WhutsHappening

Backwoods Depravity Conclusion: From Backwoods to the Big City - And New Adventures

Continued from Backwoods Depravity pt. 4: Music and Drugs Coming together into the perfect storm

Morning three was far different from the previous two. I would come to find every morning different for the next 3 months, but this one was certainly a shock. I awoke at 8 to Nikki freaking out, rolling around the tent in a near-panic. She was going to work with me tomorrow when we met back up with the tour and she kept on repeating this.
“I’m about to fly from this hippie music festival into a new job tomorrow and meet my new bosses when they pick us up from the airport in the rental car that they’re giving to me to serve as assistant for a national surf video tour and I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing!” For some reason that frightened her. I kept on trying to get the girl to go back to sleep but she was obsessing. When I then tried to get myself back to sleep, she kept me up with questions.
“We’re getting a ride to and staying in Atlanta with Jared? When does he wanna leave? After Widespread has played a little? So we won’t be getting in until 2 in the morning! Are you kidding me! And we’re this dirty now, we need to shower and tomorrow’s our flight and . . . Fuck, we need to try to get him to leave earlier.” She wasn’t really yelling this with exclamation points and all, but whispering in a cross way that made it feel like she was yelling.
And yes, my parents named me after a fucking chipmunk, the most American of all youths.
<>
She refused to go to sleep so I took her into the car to get us out of the dirt and the thin level of water that had collected on the floor of the tent. We reclined the front seats but she couldn’t go to sleep there either and worry kept her asking questions. I started kissing her to shut her up and touching her and as she smiled we decided to go back into the tent, doing what we do best while Adam’s friend’s brother’s car droned on outside broadcasting the Bonnaroo radio station playing some anonymous jamband song, something that made you feel like sitting on hills and picking out shapes in clouds instead of doing anything else. Except maybe rolling around with a girl, naked and wet and dirty and happy as the sun decided to shine that day. Now we were warm, a sign from God coming through the clouds that we were blessed and right so I said:
“Can you possibly think we should be doing anything but this right now?” She shook her head and looked down at our bodies, wet and dirty together, then back up at me and smiled. Eventually, though, we were back in our clothes and her worrying returned with a vengeance. I stepped out of our tent, climbed into my dad’s Trailblazer, and turned on my phone. I had a message from Mark asking how I was enjoying my days off, my first painful reminder of the outside world. I called up Mary, rolling up the windows of the truck to shield our conversation from the fucked up world of Bonnaroo.
“Hey Alvin. How’s Baltimore going?”
“It’s good. Just finished the proposal, went great!” Right outside my window, Adam and Nikki were smoking a bowl, covered in mud, enveloped in mushroom clouds and coke rings.
“So cooool!” She always drew out “cooool” like a patronizing old mom who didn’t get it talking to a 9 year-old. I told her what time we were arriving and that we couldn’t wait. She told me she and Jack had been doing some legwork in Texas, that the Corpus premiere had been great, and that they were excited to pick us up at the airport tomorrow and meet Nikki. I said we were too, then I said I had to go back in the office. “Okay, bah,” she said as I said bye too and I closed up my cell and stepped outside of the car, back into the war zone. Jared called me, his plan now being to leave after Widespread had finished. Then he called again, saying he might stick around to meet up with some other friend after. His plans were getting later and later, Nikki was looking sicker and sicker, and I just wanted to enjoy the fucking music with my brother. So we puffed again, took down the tents, packed up the truck, and went to Citizen Cope. On the way there I began to unfold a new plan to Adam and Nikki.
Since Adam had to go back to Baltimore that night, and since he was exhausted and the drive was the longest he’s ever made, I said it might make sense to get a hotel room down there and rest a bit, to which he heartily agreed. Then I suggested that he and his friend, who was driving back North with him, drive Nikki and I to Atlanta. There I would pay for a super nice hotel room and a filling dinner in the city. We would all wash up and get clean and eat a warm gourmet meal to shake off the cobwebs. The next morning, Adam and his friend would drop Nikki and I off at the airport in Atlanta at 7 for our 8:40 flight. The girl and I would be fresh and clean and rested for our first day on the tour and Adam and his friend would be well-rested and well-fed for their long drive. Everyone was nodding their heads in approval. To the boys I built up the idea of eating out some money steaks or ribs. For Nikki I didn’t need to build it up. She was now learning to lay back and enjoy the ride as it all works out when you give it a little faith. For myself, my headache was beginning to go away as we sat on the grass watching Citizen Cope and passed around the bowl.
We looked at the kids around us, tired and mellow, a full 180 from the previous night’s explosive universe where everyone was so alive and wild. At one point, a short Asian boy stood in front of me and started dancing some weird hip-hop dancing thing to the jam band. He started staring me in the eyes with two earrings and slicked back hair, and I didn’t know if he was challenging me to a fight, an intense dancing duel thing a la Bring it On, or some gay orgy on the other side of town. Either way I got up, stared at the boy with a confused mix of anger, laughter, and mental exhaustion, and started walking to Bob Weir and Ratdog. Everyone else sensed it was time to leave. On the way over, I bought us cheese fries and we talked about how good it would feel to get some sleep and real food. I looked over and saw the same physics teacher I had seen the night before. He had been dancing and enjoying the joint with the random concert-goer during the Widespread show when last I saw him. Now, he no longer enjoyed anything. He looked unshaven and tired. His eyes were bloodshot and worn and he sat huddled against a fence, a shawl around his shoulders and back, his wife holding him and telling him it would be alright.
We watched some of Bob Weir and Ratdog, the Grateful Dead member’s band while I wondered if every one of these guys gonna start their own fucking band. Bob Weir, Phil Lesh . . . and who named these people, anyway? Christ. Then we decided to make our move, try and beat the traffic. Back at the truck, we were able to get doing without hesitation, a thing which made me thank the lord Nikki had the foresight earlier to want to get everything packed up.
On an earlier bathroom trip we had noticed a back way out of the festival grounds nobody seemed to be using. We had noted it for the future and so when we began our exit, myself driving Nikki, Adam and Adam’s friend in my father’s car, laden with muddy gear and the left-over confections boxes of Dad’s trademark vehicular clutter, we were greeted with the beautiful view of a queueless exit. With a shared yawn from everyone, we set off southeast for Atlanta.
