the past versus the future
most days now i feel like all of my "good epic" experiences were in the past. i did all the stuff that kids do and it was awesome and incredible. i'm remembering the time that danny called me up one afternoon and told me jane's addiction was playing in a city 3 hours from us that evening. and wouldn't it be incredible to go see them?
sure, i said--i loved perry farrell's style and his music really speaks to some part of me and yeah it would be great to go but i have like $60 to my name and have to be at work in the morning and how can we get up there and get tickets for that price? these days that would have been just the gas but then, in 1998, it left some money for a ticket but really i can't stand sitting in the back row for a show, i have to be up close and personal or it really isn't worth the price of entry and driving 6 hours to get there is just ridiculous anyway and we can't actually do this, can we?
but he convinced me that we were doing it, found a friend (the kind of girl i would have been facebook friends with and never otherwise seen ever again) to split gas with so we'd have $30/ea to spend on tickets from a scalper (tickets cost about that much for retail) and we got in his car and drove from austin to dallas.
fortunately i knew my way around dallas and so the navigation, at least, was taken care of. we cruised the strip near the fairgrounds, and i recounted many "epic" times there, such as when we dyed my best friend's brother's mohawk green on the hood of the car we'd driven to the amphitheatre in, or my first concert where i lost a good 10% of my hearing and almost got seduced by a 23-year-old woman and saw, then almost tried, drugs for the first time (neither happened, fortunately for my 15-year-old sensibilities). another time my friend had gotten kicked out of this venue for doing something stupid (i can no longer remember exactlywhat) and then climbed back into the place through a dumpster and played it off like nothing had happened until we asked why he smelled so bad...there were good times and strange times but they were all the makings of a hilarious memoir but what have i had to add to that lately? "oh yeah i rode my bike through death valley. but it was february and we had a support vehicle for that part. and it was mostly downhill." (a fun and good story and i'm proud of us but i'm not sure it's epic. at least not completely..)
i guess you can spin things anyway you want but it just seems like the adventures: i don't make em epic like i used to. lately my epic is having a meeting schedule that suggests that my extracurricular activities have become a curriculum with no escape.
anyhow, we talked this scary scalper dude down to the price we needed and got into the show---in the cheap seats. the expensive seats were general admission and we had missed the cutoff by several rows and about 10 vertical feet--we were in the stands, not on the floor. and woe was us, but there was us, and we had to make the best of it. and somehow in the crowd i saw my friend angeli, who lived in dallas, and i shouted her over and she sympathized slightly with our upstairs-ness and said "just jump down here...what are they going to do, kick you out?"
"yes," i thought, and wished her well and sat sadly in the bleachers. and then the band came out, and about 100 folks jumped the wall and ran onto the floor and i looked at danny and we joined the rush and there we were, in the crush of people, squeezing up next to the stage, not close enough to smell him (thank god) but close enough to have this religious sort of experience, a joyful, cathartic, screaming evening of doing-it-right. i still have somewhere a bootleg from that show that i dug up that i could pretend to hear myself screaming on, and the times were great, and left us feeling accomplished before we deflated in the face of having a 3-hour drive back to austin to do at 1am so we could get up in time for class/work.
i wouldn't trade that experience for anything in the world. perry farrell was a terrible solo performer as proved when i got a chance to see him at SxSW 10 years later, and whatever---it wasn't him, in the end...it was what jane's addiction was in the 90's. "ladies and gentlemen...we have more influence over your children than you do." says their opening line (in spanish)...and it wasn't true when i was a child but it was true once i pretended to grow up and getting to experience that live, on a shoestring and a prayer, well, that was epic.
these days, i stay out til 1am playing board games with a couple guys and come home to all the hot half-naked chicks going to bed with fish sticks and decide to type a livejournal post instead of instigating epicness.
and really, i guess i still do epic stuff that will make great stories for my nieces and nephews. but i think, somehow, that the urgency has gone out of my adventures that would leave me feeling honest if i called them epic. instead, they're just reality.
