Lester Dweebley was an insignificant little Wally Cox kind of a man. Lester worked in a bank where he spent his lunch hours sitting on the floor of the vault, using his laptop to look up tour dates for bands like Widespread Panic and artists like Prince on Pollstar.com.

Then one day, Lester emerged from the vault to find that the unthinkable had happened. After over 50 years of threats, posturing and warnings, mankind had finally launched the missiles that would wipe out all life on the planet. Lester Dweebley was the last man on Earth.

He spent days wandering through the rubble that was humanity’s last stand. He cried when he saw what was left of the mighty sports arena where Eric Clapton and Madonna once played. He stood in the crater of what was once his favorite Ticketmaster outlet as memories of choosing seats for Lydia Lunch, The Guess Who and Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers overwhelmed his senses and brought him to his knees, whimpering in the dark like the frightened little spineless man he was. That’s when Lester realized he was truly alone.

Then one day, he found a thin plastic cord emerging from the rubble. A telephone connection! Feverishly, Lester hooked up his laptop. Would it? Could it? Yes! It still worked! He rejoiced as he heard the modem connect with the ISP. His hands shook as he punched in the URL, and he brushed back a tear as the dates for Rammstein, Robbie Williams and Dwight Yoakam appeared on the screen.

Soon, Lester had organized all the data into categories. “I’ll spend this year reading all the tour dates for New York and California,” he said to himself. “Next year it will be the support acts for Guns N’ Roses and RZA. Then in 2003 it’s packages like Wotapalava, So Many Roads and Area: One. WWIII was the best thing that every happened! Now I have all the time I need to read every single tour date on Pollstar.com!”

But fate, not unlike the concert industry, can be a cruel mistress. While he was looking up the dates for P.J. Harvey and Stevie Nicks, his hand jerked from an uncontrollable spasm brought on by the carpal tunnel syndrome that went untreated because the last president’s administration had removed that affliction from the list of injuries covered by workman’s comp.

He tried to recover but it was too late. His sudden movement had ripped the mouse cord from the laptop, breaking his connection to the tour dates for acts like Osker and O-Town that were his salvation.

Let this be a lesson to you. We must all work together for world peace. It takes each and every one of us to safely shepherd this chunk of rock called Earth into the future. If the buttons are pushed and the missiles are launched, one could very well end up like poor Lester, a shrimpy little excuse for a man who’s all alone without a mouse to guide him through the schedules for Tonic, Slipknot and Janet Jackson.

For Lester was just another poor wretched soul, lost in the Pollstar zone.