Almost as soon as we got on the freeway Adam and his friend fell asleep. Nikki and I sat in front, awake but mostly silent. We had experienced quite a bit in the last few days, and soon would be experiencing quite a bit more. The girl and I were honing our joint chis for the next few weeks, back on the tour. I checked my messages and once again listened to the one from Mark “checking in” and hoping I was enjoying my time off, then one from Mary “checking in” and hoping I enjoyed my time off, and finally one from my parents asking how Bonnaroo was. It was all starting back up again, the organized insanity and the half-witted chaos of TOR. Nikki and I would also have a few huge gaps in personal lives we would have to keep hidden from our work lives, most notably that we had been at a drug and music festival in Tennessee and not composing a presentation for the president of our company. Hell, we’d even have to pretend that we were only friends, without the occasional casual fuck because intra-office dating is a serious no-no for any business environment. And then of course there was the general lie that we didn’t smoke pot, snort cocaine and eat mushrooms at the same time like immoral animals. We were two good, honest, regular Americans in love with the world of surfing and money and everything in the goll-durned US of A. We stared at the road unfurling in front of us, me occasionally comforting Nikki about the upcoming trauma we were about to throw our bodies into, stuff like “If I didn’t think you could do this, I wouldn’t have asked you.” Nikki would nod, then voice some of her worries and concerns, not looking for a response but just to vent, and I would listen as I stared forward down Highway 41 and hoped that we had made the right decision.
The two boys in the back seat woke up when we were about 45 minutes from Atlanta. The 4 of us smoked a bowl as I put on a jazz station. We were all silent and the music played the perfect background as we descended into the urban sprawl of Hotlanta, shockingly cosmopolitan after 3 days of being in the backwoods. I drove around a bit until I found a Ramada in the Southwest corner of town by a stadium. I turned into the carport and it became strikingly apparent that our car was the shittiest around. Escalades and H2's with Sprewells glistened in the circular driveway. While Nikki went in to get a room and I was waiting with the boys, I saw a group of 3 or 4 brothers coming out of their cars dressed in Gucci linens, every line perfect in their cropped, tight haircuts, their designer suits and shirts all shiny and sharp. The 4 of us might as well have come from mars. I was to later find out we were in College Park. Somehow we went from the biggest subversive hippiefest in the universe, with no fashion sense and few black people, to the wealthy black-man neighborhood heralded by rappers and athletes alike known as College Park, Atlanta.
Nikki came out of the hotel with our room keys and my debit card. The four of us moved the car around the side to the parking lot, grabbed some of our clothes to change into and our toiletries as well as the bowl and the rest of Nikki’s weed. We walked into the elegant hotel with all its marble trimmings and fresh flowers and beautiful stained oak furniture. We were 4 dirty white hippies with our clothes in our hands, and we took the elevator up to our room, trying to avoid eye contact with any and all passersby for fear that we would get kicked out.
We let the two boys hit the shower up first since they hadn’t bathed the whole extended weekend. Nikki shaved the last strand of hair on my head, a return to the normalcy of civilization while the looks that showed on the boys’ faces as they came out of the steaming bathroom were akin to the sublime relief that fell over one’s visage during the precious few moments of post-coital bliss. Nikki and I followed suit and soon we were cleaned up and fiending for civilized meal and drink.
We asked the hotel where you could go to get some ribs since I hungered for the flesh of slaughtered pig. I wanted to gnaw something steeped in sauces and seasonings off a bone, tear it off with my teeth, and wanted to find the best place in town to do it. But the guy at the front desk seemed incapable of suggesting anyplace, as if he didn’t know a goddamned thing about his own city. He just said “Everywhere’s good” and held up a menu book as I grew quickly lost. We were tired and hungry, not desiring another drive, especially if we didn’t know where we were going, and we decided just to eat in the gourmet restaurant in the hotel.
I ended up getting a short rack of ribs as an appetizer and a rare steak and mash potatoes for the main course. Adam’s friend followed suit with the steak, Adam got some gourmet chicken dish and Nikki got a fish plate. Our waiter was a recent African immigrant who said his name was Grant and only spoke broken English. Despite the fact that he practically poured my appletini all over me trying to shake it and that Nikki’s fish still had packing paper wrapped around it, we had no complaints. Certainly to go from groveling in mud-filled fields wearing 3-day-old clothes and eating burritos filled with ground rat’s meat and cooked in unsanitary hippie-run outdoor grills to eating a $150 dollar meal dressed in the finest button-downs and khakis we could find in our muddy bags was an experience not unlike jumping in a freezing cold lake with nothing to keep you warm but the hair on your balls and about 10 shots of whiskey. Truly refreshing and awakening.
Afterwards we talked to some yuppies sitting at the bar, mostly white folks in hideous maroon button-downs and sleazy used car dealer haircuts. They were getting wasted celebrating somebody’s engagement or something and we paid them some polite attention as they offered to buy us drinks. They were yapping about “getting crazy until the banks opened” or something. I was suddenly missing the dirty, stinking hippies. I had become one of them, began to understand their lifestyle, and although I still thought them lazy and indulgent I realized I preferred that to these fucks. I guess a hippie is better than a yuppie any day. Despite our drug abuse and occasional hate rants, we were relatively respectable people and held strict onto the moral codes that involved respecting other people and the planet. These bastards did not. We finally convinced them our conversation, devolving into storytelling about getting wasted and fucking hookers while their wives waited at home with the kids, were done. We made our way back up to our room and changed into comfortable sleep clothes. We got in our beds and wrapped ourselves under luxurious sheets, Nikki and I in one and Adam and his friend sharing the other, packed up the bowl, and passed it around one last time. We got comfortably numb as “Family Guy” played on the hotel TV, laughing tiredly while the day came to a close. My bed sank in like an enormous pillow hugging my body and the last thought I had before I fell asleep was how I didn’t think I’d ever laid in such a comfortable bed.

