In which I didn't get stabbed

Open mics are a lot of things; some bad but also some good. One good thing is that I guess you could say they're egalitarian. Anyone can show up. You never know if the next person to walk through the door is going to be Adam Sandler, or if it's going to be some guy fresh out of prison. As it turns out, the second option is a lot more likely.

Halfway through the show, a man came in with a burrito in a bag. Immediately, the part of me that had just been watching Sherlock Holmes right before the show kicked in to gear and thought that that was not only a burrito, but a suspicious burrito. The other clues were that this was at 10:30 at night and the guy looked like he was either drunk or on heroin.

The first problem with this fine upstanding audience member wasn't so much that he was eating a burrito, it was that he'd flick things off the table onto the floor. I tried to be nice and offer some of them back, as though he truly wanted his slice of lemon which had been on the floor. He flicked it off the table immediately. Now, he might have been a devotee of the five second rule, so I didn't take offense. But this pattern of flicking things off the table lead to a group consensus: he was an asshole.

But this gentleman (and I use that term so ironically it is in fact a pair of 1980s eyeglasses) was not content to being an asshole in one dimension. He was a many-faceted and complex asshole. The remnants of burrito were spread around the table. He kept re-arranging the mess he'd made, seemingly not content with the layout. Maybe it was a statement on the transcendent nature of art. Then again, maybe it wasn't.

And then he discovered the butter knife. Having never been murdered myself, I can't say whether that implement is considered a deadly weapon, or just an annoying one. But he was wielding it as though he meant business. I didn't want to find out. It was at that time when I noticed that he had a neck tattoo. Much like forehead tattoos, neck tattoos aren't found on gentle, kind souls. I've never seen a neck tattoo that said 'I love puppies'. I didn't really bother to read the tattoo, because it probably said 'If you can read this, I'm already shanking you.'

So, now that you have a picture of this guy, you can see the predicament I was in. He was causing a mild ruckus, and I was on stage and had the chance to take him down a peg and make the audience laugh. As the old adage goes, an adage I learned when it was written in my yearbook by a dear friend, "Don't die". I took this adage to heart instead of taking a butter knife to that same delicate area. So, I suppose we could call this a victory.

But to maintain the universe's karmic balance, next week Adam Sandler damn well better show up.