The Book Zoo Show: Paulette the Walking Carnival

Dear Reader,

 

After last friday's show, I've received request after request after request to write about it in a long, drawn-out, boring way with too much detail, meanderingly, and unintelligibly, and as always, I'm more than happy to oblige you, my faithful, ardent, really fanatical, crazy, insane, derelict, dreggy, debauched, nuisancy, recidivistic fans.

 

so friday was a work day, and I love my job, so I had trouble thinking about my show that night because I was so excited to round up shopping carts and walk for miles on end doing so.  I woke up excited to go to work, and almost forgot to eat breakfast or get dressed I was so excited to get to work.

 

I don't remember exactly what I ate for breakfast, but it was either an egg sandwiched between two bagel slices with tomato, pepper, tapatio, and tlc, or it was oatmeal with cinnamon and raisins and milk.  All my breakfasts and days blend together, so let's just say it was the oatmeal.

 

I checked my mail, my e-mail that is, after turning on my computer and waiting for 3 to 4 hours while my computer booted up.  My computer tends to run slowly, and it really has a hard time with this microsoft livemail program.  I looked for alternatives to this program, but didn't find anything that really made my nipples harden.  I went to cnet downloads and read about the different e-mail consolidation products, and I looked at outlook, and well, I forgot to mention that I have 2 different e-mails the program has to juggle, and my computer isn't the newest as I'm still running windows '95 with a pentium 1 processor and you have to hand crank a dynamo on the side to give it a power boost when big demands are placed on RAM.

 

I like to imagine getting e-mails from people telling me that they have a lot of money and want to pay me to use my music in their film, or that they are a band with money and would like me to tour with them, opening shows, but mostly, I get e-mails from friends and reminders of bills.

 

So I checked my e-mail, ran out the door, walked to work, walked around at work getting shopping carts, moving plants around, suffering abuse from rude customers, watering plants, and doing other fascinating stuff, and then work ended, and I was really sad to have to leave, and I broke down and cried, saying to the manager, "Please, can I just stay another shift?  Please!" with my nose running and my face puffy like I was crying.  And one of my coworkers, Francine, came over and put her arm over my shoulders, gripping me in a lovehold, saying to me in a quiet, understanding tone, "God loves you Paulette, and he wants you to be happy.  That's why you're on the schedule tomorrow."

"So I can come back tomorrow?"

"That's right, you can come back tomorrow."

"And I can stay all day?"

"A full eight hours minus one because of budget constraints."

And of course, I looked up with a smile amidst the tears streaming down my face and the sucking sound of me slurping my running nose back into my sinuses.

"There's a smile. I saw that.  Look who's happy now.  Huh?!"

 

I hid my face and coyly smiled, relieved and a lot less sad than I'd been, faced with leaving to go home.

"Are you gonna be ok now?" Francine asked.

"yeeaah" I admitted, blowing my nose into my sleeve and then wiping it off with a tissue another one of my coworkers handed me.

"Except, is god really a man?"

 

and then I went and played the show, and everybody had the times of their lives.  it was really fun.  I had fun, others had fun.  it was a fun place to be because we were all having fun.

 

Here's a clip from it.  You shoulda been there.  It was your moral obligation to be there, and now the irs is going to audit you, and the government is going to send you a receipt for the specific bullets you paid for, and they will include a list of the people those specific bullets went into.

 

Love Always,

 

Paulette