The Light of Day. OZ. pt.7

I trundled off from the fire-circle with no real direction in mind.  Surrounding the stages were the healing tents, a smaller practice fire circle, and a projector screen displaying sounds and images spliced and segued in logicless, spontaneous fashion--perfect for the complimentary minds that stood entranced by it.  I crossed my legs to watch what appeared to be a 50's movie, a stoic conversation between a man and a boy, spattered with Jerry-bear like dancing images, and occasionally morphing into Rorschach-blot-looking colored designs, and then back to the dialog-I felt like a goldfish, as each image became my reality, unrelated to the previous reality, and easily discarded for the next; blub blub.  I was in that zone where I was looking around for other people to share my wonder, but not secure enough in my state to be overtly social.  After an indeterminate amount of time, I wandered on alone, but still in vibrational sync with the great swath of international humanity all around me.  I could sense that Adrianna wanted to find me too, somehow, across the dark, pulsing night I worked my way back to the main stage and my Brasilian companeros.

Adrianna's trip had hit a bump in the road, and her tummy hurt a bit, I didn't hesitate at all to console, and care for her in the melodramatic LSD manner.  It was deep in the night now, and I couldn't tell how or where I was in my journey.  Between hugging and stroking and dancing and closing my eyes and opening my eyes and absorbing the night and light of harmony enveloping us, the night turned toward morning.  We healed each other and shared cigarettes and oohed and ahed.

"It's amazing no?" sounding more Italian than Brasilian  Adrianna would inquire regularly, often after a time-stopping make-out session.  We decided to watch sunrise from the big dirt burm back by the tent, and then find sleep.  There were innumerable couples and groups with us on the sunrise burm, time was meaningless in places like this, and our minds were exhausted from the nights inputs and exertions.  The sunrise was impeccable, shimmering over the Southwestern Desert.  We retired to Adrianna's tent in the last remaining cool morning hours, took each others clothes off released all our pent-up lust from the long night of penning up lust.  It was perfect, and we fell asleep in our underclothes with the tent door open, and soon the light breeze turned our daydreams into dreams.

We roused around 1:00 p.m., to the full heat of the day, and mild disorientation, smiling at each other, and the perfection of our affair.  I cruised back to my tent to eat some crackers and tuna, and hot cheese, and grab my shower stuff.  Showers consisted of a collection of plywood stalls, around pallets, and buckets to collect cold water from the two-story water drums; this was perfect.  The sweat and dust and drugs and sweat had formed an imperceptible halo around my body-my skin was visibly reddish, but the real layer around me was inches thick, just hot energy and chemicals and images from the night before.  I dumped the first bucket of cold water over my head and gasped with pleasure.  Found a piece of soap on the pallet and washed a bit, and then more cold water, balancing on the pallet, listening to world outside my roofless stall. 

When I came back to the tent, Liam and Sonya were there eating lunch-calm and well-rested, if not a little shaky. 

"Hey mate!" They called to me, "How was your night?" They asked in the same way you address someone that got really drunk the night before.

"Amazing, bruv, amazing.  Did you see the firedancers?  Awesome."

"Yeah we did.  Thanks for the goodies, by the way, we had a lot of fun."

"Wait til tonight, mang.  ECLIPSE.  6:30.  did you get your glasses?"

"No, where do we get them?"

We made loose plans to walk around that day, and explore.  Liam had discovered a bar in Lyndhurst, the tiny, defunct railroad town just down the road.  Mmmm, beer, strange how good it sounds even after a night of penultimate debauchery.  Audaciously, I even thought about my hard-drug supplies for the upcoming night, the night of the eclipse, 30-some seconds of totality, we wild ones congregated in the path of the umbral shadow, the eternal earth-shaking shadow of the moon blotting out the sun, stopping time and starting the tribes aworshiping, we would howl like wolves and babies and the sliver of life that we represented, only hours away.

For now, we smoked another sweet bowl with the Aussies, I got to say hello to Taku, who had found his Japanese friends and a big googly smile, and milled about in the sun.  I watched the naked hippies chasing the water truck as it sprayed down the dust, white skin wetted, and then soaped, and then wetted by the moving spray.  Clouds flowered softly above, the horizon white, the buzz tangible.  Adrianna, Liam Sonja and I decided to walk/hitch to shack of a bar that we'd heard about, which we did in the back of a truck leaving the festival site on their way to Lyndhurst.  Lyndhurst really was a one-horse town, though where that horse was was was anyone's guess, beyond the weathered-wood bar that we found perched gray in the expanse of red and blue.  The porch that hadn't seen more than a dozen people since the railroad had stopped coming through here in the 60's, was strewn with the colorful beat people of the world, and their guitars, and scarves, and cares.  Green Victoria Bitter cans were everywhere, and suddenly my excitement grew again; oh the joys of beer in the heat, with your friends.  Liam and Sonja already had a plastic jug of wine, which we'd been swilling along the way.

I found the large female proprietor to find out if I could get yet another cash advance, as I already spent most of my money on food and drugs, and the festival.  Miraculously, the overwhelmed Aussie said yeah, they could do it, and added 400 AUD to my bill for 2 six packs of VB, and two 25 packs of Weatherford Cigarettes.  I felt that same whoop of vibrant possibility as I turned back to Adrianna's smile with my booty.

"Ah, VB, muinto bon," she said and gave me a kiss in front of the dirty crowd.  We found a place on the porch to drink and smoke for a while.  Somehow we decided to walk back to the campsite, some mile or so away.  It was hot, in the 90's, but we had beer, and each other.  We passed by old tractors, and pond of some sort, bust mostly scrub and dirt.  Occasionally, Adrianna and I would stop and make out.

"I can't believe!" She would exclaim, "It's amazing, no?" Our compatibility was no less.

"Get a Desert!" Liam shouted at us in his British lilt, kissing Sonja and smiling.  I laughed and looked back toward the campsite, now with a handful of beers in my system. I still wore the same oversized bright board shorts, and sunhat, and Reef's, and a cigarette hung from my happy lips.  I was addicted to it all, as I always had been; not any specific drug, but the vivacity of the combination, the risk and ridiculousness of what we'd created.  The Rainbow flags fluttered, and the artists sat making and vending their goods, marking the main entrance, the music had never stopped, not for a moment, and wouldn't until just before the eclipse.  The kids were all dancing, or napping, or drinking, or meeting their lovers, or even leading their deaf students around the zoo of humanity as one Canadian character was doing.  We didn't even have nationalities anymore, we were just eclipsers, lucky, lucky, once in a lifetime lovers of life.  It is a moment in time that will live in my heart forever and ever: raw, young, perfect loving life, in the middle of nowhere.  AAAHHHH...

http://www.ozdoof.com/outdoorevents/OEF2002/index.html

Part 6.   Part 8

Backwoods Depravity pt. 4: Music and Drugs Coming together into the perfect storm

