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Tours de Farce: Time Is On Your Side
That’s when that little voice deep inside your head speaks up.
“Wait a minute,” says the voice. “What if?”
And there you go again, wondering what would happen if you had bought Azure Ray tickets instead. What would change? Would your life be better?
You rise from the chair, walk into the kitchen, open the refrigerator and pull out the frozen turkey. A 21-pounder, it takes both hands to carry the bird to the counter. You put it down and begin to stroke the left drumstick.
That’s when your vision blurs, your equilibrium falters and your knees grow weak. But it’s only for a moment, for after your vision clears you find yourself back out on the street standing in front of the Ticketmaster. You check your watch. It’s one hour earlier. You’ve done it again. You’ve gone back through time.
It’s gotten so you can’t remember the first time you took advantage of the frozen turkey’s temporal abilities, that just by touching various parts of the bird you discovered you could travel back in time to that moment right before you purchased your concert tickets. But you’ve gone back again and again. Each time you purchased new tickets for bands like Wishbone Ash or The Darkness, only to sink into the bottomless well of self-doubt as you wondered “What if?”
Like yesterday when you were looking at your new Yeah Yeah Yeahs tickets and you were wondering if you should have bought Bob Dylan tickets instead. A quick walk to the refrigerator followed by a quick rub on the right breast solved that problem. Or when you realized you couldn’t make it to Jim Brickman, and you wanted to exchange your tickets for Bob Log III. Sure, Ticketmaster has a no exchange, no refunds policy, but Ticketmaster never heard about time-traveling turkeys and what happens when you kiss the giblets.
But lately you’ve been wondering if the ability to travel back in time is too much of a good thing. At first it was great. That’s when you rubbed your turkey maybe once or twice a week. But now you’re lost in a sea of cognitive dissonance, which leads you back to that frozen bird in the freezer. W.C. Clark, Steel Train, Maroon5 – you’ve bought tickets for all those acts, only to jump back in time and buy tickets for David Lee Roth, Limp Bizkit and Manhattan Transfer instead. You buy the tickets, rub the turkey, buy more tickets… Well, you get the picture. But at least you learned something about frozen turkeys, time travel and concerts.
That’s right. You learned why they call it the Butterball effect.