We get a lot of that. Ever since we served up our billionth tour date, we’ve been getting more than our fair share of sour grapes and envy. They say we’re just a bunch of stumblebums who lucked onto a good thing. They say we’re nothing but anal-retentive wimps who think we’ve got it made because we have dates for The Waterboys and Travis. They say we’d be nothing without the Internet, that we’d be nobodies if it weren’t for the World Wide Web.

But we remember those days before the Net. Those days when we’d spend each and every working hour gathering dates for great acts like Jimmie’s Chicken Shack, Festival Condios and Collective Soul. Then when 5:00 p.m. struck, when the hard-working people of this city headed home after a long day at work, that’s when our day would begin.

We’d roam the bus stops, taxi stands and auto-wrecking yards of Fresno, spreading the gospel of date, city, state and venue to the multitudes. We’d walk up to total strangers, grab them by the lapels, stare wildly into their eyes and shout, “Trisha Yearwood, September 15 in Reno! Modest Mouse, September 21, Fort Worth!”

Needless to say, we were often misunderstood.

But we persisted. We persevered and we bailed each other out. And our minions spread out from Fresno into the greater metropolitan regions of Modesto, Sacramento and Bakersfield. We spray-painted the dates for John McDermott on buses and we tagged cars and trucks with the routings for New End Original and The Ghost. Nothing could stop us. We were on a mission.

Where would we be without the Web? Where would we be without an outlet to unleash our pent up energy from collecting dates for Lake Trout and The Exit? Would we have spent the remainder of our days standing in traffic intersections and shouting “Pearl Jam, October 22, Seattle?” Would we have spent every waking minute hammering windshields with our fists, screaming out the schedules for Sade and The Dickey Betts Band to motorists as they rolled up their windows and locked their doors?

Yes, where would we be without the Internet and a Web site like Pollstar.com? That is a very good question.

But an even better question would be: “Where would we be without Prozac?”