I’ve done these college gigs how many goddamn times, and I still get crazy nervous before each one. At the hotel, I get up an hour earlier than I need to, sheer nerves, and make some coffee in the bathroom. I’m not sure why the coffeemaker’s in the bathroom but that’s how Marriot rocks it.

I suck the coffee down and turn the TV on. “We are in for some snow, folks!” says the Michiganian weatherman. He goes on to reveal that New York is due for a shitload, more than a foot. I hope my flight back home won’t be delayed. I turn the TV back off and finish tinkering with the speech. Sometimes it’s better not to fuck with things but you just can’t help yourself.

After about an hour, it’s time. I put my black College Speech sweater on, grab all my shit and head down the hall. In the lobby, I check out and enjoy a bowl of complimentary Fruit Loops, which does nothing to settle my stomach.

The department director comes to pick me up at the hotel. Though it’s a different guy from the night before, he has the same name, making this the second time in two days I’m getting driven somewhere by a guy named Steve. A guy could get used to this. (Unless that guy’s name was also Steve, which might get weird.)

Me and seventy high school kids in an amphitheater for thirty minutes.

The speech didn’t go great, I definitely should not have kept messing around with it. Instead of delivering a coherent, well-constructed oration, it sounded more like I was standing up there and spitting out a bunch of random factoids I thought these kids should know. Afterwards the college kids who set the gig up said it was okay, but I know the truth.

When it comes to college gigs, I can always see the wrong in what I’ve done, but rarely the right, and yet gigs still come in. I guess it’s better than if everything was the other way around.

After the gig I’ve got four hours until my flight back to New York, so Steve, the director, and his girlfriend Chris, an activist from Chicago, take me out to lunch in Ann Arbor. The snow keeps coming down, so I call the nice people at Northwest to see what the deal is.

“Delayed, with a chance of cancellation,” says the airline rep. I don’t like the thought of being stuck at Detroit Fort Wayne, so I treat this as a cancellation.

“Don’t worry,” says Steve, the director. “We can put you up for another night.”

Sure enough, my flight is later cancelled. Looks like I’ll get to know Michigan a little better.

I spend most of the afternoon in a coffee shop with Chris, working on editing for Theme Magazine. Deadline time is this weekend, so it’s a good thing I brought the laptop.

The evening finds me back at the Marriot Courtyard. Shirtless, lying flat on my back and admiring my new potbelly. Some people get pets, but I decided on a potbelly; easier to take care of. A potbelly is like a cat, if you feed it a couple times a day it will never leave you. My friend Handsome Dan says there’s nothing worse than a fat skinny guy, but I can feel myself going down a road I probably won’t return from. When people next to me on airplanes start complaining, maybe then I’ll worry about reducing.

I’m in a different room from last night, and this one has two double beds in it. To help the University of Michigan get their money’s worth, I am reclining on one bed now and will switch to the other one when it’s time to go to sleep. Which won’t be for some time yet; those crazy college kids are taking me out for drinks tonight.

To kill time, I flip through cable stations. Unlike my television at home, this one is huge, has a remote control and actually gets a clear signal. I end up watching a fascinating program called “Captured,” where they show footage from that crazy L.A. bank robbery in the ‘90s, the one with the 40-minute shootout.

Ten minutes into it, the phone rings. “Hello?”

“Hey Rain, we’re outside.” It’s the college kids, coming to pick me up.

I get out of bed, carefully; the potbelly is sleeping on my stomach and I have to be careful not to wake it.

Thirty minutes later we’re in an Ann Arbor jazz bar. I put my cigarette out on the way in, but once I got in, realized people were smoking. Holy shit! Booze and smokes is so much better than booze alone.

With me in the bar are Steve (Original Steve, the guy who picked me up at the airport), his girlfriend Marcia, an activist from Detroit, and a student named Theresa, which I pronounce “Therese” because that’s how people said it where I grew up.

Tonight it’s blues night, and a three-man band is up on stage, banging it out. Kind of a strange scene--the guitarist and bassist are two white guys not younger than sixty. The drummer is a redheaded kid of maybe sixteen, and his simultaneously frightened and glazed expression suggests he has been kidnapped by these men and forced to play drums in a blues band for several weeks.

For several hours we hop from bar to bar. I can’t remember the last time I went bar-hopping, and it’s actually kind of fun. I also find out that Therese, whose idea this was, first worried that they should take me to an “old person’s” place. “What do people his age do?” she wondered. I told her I normally have a glass of warm milk at 9:30 and am in bed by ten.

By the end of the night we wind up at the Fleetwood Diner, a beautifully grimy shitbox greasy spoon, which has to be one of my favorite types of places in the world. An honest-to-god diner. It’s packed, smoky, filthy, and the kind of place you can only get by being around for forty years and not changing a thing. You occasionally see places like this in Jersey, but there’s nothing like it left in Manhattan. I order something called “Hippie Hash” (food, not weed) and the group of us chow down.

They drop me back off at the hotel around 4am, and by 4:10 I’m lying in the second bed. I flip the TV on and am thrilled to see the bank robber show I was watching is on a loop, and is playing almost exactly where I left off. God I love cable.

Overall it was a good day, even if my speech could have been better, and tomorrow I’d be going back to New York--or so I thought.