On a hillside, desolate

Seeing a concert at the Gorge is an experience beyond words, much less my puny ones. Sasquatch Fest was profoundly rad, and we’ll mostly leave it at that. I will say that I’m so burned out after this three-day weekend that I need another one to be ready for school this week. Here are some highlights:

On the way through a town in Eastern Washington, I noticed a billboard that said “CONGRADULATIONS SENIORS”, spelled just like that. Yeah, good luck with your hopeless future surrounded by cretins.

We made camp on the far side of the grounds, right on the cliff overlooking the amphitheater, and right next to a carload of cosmetology students. They were cute and wanted to get in Lars’s pants, but they were without a doubt the most annoying humans I’ve ever encountered. I wanted to grab a double handful of bleached hair and just keep pulling until I hit bone.

Walking to the concert was like an exodus. The trail from our tent to the front gates is literally one million miles long, and we felt every step. From our site we could look up the valley where the carefully fenced path winds up the hill, and it resembled nothing more than a sad wash of refugees escaping the banks of port-a-potties. Really, we were camped in the Borderlands, so far removed from society (and the concert) that there, law and order are just ideas old men mutter in their sleep.

I bought a twelve-ounce Hefewiezen (which the bartender pronounced with a ‘w’) for $6.00.

My sister Jenn and I spent over four hours searching for each other, and missed each other by a matter of minutes at least three times. In the process, I ran into three people I knew but hadn’t come with, including a girl from my English class last quarter with whom I used to discuss Death Cab. My sister and her friends were gone from their blankets for hours at a time, but no one ever disturbed said blankets or tried to take their place.

The highlight of the show was the Flaming Lips, who put on a spectacular live performance. They had members of other, lesser-known bands dressed up in full-body animal costumes up on stage. Imagine around thirty furries, each dancing spastically to their own choreography as the Flaming Lips played. They inflated enormous (8 ft.) balloons and sent them out over the crowd. They tossed handfuls of glitter into the air and illuminated their slow descent with a strobe light. The lead singer took inventory of the crowd to find people with birthdays, and then smeared his face with costume-shop blood as he led the crowd in singing. He rigged a bullhorn with a smoke bomb, and sang through it as it poured out pink fog. He made the “surprised” observation that he smelled pot (to cheers, of course). It was awesome.

Predictable encores are idiotic. You know the kind, where the band leaves but the stage lights stay on and everyone knows they’re not finished yet. Coldplay did one, and actually fooled a large number of idiots.

After the show, Jenn’s friend Jeff prepared enough meat on a portable grill to drive a PETA member to desperate sobbing. I ate halibut fillets basted with garlic and butter, huge sausages, and marinated chicken breasts. This was all served with salad made with freshly-sliced avocado and all the cold beer anyone wanted.

I didn’t trust myself to find Lucas’s tent on the other side of camp in the dark, so I slept on the back seat of Jenn’s friend Sarah’s Honda. It wasn’t that bad.

The next day Sarah drove us to Portland for the baby shower, Jenn and I shoved into the backseat along with a mind-bending amount of gear. We each had around a cubic foot of personal space. The shower and preceding barbecue passed uneventfully. And I saw Holes, a surpisingly good Disney movie, with my dad and older brother. Back at my brother’s house, my mom encouraged me to open a beer right before my dad announced we were leaving, so I poured it into a plastic cup to avoid getting my parents arrested. Just my way of stickin’ it to the man.

Posted in Musings.