Certain Facts Show In The Muck

I've been to three muddy concerts in my life. The first was a hip hop (Up In Smoke Tour?) concert with Jay Z, Snoop, 50 Cent, and others in Cincinnati. It down-poured the whole concert, and the security tasked with guarding the pavilion were overrun by people not fucking around about getting out of the rain while still getting to see the show. It was packed and everyone was a tad reluctant about losing their precious toehold on the couple inches of breathing room they had. Lots of slow territorial expansion through the repositioning of your feet that no one ever openly acknowledges at concerts but is a driving force behind people that are too stoned kind of losing their shit about how uncomfortable they are. Also, I think Jay Z had a bunch of sandbags on stage for some sort of military theme, or maybe he was worried and very prepared about flooding from the Ohio River?!? I can't remember exactly, because I was really really stoned (High school! What up!).

The second muddy concert I went to was at All Points West (or East?) right outside NYC. That one only got muddy for me and my friend because we unknowingly set up shop in what would become the mosh pit area once Tool came on stage. Of the three muddy concerts this one pissed me off the most because Tool was awesome but I just wanted to hear them obliterate everything in their path without having to fend off violent fast moving human projectiles every couple moments. You may be saying, why the hell didn't you just leave the mosh pit? Well, that was the simple answer, but the people behind us were not too keen on having their buffer zone removed from the mayhem. So when we tried to leave we encountered a Spartan-like phalanx of concert-goers that could not be breached without one of those mega-drills Cartman uses to get to the stage in the hippy episode of South Park. A brief side note of this concert - This was one of my more ambitious booze smuggling forays ever. 10 airplane bottles of Beam in my socks, all of which was confiscated while I said, "Well, you caught me" while chuckling with the guards, who were filling out forms so that they could keep the contraband. Don't worry about that though, booze was for sale inside.

The third muddy concert was this past weekend at Jazzfest in Norleans. My friends and I went to see Fleetwood Mac, because duh, Fleetwood Mac. And our hosts' friends already had a spot set up at the tent they were playing at. To get to that spot though, you had to traverse what could be accurately called a deep mud thoroughfare. On the way in to the spot there was a little room on the outside of the thoroughfare to move along it. So I was mostly unscathed by the time we got to where the group was posted up. The concert was great. The people watching involving the mud thoroughfare was very funny. There is something life-affirming about watching someone slip and fall in a bunch of mud while not spilling their beer. But then near the end, we wanted to go see some of Frank Ocean's show, so I had to abandon the relative safety of simply staying in one spot. And I knew, and remarked to a friend, that all those laughs I got from other people struggling to stay upright was going to come back on me as soon as I ventured out into the muck. At the start of the concert their had been a path you could take where you could avoid a lot of the deep mud, but that path had been swallowed up by the growing crowd. So when I wanted to get out, I was in a 10 inch ocean of brown suction. Things did not go great. I didn't go down per se but I did have to put a hand down to steady myself against a much worse fall. And when I finally did somehow get to pavement my entire lower legs and right hand were covered in some smelly thick sludge.

This is all to get to a point about New Orleans though. After that happened, my psyche didn't break into pieces. I didn't have to leave immediately. I brushed myself off the best I could and went about the day of having fun. I didn't see a single person at Jazzfest who gave a rats ass about whether they had gotten muddy or not. Everyone was just having a good time and not worrying about something trivial like how much of this mud is actually horsehit considering that this area is usually a horse track and there are stables right there, and it sure smells like horseshit. Nope, those thoughts got pushed aside. I don't think I even washed my hands before eating a bunch of crawfish right after we left the fairgrounds (Where you at e coli, I ain't scared?). New Orleans puts you in a state of mind that makes you feel like nothing should bother the goal of having fun. Laws and Police? Non existent as far as I could tell. People giving a fuck about what you're doing? Nope. Judgement from establishments? Only when you haven't bought a drink and it's 5AM and you are slowly drinking a cocktail brought in from another joint and talking coherently is something suckers do. Still though, not that much judgement even in that much circumstance. Just a blunt reminder that if I was about to go to sleep that I would have to take it somewhere else.

New Orleans is like a place someone made up in a story about how a town should be when you want to have a good time.