Continued from Backwoods Depravity pt. 3: From Mud to Drugs - Waking Up, Frightening the Normals, and Returning to the Fray
Back at the campsite Nikki attempted to form my hair into a mohawk. We smoked a bowl with Adam and his friends and the girl sat me down on a seat with my head over one of the free trashbags they gave us when we came in, a beer quickly in everybody’s hand as they all gathered around the spectacle. She proceeded to shave my long, black dyed scruff into one strip right down the middle of my skull but my hair was thin and wet and the gel she bought was more for yuppies looking to get all metroed out for a night at the clubs than for extending one’s hair into an evil black spiky mohawk. So the strip had to be cut shorter and shorter until finally we gave up on making it stand. I had a floppy strip of hair about 4 inches long running through the middle of my bumpy head, drooping sadly to the side. They had been giving out free mohawks in Centeroo but I had insisted on my friend doing it and in the end we failed. We tried to use somebody’s hot iron but it wouldn’t stay up. The vision I had held in my head ever since I was a young kid and saw my first punker down in Fells Point would now possibly never come to fruition. I was becoming too bald to have long hair without looking like some sad comb-over guy and this had been my last chance. But fuck it. At least I still looked like a freak and in the middle of Bonnaroo that was good enough for me.
The Black Crowes were just finishing up so after smoking out with Adam and his friends again we took to swigging the Tattoo, drank a few beers, and headed off with our mushrooms in our pocket. We were ready to catch Jack Johnson, feeling the potential energy of this great surfer bard coiling up inside us, ready to spring out. Life was in the air and in all of us and everyone in the field that summer evening and we all knew that night would be one we would all remember for the rest of our lives.
Jack Johnson was a main headliner, a musician the hippies, the jocks, the surfers, the pop kids, and everyone in between who would spend a hundred and sixty bucks on a jamband music festival liked. The two people I considered closest to me in the world - my brother and my best friend - were standing next to me as a modern day prophet, a man I was sure would go on to define a certain musical aspect of this common era, took the stage to a crowd of 40 thousand. The minstrel began singing his signature smoky vocals accompanied by mellow down-stroke/up-mute acoustic guitar. His music couldn’t be defined or categorized as anything other than Jack Johnson but it echoed through that field and the crowd roared, folksy-bluesy-surf tunes taking over the air of Manchester Tennessee.
Adam and his friends bobbed their heads back and forth to the music as Nikki and I swayed holding each other. The crowd started making excited sounds not at the music, but at a tree on the other side of the sea of people. Some tree-hugger was shimmying up the fat trunk like old footage I’d seen of Fijians climbing up palms to grab coconuts. The kid got close to 15 feet up, wrapped around like a bug, when all of a sudden he slipped and fell, frozen in almost the same position as when he had climbed, back into the sea of people to a resounding exhalation of disappointment. We turned our attention back to the music but before long we noticed another kid was climbing that same tree and he had already gotten higher. The whole crowd was watching, excited cheers erupting as he got to the first branch and Jack Johnson played the background with lively tunes from his newest CD. The kid climbed up a few branches and then got situated a good 30 feet off the ground, the finest seat in the house, in a nook of the tree. Our attention turned back to the stage where Jack still jamming, us mortals reveling in our compatriot’s victory. Another guy started climbing the tree, a hippie with long hair and a broad back who reminded me of a friend of mine from Colorado who I could imagine climbing a tree like that. This guy shimmied up to the branch where the other guy was as we cheered him on and I couldn’t help but wish I could hear their conversation. “So, this is kinda rad.” “Yeah. Trees really are for hugging.” “Nice. Well, I’m gonna keep climbing.” “Cool.” The guy with the long hair kept on climbing higher and higher up into the tree until he got to the top, the highest branch so that his head poked out above the top leaves. There he was over a hundred feet in the air with the greatest view one could ever imagine for any music show. At that moment, I thought, if I could be anyone in the world, I would want to be that tree-climbing hippie, sitting atop a ten story tree, staring down at one of the greatest musical voices of my time, truly one with nature and the world and everything.
Jack finished a song and said, “Hey, that’s cool that you guys climbed all up in that tree. Don’t fall or anything,” with his mellow surfer voice. He went back to playing as explosive cheers erupted from the croud. Every head started bobbing again, no longer paying attention to the hippies in the tree. Nikki, myself, Adam, and his friends all ate our mushrooms. The girl’s and my bag looked pretty good, the boomers strong, but there was one big mushroom cap with blue stripes all ribboned through which Nikki offered me. She wanted to shroom just a little but I wanted to trip my fucking balls off. So I ate it; and so began the rest of the night.
As Jack finished the mushrooms began to course through my veins. The skies opened up and it began to pour, cold fat rain adding to the sensation and the confusion. I looked at my brother, bobbing his head back and forth, his spiked hair fixed and unmoveable on his head. He looked like a club boy, like some crazed raver moving his large dome back and forth to the beat. Night had fallen and we were reveling in the music, the psychedelia running through our heads. I had eaten some strong ones and the most wicked of all the caps in the bag. My trip was starting out hard, lost in the surreal vividness that first comes when heading to a higher consciousness.
We moved on to Keller Williams and Bonnaroo for me had taken on a different reality. The throngs of people all began melting together and the music - the great power, the great stimulus emitting throughout the fields took over everything. I saw it as I watched Keller Williams, not knowing who he was, not being aware of anything but the now, life simplified to nothing more than just existing and experiencing, and felt the music vibrate and echo in my soul as great light shone all around me. I started peaking during Keller Williams and it was the greatest fucking music I had ever heard in my whole blessed rotten life and I felt like jumping and dancing though I could not move my body to do it. I remember hanging off Nikki and staring at the stage, pulsing and pumping forth energy and life like a heart made of pure explosive light. Colors, the edges of reality all fuzzy, only that one point in front of me shining so beautiful and great and the experience was everything – the only thing – that mattered. I was tripping hard, floating through the fairgrounds unaware and uncaring. We decided to leave. That is, Nikki, Adam and his friends decided; I had no conscious ability to make any decisions by this point. We went to a tent where the Tyson fight was playing for whichever children wanted to sit down and watch it but Nikki and I were in no mood for pugilism. We left Adam and his friends there and continued on our own journey. At another tent they were playing the South Park episode where Cartman and the adults kill all the hippies at the music festival, a twisted comedy to be watching at that place at that time. I will forever revel in the irony of watching that episode at the pinnacle of hippie music festivals. Hippies watching their cartoon equivalents being plowed down by huge trucks. At the end of the festival, Stan (or was it Kyle) told the hippies they’re all stupid because they all preach world betterment but will never actually affect any change unless they put down the pipe and stop following jam bands all over the country. Then we were off to find me a bathroom.
By this time the bathrooms had become a large focal point of the night. The ground around them was muddy and looked like shit. Compounded by the dreadful smell that emanated from 40 or so spot-a-pots lined up at the Centeroo women’s bathroom section, it was an altogether rancid environment in which to walk. It was the dead part of the field, the place where my trip felt darkness, no stimulus to activate, just gray freakish people on their way from one adventure to another, stopping to release decomposing trash from their bodies. I couldn’t help but feel like I was wading through shit as I walked behind the spot-a-pots to piss in the shadows instead of waiting in the lines and this created a weird sensation as the shit-mud squished up between my toes. After every pit stop Nikki and I would move on to another stage another world.
My trip continued hard as we went over to see Widespread Panic. I let the legendary jam band’s music run through me but I had peaked at Keller Williams and so while Widespread put on a good show, I was interested in seeing what else was going on. I looked next to me and seeing some old guy, possibly a physics or chemistry teacher, dancing around with his glasses on. He turned to some young kid next to him and toned out “Bop boppity bop-bop-bop” air-drumming on the kid’s nose. Then he took a hit of a joint given to him from somewhere else and cheered, a wild, nerdy cheer and it was funny to see one of the squares letting it all go and being one with the derelicts. I kept on complaining I was cold due to the fact that the light drizzling on my now-bald skull cooled me down and that one is more sensitive about temperature when tripping. But I was also tripping to the point that I was nearly a gelatinous mess, regularly leaning on Nikki and saying “You’re in control. You need to take me wherever you want - you must be my guide for this trip.” So she did.
We walked the grounds, staring at some of the displays like the silent dance club where everyone wore headphones and danced to the same music coming over them so to outsiders it looked like a bunch of freaks just bouncing to nothing. In the same area there were also light poles surrounded by concert-goers walking slowly around them, staring and wandering like zombies. As I walked up I found these poles lit up where you touched them and emitted the sounds of crickets and spring nights. I was caught up in this trance for a few seconds, Nikki getting into it too, when suddenly I looked around and noticed something. All the people there looked like pathetic dope-using stereotypes all going “Whoaa” while they played with the lights and listened to the noises. It was so cliché that I decided I did not want to be associated with such behavior. Nikki asked me what was wrong and I just said I didn’t want to be one of “those fucking bastards” and stayed away from that spot for the rest of the night. She kept on trying to show me how cool it was, like a mother trying to show a child some toy she thought he would really like but the vision of myself as some drugged up zombie frightened me.
As it was, I had a black mohawk and was hanging off my girlfriend in a psychedelic mess. We were wearing ratty t-shirts and I was geeking out amidst 90,000 other freaks, so that general experience, the whole night as one giant circus, was more than enough to entertain me. We checked out the other sideshows, then watched Trey Anastasio after Widespread. We started walking back and forth between Trey and Karl Denson’s Tiny Universe, my trip by now only making everything seem slightly surreal and amplifying the difference between noise and the silence. Nikki and I went to dance at Karl Denson, her face smiling at me as it bobbed back and forth and so beautiful and myself finally regaining bodily control. It was close to one when I really felt myself coming down. I had been tripping pretty hard for nearly 5 hours and now felt tired, as did Nikki. We couldn’t make it to RJD2 and definitely couldn’t make it to De La Soul, playing from 2:30 to 4 AM, so we decided to walk back to our tent. Somehow we found it, just barely awake anymore, and fell asleep before Adam got back with the cocaine which would have helped us greatly to finish out the night strong. So while my drug guide slept with me, smiling in our dirty damp tent, Adam and his friends fired down dingers into the wee hours of the morning not more than 5 feet away, the younger brother never missing a beat.
Continued in Backwoods Depravity Conclusion: From Backwoods to the Big City - And New Adventures

