Conan Visits the Day Spa

Certain dead musicians continue to release new music long after they're gone because people keep "finding" "lost recordings". And so it is with me. Except I'm not dead. But I had ripped all my old VHS tapes long ago and was much disappointed by what I had apparently failed to keep. Recently new VHS tapes were uncovered and so I'll be ripping/editing them for days to come. Some - but not many - will even make it to youtube.

And so here's the first of hopefully many.

This is going all the way back to February of 2003, Conan is feeling run down and decides to visit a day spa for a day of relaxation.

This is one that I can tie to a specific time and place. I brought the tape on which this piece was recorded to a friend's house and we watched it during a particularly heavy snowfall (there was a blizzard in '03 but I think this was a few days later). We went through the tape, laughing, eating, making jokes, cracking wise and generally enjoying life.

And after a good amount of that, a little bit of reality set in. His parents wanted us to shovel the driveway. This was particularly important as it occurred to me that I needed to get home. The next day I had class and I had a paper to do. Problem was, his driveway was like 40 or 50 yards long and the snow was (as I recall it) about 20 inches deep and heavy. In the face of those kinds of numbers, there we were just two regular dudes and a couple of shovels. It was not looking good. I think I shoveled a single strip about 8 feet long before I hit the wall (even in those days I was out of shape) and realized that I wasn't going to survive. Not good. With my primary mission to get myself home, looming in the back of my mind is that I have a paper to write that's due tomorrow and I haven't started yet. It was an essay for a Media class where I had to write a 4 page analysis of a local news broadcast. Sure, it helped that part of the assignment was just watching TV but I dread trying to expand the material to cover 4 pages. The local news is the local news. It loomed over me every bit as much as the snow clouds.

The giant driveway snow tonnage didn't kill me but it was a close call. After an hour of back-breaking labor (over which we made approximately 0% progress), a dude with a snow plow came by and offered to clear the driveway for 20 bucks or something. The deal was made, I was able to get home, record the 11 O'Clock news and get the paper done in the wee hours of the morning.

The day of basking in the warmth of late night comedy while the snow fell down was a fleeting happiness but it's a memory I'll never forget.