As Charlie Brown Would Say, "AAUGH!"

It was about 2:30 yesterday afternoon, and it was a typical day before one of my shows in Second Life. I was scheduled to play at 4PM at Vinyl Cafe, where I was going to be making my debut. I was pretty stoked about it too; the venue looks fun, and Heavenlei Lexenstar who runs the joint seems like a very cool lady. Generally, I drop whatever I'm doing exactly one hour before I'm scheduled to perform, and I start warming up my voice and tuning my guitar, then pulling together my microphones and otherwise getting set up to play.

However, as I've mentioned several times recently, last Friday my trusty MacBook Pro started behaving badly. A certain grinding noise in the vicinity of the hard drive told me that this computer was on its death bed, and especially considering that this machine is the centerpiece of both my music and my business, I didn't screw around. On Saturday, I ordered a killer new Mac from Apple, but since I needed it with a slightly better spec than the standard model, it's being shipped to me (hopefully arriving by the weekend). For the time being, I've been making due with a combination of my iPad and the dying MBP. It even allowed me to do a couple of shows last Friday and Sunday without failing. I was happy.

Back to yesterday. I decided to fire up the computer that had spent most of the day dormant, but this time the grinding noise was much worse, and there were indications that my digital audio interface was not being recognized. No interface means no audio makes it into the computer, and that, ladies and gentlemen, means no show. Did I handle the realization with grace and dignity? No. Instead, I got super angry and stomped outside while muttering a string of profanities, then stomped back in, continuing my private tirade. I then sighed and got on Facebook to ping my manager Maali Beck as well as Heavenlei herself to tell them the bad news. Making matters much worse, I could see that Lei was promoting the show across several Facebook groups at the moment I was writing to her to tell her it wasn't going to happen. After ascertaining that everyone was aware of the situation, I sadly strolled over to the Bean Counter and got a coffee.


My show cancelations over the past seven-plus years I've been playing live music in SL are extraordinarily rare. Sure, there have been times I've become ill, but almost none of them involved last-minute cancelations. I usually know hours and hours before the show on the few times I've had to cancel, and I do everything I can to get one of my fellow musical friends to fill in the time slot for me, to present as little disruption to the venue as possible. But doing it an hour before I was supposed to go on, at a place I really wanted to play for the first time? It literally made me sick. I was a sad puppy for much of the rest of the day.

So, that sucked, but in the grand scheme of things, it's certainly not the end of the world. To avoid a repeat situation for my next show (which was scheduled for tomorrow), I had Maali cancel that show preemptively, so I have all the way until next Tuesday to get stuff worked out. The shows that I had to cancel this week will be rescheduled. All will be well. Still, as Charlie Brown famous exclaimed on many occasions, "AAUGH!".

Okay, I feel better now. Onward and upward.