Backwoods Depravity pt. 3: From Mud to Drugs - Waking Up, Frightening the Normals, and Returning to the Fray

Continued from Backwoods Depravity pt. 2: From Mud to Drugs - Our First Day in Bonnaroo
I woke up quick at about noon on Saturday and stared at Nikki, glowing ever more beautiful than usual by the dirt which surrounded us in our little tent. She woke up and smiled at me and we kissed and woke up in the way I had missed so much since I had left Baltimore, a time period which felt like 2 years even though we had only been apart for 2 weeks. For two people who care about each other as we do, regardless of whether or not we’re lovers or just good friends every minute apart felt like an eternity and time slowed down to a painful crawl. Upon reunion our new timetables told us we had been apart longer than we really had. After we finished exploring each other’s bodies and waking up, Nikki re-telling the night before while playing in the early afternoon mud, we got dressed and went outside. It was overcast and rainy. The field held the stillness of death, as most people were sleeping from the night before despite the fact that the Black Crowes would be going on in just a few hours. It reminded me of the first morning after the first night in Battle Royale when a sobering reality descended on all the lost, frightened kids. This was a wasteland of humanity, the only people awake looking frightfully exhausted for 12:45 in the afternoon. Nikki and I walked down to the bathroom, running into a few others shaking the sleep out of their eyes. Back at the tent Adam had finally woken up.
“Hey, Nikki and I were thinking we wanted to leave the campground to get some supplies like cheap shoes, a new towel, and clippers and gel to put my hair into a mohawk.”
“You wanna do a mohawk?” my brother asked.
“Yeah, why not?” Adam shrugged. We also told Adam’s friends we would get them some beer and some liquor since we drank a sizeable amount of theirs the night before en route to Dave Matthews. Adam decided to come along for the ride out of the compound and so he could direct us back to the tents upon our return. Nikki and I had decided we would park the car back where our tents were when we returned so Adam could pack it up easily and leave the next day. The next day was really the end? Fuck.
So the three of us trekked to the other side of the fields where our father’s Chevy Trailblazer was parked. We were greeted by all the kids at the concert, finally stirring from the dead. We stopped at a makeshift stand for 5 dollar breakfast burritos, sustenance piled on empty, twisted stomachs and headed in the direction of Dad’s truck. On our way we heard a girl whisper “Mushrooms” as we walked by and Nikki stopped. Adam had been planning on booming with his friends that night and naturally they wanted us to follow in their trip but we had to buy our own. So this short, pretty hippie with long brown hair, a single strand braided and beaded, turned to us as we to her, a psychedelic business woman in her muddy office.
“Hey, can we get an eighth?”
“Sure, twenty-five.”
Nikki grabbed a 20 dollar bill and we all looked for another 5, digging through our pockets and wallets, when the hippie girl noticed my blue OP wristband, one of the pieces of swag we had put in our TOR premiere gift bags.
“I like your wristband.”
“Thanks.”
“I’ll knock off 5 bucks for that wristband.”
“Sure, here,” I said. I had ten more pairs in my bag in the car. She was stoked on it and we were stoked on the party favors for the night. We thanked her and continued on, Adam and I talking the whole walk while Nikki just smiled and laughed at our reminiscences. We laughed about our time living together in San Diego, a summer of debauchery the likes of which no human being should ever experience unless they’re not worried about the possibility of cocaine overdose, alcohol abuse or full physical destruction and failure, all of which were played with and very nearly achieved in that amazingly rotten époque of time. We’d pushed the envelope that summer, living in a rancid sublet squeezed between a tweaker pad and a flophouse across the street from my college in a rundown housing complex. Somehow the drugs and booze had flown freely, usually on other peoples’ dimes, and we were unable to say no. We looked back with no regrets about the summer, although neither of our bodies had been the same ever since. It was a summer of great personal growth as only a period of excessive debauchery and pushing it to the limit can be. I personally don’t completely trust somebody who hasn’t had at least one period like that in their lives. They seemed perhaps like they were too controlling, to afraid of the unknown, and therefore too artificial. One needed to see how far down one’s demons can go to truly understand the depths of one’s character and by God had we tested that boundary. We’d come out of the other side to be wiser men, more knowledgeable of our highs and our lows than most people our age, especially Adam, my protégé and soul companion.
Adam was my younger brother by 4 years and accordingly I always took it upon myself to teach him everything I had learned by running into brick walls throughout my life. We were two of the closest brothers I knew, without any of that painful rivalry that plagued other sibling relationships. Our top dreams were for the success of the other and it was always a great time to be united with the kid. He was taller than me, much better and hipper of a person as well as much more popular than I ever was. In so many ways we are so much alike: same sense of humor, same taste in literature and movies and role models, two great brothers molded out of a general pattern. But we are also very different. I’d always been the wanderer, the person for whom the road was always beckoning; he was not. I envied his desires and ability to stay in one place, to set down roots and continue on with a steady life without much deviation from the trunk while I was flitting off in the branches. Perhaps I showed him that while the voyage is always rewarding, it’s also usually painful and perhaps I’d helped him avoid some of that pain, as a protective older brother should. Whether this was true or not, he would always be the thing in my life I was most proud of and would always be my fraternal soulmale. Any time together was bittersweet; sweet because of how great it was and bitter because usually it would end soon. We laughed as we rapped about our lives, our dreams, and our differences and right at that moment, at Bonnaroo together, everything was perfect and I’d forgotten that anything existed outside our little backwoods bubble.
