Swimming up stream

Couldn’t ask for better weather for an outdoor stadium show. The cool breeze felt good in the mosh pit. (It was only a Bruce-grade mosh pit, so things were kinda comfy.)

Dave and I met in the parking lot about a half-an-hour before the show and managed to fit about three hours of tailgating in as the tock was clicking. It felt for awhile like we were on a Japanese game show the way we were quickly passing beers, bottles and Mexican brick back and forth on some poor soul’s car. By the time it was time to walk into the stadium, I was fairly disoriented.

Which is good, I guess. But for the first time in a long time I saw through the disoriented part so that I could ask myself, “Why did you purposely disorient yourself to enjoy an experience?” An interesting question for the ages…


So, after I get this weird sort of agoraphobic/exhibitionist buzz on, we decide it’s time to walk to our seats. It was around that time when Dave asked, “Where are we sitting?” I was, like, “I don’t know, let me check the tickets.”

Fucking floor seats.

Do you know what this means? This means going from passive to active. This means going from innocent bystander to culprit. This means a mental transition from watching to being. Which is why I will get paranoid in the next chapter.

We go about trying to find a gate that will let us in. We walk a half-mile to Gate C. We are in a mob of 5,000 people. We thread our way to what was about one level lower than a cavity search. We get to the ticket scanner chick. “You can’t enter through this gate.”

“Why?”

“Actually, your seats are too good for this gate. You have to go to Gate B to get where you need to be.”

You have no idea how stoned I was at this point. And the ticket chick telling me I had to walk against a tide of 5,000 people to a point on the other side of the stadium didn’t help. I somehow got more stoned and started walking in the complete opposite direction of every human being on the planet. Dave was leading the way.

Now, when I say stoned, I don’t mean it like ordinary people. This wasn’t a pleasant little buzz. This was full-on. My body felt like it had smoked Jamaica. My mind felt like it had read Bukowski. My spirit was ready for Armageddon.

And this was only ramping up.