This is why I don’t usually write at four in the morning

As lazy as this’ll make me sound, I don’t do mornings. I’ll feel better and have a more productive day if I sleep til eleven and stay up working til three in the morning than if, say, I try getting up at sunrise and turn in around prime time. It’s just the way it’s always been. And while I had a day job I didn’t really get a choice in the matter, one of the nice thing about working for yourself is that you usually get to make your own hours.

Today is not one of those days. You’d think that flying from the nation’s second-largest city to the third-largest city would be A) direct, and B) available during various times of day, but it turned out to be neither. I’ll be having lunch in Denver today, and although I’d have been perfectly willing to arrive after dark for the sake of leaving in the early afternoon, I’m instead leaving at nine in the morning and arriving around dinnertime (the time zones are against me on this one). Get there two hours early, allow for traffic problems and leave time for a last-minute re-check of the equipment I’ve packed, and I went to bed last night knowing that my alarm would be clanging at five in the morning. And somehow, anytime I know I’ll have to get up that early, I usually end up waking up even earlier, as if to punish myself being so foolish as to scheduling something which required getting up that early in the first place.

So here I am at just after three in the morning, feeling deceptively perky, a feeling which I know will have fully faded by the time the sun rises. The irony is that my Chicago-based plans for this evening (a personal visit not related to iProng) have been cancelled at the last minute, leaving me with nothing to do when I get there this evening. Don’t get me wrong, it wouldn’t have changed by flight itinerary, as the only other option would have been to fly at about the same time tomorrow, which wouldn’t have loused up tomorrow’s plans. It’s just that, aside from the fact that I couldn’t have flown later today even if I’d originally wanted to, there’s now literally nothing for me to do in Chicago this evening.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. My short night and long day will have caught up with me plenty by then, so grabbing dinner and turning in early will suit me just fine…especially considering that I’ll have to be up not much after five o’clock the next morning. Maybe tonight my body will let me sleep. After what I’m going to put it through today, I suspect that’ll be the case. Thursday will be the only brutally early morning, packed with sightseeing or whatever it is we’re doing on Thursday. It’ll start back at the airport, involve trains and cabs, at one point we’ll be at the Sears Tower, I’m pretty sure there’s a medical school involved…I’m glad someone else is planning it out that part of things. I’ve got enough to worry about when it comes to the three days that follow.

The nice thing about covering a music festival as opposed to, say, a technology conference is that nothing much happens at a festival before noon. That means you can get up at a comfortable time and even get a little work done before you have to be on-site each day. Of course the day’s performances don’t end much before ten or eleven, so after-events can still cause morning-after pain if you don’t manage your schedule with a bit of propriety. But still, festivals employ my kind of hours. Unfortunately, Chicago in the summertime doesn’t employ my kind of heat (dry and hotter than anything I ever faced in all my years in Florida), but I suppose that’s nothing that the right clothes and a ton of bottled water can’t rectify.

On the other hand, I can’t help but think back to last year’s Lollapalooza, where I took off my sopping wet sweat-soaked T-shirt at about midnight, hung it up over the shower rod in the hotel, and found that it was still so soaked as I was packing the next morning that I couldn’t put it in my suitcase and had to leave it there. Now that never happened to me in Florida, not even when Lollapalooza used to travel to Florida back in the day.

But despite Pearl Jam coming back to headline this year’s Lollapalooza fifteen years after using the festival to introduce themselves to the world, despite the fact that Silverchair is using the festival to relaunch themselves in the U.S. after essentially a twelve year absence, despite the fact that this is still Perry Farrell’s baby after all these years, now is not a time for reflection. Of the dozens of bands I’ll see perform over the next few days, many of them have found there way to stardom fairly recently (or are still working toward finding it), meaning there’ll be a ton of fresh talent to watch, listen to, meet, interview, and enjoy.

Speaking of interviews, scheduling them has been a rather interesting game of speed-chess over the past week. A few of them are locked down hard and fast on the schedule, while others are still dangling like a participle, and so I think I’ll wait at least another day or two before announcing anything on that front. I will reveal, however, that we’ve been invited to an after-party at the Hard Rock Hotel during which I’ve been told we will likely meet Ashlee Simpson. And I thought weird things happened here in Los Angeles.

Anyway, if you’ve been reading all of this, bless your heart, as there’s a reason why I don’t often write at four in the morning. Hey, I said that some of the stuff I write in and around this trip would be worth reading, not all of it. I suspect there will be more interesting topics upon which to pontificate once I touch down in Chicago, or at least once the fun starts on Friday. Or is it Thursday? It’s too late at night to be remembering such things. Or is it too early?