We walked down an asphalt road running into the grounds that Nikki and I had traversed the day before, and turned down some more grass “lanes” on what we thought was the way to our car. We stopped by a middle-aged tough guy filling balloons with nitrous from a head-high tank he’d snuck onto the grounds. They were illegal and the punishment was a fine and eviction from the festival but the risk is worth all the money he could make selling compressed NO2 to all of us druggie derelicts. He had a walkie talkie around his waste and we heard a voice crackle over it “Security’s coming. These balloons, then we’re done.” He radioed back okay just as we walked up. We bought two balloons quickly for 4 bucks each and walked off inhaling the gas. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a guy run up, his walkie in hand, and help the dealer grab the tank. By the time I looked back, it was gone.
We soon discovered we were walking in circles, Blair Witch in Manchester, and were beginning to think we might have lost the car somewhere amongst the mud and the depravity when Nikki spotted it a hundred yards away. So the girl, Adam, and myself jogged towards it, climbed in and cranked up the air condition full blast. Despite the fact that the rain and clouds kept the place cooler than normal, it was still Tennessee in June and was therefore still hot and muggy. Just not as hot and muggy as it could have been.
I started driving and made the mistake of slowing through the gates, trapping the truck in the mud trying to leave. A few older women working the gates, salts of the south, came over to help. One, a bushwhacking wrinkled old crow with a thick southern accent and an affinity for Waylon Jennings jumped into the driver’s seat, Nikki in shotgun, and swore at the other older woman trying to direct her from outside.
“She thinks she knows what she’s talking about, she’s from the city, she don’t know no country driving, I grew up out here, who the hell’s she trying to tell me what to do . . .” the woman said as myself, Adam, and a band of helpful hippies struggled to push it free. This caked us all in mud, especially Adam and myself, leaving us looking like we were freshly-thawed cavemen. Eventually it popped out, the lady behind the wheel “yeehawing” as she pushed it forward onto solid ground and Adam and I, dirty and sweaty, thanked the hippies and the old ladies for their help. We climbed back in and took off out of the hippie music commune, about to reemerge into normal society with nearly an inch of mud caked on each of our legs and all over our shorts. That oughtta shake up the squares.
We toked a well-packed bowl before we arrived at a gas station to fill the car up for quick departure the following day. I walked into the mini-mart and bought a case of PBR for myself and a case of Bud Light for Adam’s friends. When I got back to the Trailblazer some brothers hanging around the gas pumps asked us for some weed and if they could ride in with us using their counterfeit tickets. We said no, saying we had no weed for sale and no room while Nikki pointed to our crowded back seat full of my and her gear for the tour. I gave the guys a green nug out of compassion and again we were driving, this time to a nearby Burger King. We pulled in to the fast food parking lot, thankful to the Lord Almighty for the creation of cheap, greasy comfort grub, just the ticket during an experience as disorienting as this. We walked in, three drugged up Yankee hippies, and the record made a scratching sound and was stopped.
We looked like swamp things at a Southern Cotillion, the collision of two very similar but quite opposite worlds, our freak world and that of the southern locals. Sure, we were both here in the south and both liked playing in the mud. But while they were good, respectable God-fearing country bumpkins, we were depraved demons from up north, obviously on drugs, covered in mud and reeking of body odor, stale booze, and reefer. There was a 4h club basketball team in there, all-American boys with their dads and moms, and a girls soccer team. Two of us were drenched in dirt while our third was a Latina who looked like she was the victim of a massive drug-addled gangbang, a spectacle for the bible-thumpers. All eyes followed us as we ordered, then began jumping around and giggling like excited schoolgirls on Christmas morning at the prospect of being able to use a clean toilet versus the gnarly port-a-pots at the concert.
We ate our meals ravenously, then dragged mud and body odor into the local Wal-Mart where I picked out a cheap pair of sandles. Adam and I walked around in a daze looking at Star Wars action figures while Nikki took care of business buying clippers and some gel to make my hair into a mohawk as well as a towel since I had pissed on ours the night before. We followed Wal-Mart with a final stop at a local liquor store.
Inside I bought a handle of a new type of Captain Morgan’s called Tattoo. The shopkeep told me it was like Captain Morgan’s rum version of Jaeger: dark, thick, spicy and strong. The couple in line in front of me was buying a 12-pack of imported beer. Turning around and noticing my muddy leg and the vacant, sunk-in look of my eyes they told me they were going to Bonnaroo too. They lived in the area, though, so they went during the day for the music but slept in their own bed at their own house at night. I didn’t really understand the couple’s excitement with this prospect. To truly experience it one had to be camping out there, stumbling through the grassy muddy fields in their 3-day-old clothes. For them it’s not really a lifestyle experience; that is, they don’t get to truly be part of Bonnaroo in all its rotten glory. They see it from the outside looking in, watching from a comfortable distance as the beasts work themselves into dirty frenzies and leaving the safari at night to sleep back in Tennessee suburbia. The shopkeep, a kindly middle-aged woman with feathered bangs and a 1980’s haircut, was very kind and told me how much they loved having all us derelicts there and how much they appreciated all the business we brought them. I thanked her and walked out to the car loaded up with booze. We were heading back into the war zone, supplies refreshed. Adam drove this time and we wound through some of the dirt roads in the fields to where the tent was, parking the Trailblazer amongst the RV’s which formed a wall encircling our little tents, our truck now no more than 4 steps from our tent to facilitate escape the following day.
Nikki had talked me into washing off, especially since I had pissed all over myself and was covered in thick mud although it cost $10 a person. Adam and his friends would hear no talk of it and so Nikki and I went to the shower trailers to clean up. The guy watching them wasn’t there so we walked past closed signs with change of clothes in our hands and into the handicapped showers, the only ones that still worked. We showered without hot water and felt reborn as the ice water washed away our sins, made us clean. The guy came back by the time we came out and we decided that like good respectable Americans we would pay him. We returned to the tents reinvigorated and ready to take on the night.
Continued in Backwoods Depravity pt. 4: Music and Drugs Coming together into the perfect storm

