What I Didn't Do This Weekend

I had Big Plans this weekend. Big, Big Plans. But while they certainly weren't lacking in Bigness, they appear to have been sort of light in the detail department.

The Number One Plan was to go see a Joan Jett concert on Sunday. This is how I can tell I'm older than some of my coworkers, by the way. The concert that's currently capturing the imagination of everyone at work is the Gorillaz. I have nothing against the Gorillas, in fact I like the album, but as I understand it, they'll be keeping up the "cartoon band" thing. Which means at the concert, there will be a sheet between the audience and the band, and stuff will be projected on the sheet.

And that's fine in its way, but in the last two years, I've been to a Residents show and a Negativland show, so I don't know how many more shows I want to go to where I can't be sure whether or not it was all prerecorded. Instead, I want to go to what will probably be a straight-ahead rock and roll show, and that's what Joan Jett plays. I've been a big fan of hers since Good Music, and I've never seen her live. That doesn't seem fair, does it?

And I made a note in my day-planner (on an unrelated note, how sad is it to have a dayplanner with notes like "Go See Rock & Roll Show"? They should have someone working the door who throws you out if you have a dayplanner) to go see the Joan Jett show on Sunday. She was playing at the Emerald Queen Riverboat Casino in Tacoma, which raised the prospect of a whole different kind of fun.

First of all, it's a casino. I haven't been to a casino in years, which seems odd, since this part of Washington is littered with them. I pass two in the ten-minute drive to work. I view casino-going as something you only do occasionally, but once I'm there, I have a great time. The trick is to just assume you're going to lose all the money you have budgeted for gambling; it's basically money you're spending for entertainment. Playing craps, for example, involves throwing dice, which is fun. Personally, I don't find it to be worth fifty bucks a throw, so I play the cheap tables. And the Emerald Queen has baccarat, which is neat because I'm rereading James Bond novels, so I know how to play. I could pretend I was a secret agent, although then I'd have to decide how to dress. My options would be:

• A Tuxedo: That's how you dress if you're going to be blaying baccarat. And you have to look elegant while you do it. Casinos will treat you better, too, because if you dress like this, you're pretty clearly a delusional clown who's going to lose all his money in an attempt to bankrupt the evil Le Chiffre.
• Jeans and a Flannel: Welcome to a rock concert in the Pacific Northwest! Seriously, you could wear this to just about any show up here and not stand out a bit.
• Leather: Have you seen Joan's last couple albums? I'm thinking specifically of "Fetish", which seems to suggest that Joan herself is going to be dressed a little more extremely than she used to.
• A White Suit with a String Tie: Did I mention it's a riverboat casino? Doesn't that mean there's a bunch of guys saying "I'll be your huckleberry" and concealing derringers in their arm garters? I don't want to look like a city slicker, you know!

As you can tell, I've put some thought into this. Possibly too much. And yet, when I was checking the Internet for driving directions on Sunday morning, it turned out that the show was actually on Saturday. And I'd missed it. Man. You'd think that if I was going to go around scheduling concerts with my day-planner, I could at least get the day right. The whole thing was a fiasco.

So I decided to see a couple of movies on Sunday instead. I could go to one that started at 12:45, then, when it got out, go to another movie at the same theater. It wouldn't be as cool, but at least I wouldn't be tempted to go rent a Mark Twain costume.

The first movie I was going to see was The Count of Monte Cristo. It's sort of vaguely based on an Alexandre Dumas novel, but it's apparently no goofier than the average Dumas adaptation, and far better than The Musketeer. It's got swordfighting and impostors and revenge and probably people jumping on tables, which are all things I approve of. So I ought to see it, if only to encourage Hollywood to keep making movies like that.

Then I was going to see The Royal Tenenbaums, now that people at work have finally stopped telling me to see it. They've moved onto telling me to see Black Hawk Down, which really doesn't interest me even a little bit. Okay, it interests me more that I Am Sam, but that just means that the commercials don't make me want to take my own life.

Incidentally, does Owen Wilson owe Ben Stiller money or something?

Oh, sorry. That's a different thing. My point is that I had this plan that involved seeing those two movies on Sunday, which would make me somewhat less behind on movies. But I forgot, so I didn't.

So that's all. Now I'm left with the burning desire to go rent a tuxedo and play baccarat. That's not crazy, is it?