The kind of weekend it’s been: on Sharpeworld’s Depression Poll one of the red flags is “I tear up when I hear applause at the end of a live recording.” How’d she manage to peg that? Not that I’m tearing up, per se, because contrary to what they say on the Life Goes On message boards, J. Allen is 100% USDA-approved bohunk, an icy rock of in-your-face apathy and all-around pungent masculinity. But still: finding a kind of vague misery in the success of others. What’s the German word for that. Antischadenfreude..?

Though there’s something more to that hypothetical tearing up, not just Gosh I wish it was me up there in a rhinestone-studded brassiere and black cape lip-synching in Times Square and then having a quick chat with Katie Couric. Something about the emotion volleyed back and forth between performer and audience. Wouldn’t it be nice, my collapsing psyche tells me late at night, its voice like Frank The One-Eyed Rabbit’s coming through the surround-sound speakers, wouldn’t it be nice to at least be one of those audience members? Since you’re certainly not going to be on the stage, generating the applause? To at least be out there in a crowd, screaming, hooooooo-ing, arms splayed, maybe a Zippo ready to go, lost, “ecstatic” (it’s 2003, that can’t go quoteless), overcome? You were like that a couple of times in high school — the lights suddenly going out and everyone screaming, you screaming, because finally it was time, they were here, they were going to play, you were going to see Roxette — or, uh, whoever, really, I’m just throwing a name at random out there — in the flesh. Remember?