Backwoods Depravity pt. 2: From Mud to Drugs - Our First Day in Bonnaroo

Continued from Backwoods Depravity pt. 1: Flying to Tennessee
Nikki and I soon found ourselves lost, wandering through throngs of young people under the influence of various substances and feeding off each others’ energy and youth and smells and spirit so as to create an island of lost children, like the Lord of the Flies but times 10,000 and full of all types of girls and drugs. They all walked by us, the jocks, the metros, the punkers, the southern boys, and of course the smelly fucking hippies, the only people for whom this weekend would be just another couple days in their lives. They were in their element and we were just guests in their universe, forced to gravitate towards their lifestyle. The outside world may be ours but this was theirs. The rain had left damp air over everything and turned the ground into slop so nobody had on their nice clothes anymore. Everybody was in t-shirts and jeans and shorts, whatever they didn’t care about if they got wet and muddy. Weird plastic sandals I heard some people calling “Crocs”. Groups of people younger than 30 walked by, all on their own trips, living their own lives. Strange commingling abounded. You’d catch little blurbs and bits and pieces of conversation and occasionally acknowledge the other person with a nod and they’d acknowledge you back and that was the most you were able to do in such a sea, at such a time of day. People walking by would whisper names of drugs they had for sale - “Molly”; “Mushroom chocolates”; “Greens”. I remember a tall, almost exotic-looking dark-haired girl, walking by, looking me in the eye and matter-of-factly saying, almost to a tune, “Ad-erol”. I thought how out of place such a designer drug was in a place like this. The girl had the air of a pretty little college student in way above her head. She was probably selling the drugs her parents had bought her for her ADD so she could get money to buy coke. We moved on into the thick of it, trying to find Adam in the midst of the Island of the Lord of the Acid Flies.
Somewhere else, released over giant speakers, the remaining Allman brothers jammed “Elizabeth Reed” and it seemed to be a song the wind was playing for us as we stumbled through a wave of humanity. Getting lost was easy in such a place, especially when the person giving you directions is directionally challenged like Adam. His phone was running down but we continued talking to each other as the girl and I wandered through the misfit children. There were giant balloons in the air in different colors denoting First Aid stations and we asked him if he could direct us by those but he didn’t understand me. “What balloons?” We walked to the heart of the festival, known as Centeroo, and stood under a massive technicolor gateway arch which looked to be the main entrance, complete with people sitting underneath tripping their balls off, their eyes lost to reality and off in another parallel universe. Of course Adam didn’t know where that was either. Finally we figured out that the main dirt roads all had street signs on them and we asked Adam where he was. He didn’t really know but he talked to his friends at our bequest and they told him what the nearest intersection was. Nikki and I walked to where he wanted to meet us and finally I was reunited with my brother. We almost collided in the place where two dirt paths come together, laughing as we hugged, excited to be in the middle of such a dynamic corner of the world together. This was where I needed to be. Not surrounded by brainless strangers and crazy surfers but at a wild festival amongst the derelicts of civilization with my brother and my best friend. I couldn’t help but let my spirit fly as we walked off to the campsite, my brother on one side and the girl on my other.
The sky cast an eerie shadow over the afternoon as the clouds blew back and forth. At the campground Nikki and I set up our tent which Adam had been storing in his tent for us. We put our backpacks in it and I looked at Nikki as she looked back at me. We both smiled. We were back together. We had made it to Bonnaroo; somehow, I had been able to leave my national tour and, just conveniently, the weekend I was supposed to drive from Cali to Texas happened to be the weekend of Bonnaroo; and somehow I was able to squeeze in a cross-country flight from San Jose to Nashville and I’d convinced Mary to fly me from Atlanta to Houston to catch up with the tour and miss only one premiere. I guess that life works out that way. Maybe it’s not ALL fate; we have to figure out the pattern and put a few pieces together. THEN we can enjoy the picture as the cosmic powers, the will of God, makes everything else fall into place.
Nikki and I started making out as all of our pent up sexual energy awoke and started racing through our bodies until our blood was pure pheromone, purple and pulsing. We tore off each other’s clothes and soon we were in union, one gyrating pulsing hump of flesh all kisses and gropes and explosive emotion. We rolled around in our dirty tent, careful to be quiet so as to not alarm my brother and his friends, the echoes of Bela Fleck creeping in from outside in the warzone. We were spurred on by the fact that we were in the middle of it all, in a dirty tent under a cloudy sky in Manchester Tennessee as day was slowly draining away and night was soon to creep up.
We lay there afterwards, smiling at each other and saying nothing except the occasional “I missed you” that accompanies such a blessing when you truly did miss the other person. We held each other, our sweat dripping together so we could not tell who was sweating after a few minutes, just that we were both wet as our breathing slowed again. Finally Adam called into the tent and said we had to go or we would miss Dave Matthews. Nikki and I kissed once more, got dressed, and climbed out of the tent. We puffed a few herbs with Adam and his friends and then each did a line of cocaine that appeared out of nowhere. We cruised to Centeroo and the Dave Matthews show with Adam’s friends, a crowd of UDel derelicts all sharpened up and ready for the night to explode over the Tennesee field party hootenanny.