can't really call that a loss or a win. but i miss the old days.
sure, i said--i loved perry farrell's style and his music really speaks to some part of me and yeah it would be great to go but i have like $60 to my name and have to be at work in the morning and how can we get up there and get tickets for that price? these days that would have been just the gas but then, in 1998, it left some money for a ticket but really i can't stand sitting in the back row for a show, i have to be up close and personal or it really isn't worth the price of entry and driving 6 hours to get there is just ridiculous anyway and we can't actually do this, can we?
but he convinced me that we were doing it, found a friend (the kind of girl i would have been facebook friends with and never otherwise seen ever again) to split gas with so we'd have $30/ea to spend on tickets from a scalper (tickets cost about that much for retail) and we got in his car and drove from austin to dallas.
fortunately i knew my way around dallas and so the navigation, at least, was taken care of. we cruised the strip near the fairgrounds, and i recounted many "epic" times there, such as when we dyed my best friend's brother's mohawk green on the hood of the car we'd driven to the amphitheatre in, or my first concert where i lost a good 10% of my hearing and almost got seduced by a 23-year-old woman and saw, then almost tried, drugs for the first time (neither happened, fortunately for my 15-year-old sensibilities). another time my friend had gotten kicked out of this venue for doing something stupid (i can no longer remember exactlywhat) and then climbed back into the place through a dumpster and played it off like nothing had happened until we asked why he smelled so bad...there were good times and strange times but they were all the makings of a hilarious memoir but what have i had to add to that lately? "oh yeah i rode my bike through death valley. but it was february and we had a support vehicle for that part. and it was mostly downhill." (a fun and good story and i'm proud of us but i'm not sure it's epic. at least not completely..)
i guess you can spin things anyway you want but it just seems like the adventures: i don't make em epic like i used to. lately my epic is having a meeting schedule that suggests that my extracurricular activities have become a curriculum with no escape.
anyhow, we talked this scary scalper dude down to the price we needed and got into the show---in the cheap seats. the expensive seats were general admission and we had missed the cutoff by several rows and about 10 vertical feet--we were in the stands, not on the floor. and woe was us, but there was us, and we had to make the best of it. and somehow in the crowd i saw my friend angeli, who lived in dallas, and i shouted her over and she sympathized slightly with our upstairs-ness and said "just jump down here...what are they going to do, kick you out?"
"yes," i thought, and wished her well and sat sadly in the bleachers. and then the band came out, and about 100 folks jumped the wall and ran onto the floor and i looked at danny and we joined the rush and there we were, in the crush of people, squeezing up next to the stage, not close enough to smell him (thank god) but close enough to have this religious sort of experience, a joyful, cathartic, screaming evening of doing-it-right. i still have somewhere a bootleg from that show that i dug up that i could pretend to hear myself screaming on, and the times were great, and left us feeling accomplished before we deflated in the face of having a 3-hour drive back to austin to do at 1am so we could get up in time for class/work.
i wouldn't trade that experience for anything in the world. perry farrell was a terrible solo performer as proved when i got a chance to see him at SxSW 10 years later, and whatever---it wasn't him, in the end...it was what jane's addiction was in the 90's. "ladies and gentlemen...we have more influence over your children than you do." says their opening line (in spanish)...and it wasn't true when i was a child but it was true once i pretended to grow up and getting to experience that live, on a shoestring and a prayer, well, that was epic.
these days, i stay out til 1am playing board games with a couple guys and come home to all the hot half-naked chicks going to bed with fish sticks and decide to type a livejournal post instead of instigating epicness.
and really, i guess i still do epic stuff that will make great stories for my nieces and nephews. but i think, somehow, that the urgency has gone out of my adventures that would leave me feeling honest if i called them epic. instead, they're just reality.
can't really call that a loss or a win. but i miss the old days.