That’s right. The sixth day of a brand new concert year filled with tours by Aimee Mann, Darden Smith and Deep Purple. What’s more, today marks the sixth day of keeping our New Year’s resolutions.

We don’t mind telling you that we let things slide during the last few days of 2002. Smoking, drinking, illicit sex, you name it, we overindulged, and we were in sad shape when December 31st rolled around.

But that’s all in the past. Now, we’re a lean, clean, tour date crunching machine, with dates galore including the routings for Styx, Pearl Jam and The Wallflowers. Gosh, it’s amazing what you can do when you really try.

No longer will we grab an extra smoke break when the boss looks the other way. Whenever we get one of those nicotine cravings we’ll just put our noses to the grindstone and crank out a few more tours, like Kittie and Marty Stuart. We never knew quitting cigarettes would be so easy!

And no more of those three martini coffee breaks, followed by two or three six packs of Miller Genuine Drafts for lunch and four or five shots of Everclear during the afternoon break. We’re on the tour date wagon for good, and we’re driving it to your town with dates for Umphrey’s McGee and O.A.R. Isn’t life wonderful?

And no more prowling the streets of Fresno in the wee, wee hours of the morning searching for pleasures of the flesh. Sorry, girls, but we’ve turned over a new leaf and the schedules for R.E.M. and Bob Dylan are all we need for physical satisfaction. Who knows? If we keep this up we just might live to be a hundred.

Now, you’re probably wondering what our secret is. You want to know how we can resist the aroma of fresh tobacco, the scent of a newly poured margarita and the allure of forbidden fruit. Well, it’s all a matter of control. That, and give and take. You see, you have to strike a bargain with yourself. You give up doing one thing so that you can continue to do something else, and we gave up all of those bad habits so that we could indulge in another nasty pastime. Hey, it may not be pretty, but it works.

In other words, we may have given up booze, smoking and casual sex, but we have a new crutch to take their place.

That’s right. We lie like a rug. So far it’s working pretty good. Man, we feel great!