last night during the show in camden nj, i had a moment that is the type of inner experience of performance that no one sees, but that is interesting to me internally. we were playing the song "then she did". one of my favorites, entirely created by perry. we began playing it and i closed my eyes. i often close my eyes to help focus more singly on what is happening in my ears. so i had closed my eyes at the beginning of the song and when i opened them again i had been engulfed entirely by smoke, dry ice. so much so that i could see nothing but the swirling clouds of smoke with one small single bright light in the distance. it turned out that the light was a light out at the soundboard in the middle of the audience. didnt know this at the time. so im cloaked in my cloud of smoke with my distant point of light and i thought that it sort of poetically represented my death. "then she did" is a song of death and it all seemed very comfortable conceptually. i could feel that the light was patient and id eventually get there, but that tonight i was a good distance from it, that all that really existed for me was my time here and, in particular, my extraordinary spot in the spectrum of human experience. namely, being on stage for the ritual of performance in front of thousands of people. this is the sort of internal experience i seek out to enrich my experience of performance, and thereby keep it interesting to me and by extension hopefully to you all.