At Dave Matthews nearly every person was under the influence of some substance and most had two or three running through their bodies. On my way, I called my friend Jared who I had lived with in Jackson Hole the previous winter. We had been ski buddies in college in San Diego and our friendship was then fortified by a year living together in the near-wilderness of Teton County and riding the roughest, most exigent resort in the United States of America ever since the Norwegians decided to hide in our mountains and ski down to in the valleys for supplies, hookers, and trade. He was in many ways the stereotypical tomcat-pothead-republican oxymoron which so many girls find irresistible. Unlike most people fitting that description, though, he’s not a fucking idiot, at least not completely. Maybe a hypocrite, but certainly not an idiot. And Jared is as good a friend as anyone could ever hope to meet which, in this life, may be the best we can hope for. Jared and I decided that right after Dave finished we would meet by some lawn full of 10-foot-high bobbleheads that he said I couldn’t miss.
We posted up behind the crowd, so far we could hardly see the stage and quickly lost interest in the show. Fuck it, I’ve never been that big of a Dave Matthews fan anyway. After the jam king finished Nikki, Adam, Adam’s friends and I all walked to a bar tent and I bought everyone in our group a few rounds of some crazy Tennessee microbrew which cost 6 dollars a pint. We drank our road sodas as we walked to the bobbleheads. Jared called out to me from afar and despite the fact I could only see a shadow sauntering in my direction I had been able to tell it was him by his confident, cocky walk. He recognized me despite the fact that my nappy hair, now almost down to my shoulders, was dyed black instead of its natural blond he’d known me to have for the last four years. We hugged a greeting, then he hugged Nikki. He and Adam shared the old handshake and hug and he was introduced to Adam’s friends with polite, firm grips. Soon Jared, Nikki and I were partying amongst the crowd with Adam and his friends, cracking jokes about hippies and derelicts and pounding beers with reckless abandon. He was a good guy, fun to party with, and on top of that he was our ride to Atlanta at the end to catch our flights out so it paid to check in with the fucker. As the show ended I somehow found myself lost. I had gotten split up from Jared and Nikki and my delusional drugged up mind immediately thought his charms had wiled her away from me, that our friendship was all a sham and he and her were fucking somewhere. I began running around like crazy, a paranoid fuck amongst 90,000 drug-addled juvenile delinquents getting drizzled on in Manchester listening to the most popular jam bands of the turn of the century. I called Nikki and Jared close to 10 times each, getting them occassionally for a few seconds but unable to understand them and cursing this damned group of loud intoxicated children. Finally I located the two after Jared asked where I was and figured out how to get there. The night was slipping away from me like many nights before; I was aware of this and accepted it as a casualty of being a drunkard and a drug addict.
With the group of me, Nikki, Jared, Adam, and his two friends reunited, we shared another beer and then split again. Adam and his friends went back to do another gram of coke they’d grabbed as Nikki, Jared, and I walked back to Jared’s tent in the VIP section. There, we drank some hard booze and my memory finished the shift into strobelight vision. I remembered something about mushrooms and pissing all over people’s heads because I couldn’t control my bladder. I had this vision of pulling out my dick viciously and shooting out golden showers all over the skulls of people laying on the ground. Then it was black. The next morning, lying in the tent, Nikki filled me in on what had really happened.
We had gone back to Jared’s and finished a bag of mushrooms which Jared and I had started in Jackson Hole while hiking through Grand Teton National Park in snowshoes on a sunny spring Saturday several months prior to Bonnaroo. We drank a few more beers, then some whiskey. We followed this with a few more lines of the white stuff that had appeared from somewhere. When we were all good and twisted we went out to listen to the Galactic show. I had to piss so bad but I couldn’t make it to the port a pots so in the middle of the field, surrounded by a bunch of other drunk and semi-coherent youths I began to piss viciously all over the grass. This went on to include people’s feet, calves and shoes, Nikki, and myself. The girl, watching me sway back and forth, helped me back to our site as I mumbled something about how bad I felt for “Pissing all over people’s foreheads.” I passed out the second I got my head down in the tent though in the middle of the night I walked, still drunk and blacked out, and pissed all over our only towel. So was done our first night of Bonnaroo. God bless.
Continued in Backwoods Depravity pt. 3: From Mud to Drugs - Waking Up, Frightening the Normals, and Returning to the Fray

Backwoods Depravity pt. 1: Flying to Tennessee

Some of you may not know it but good ole Unkal Ryno's been writing a novel for the last 8 months. That's right, I think of myself as a real author, fucking joking me? My novel's a gonzo travel story about my summer touring the country, like a mixture of On the Road, Blue Highways, and Endless Summer, a bunch of depraved, hideous shit set against the backdrop of a surf video tour. So for the novel I changed the names to be able to exaggerate and augment our already sick, depraved minds. I turned Bec into a Venezuelan named Nikki; Kyle became Adam; and I became Alvin, the young man coming of age on the road. But in honor of the greatest music festival in the world, Bonnarroo, which happens around this time, I'm posting an excerpt from the novel. Keep an eye out - hopefully it'll be coming to a bookstore near you soon.

- UR

I awoke to one of the airport workers taking the chairs off the top of the tables and putting them on the floor beside me. He looked at me with silent disdain, probably because I was sleeping in the middle of where he was working like some weary world-traveler or dare-all journalist – or maybe just like a bum. I walked to the counter and checked in. Security check was brief after I once again had to put on some of the clothes from my duffel so that my luggage fell under the regulated weight. Soon I was asleep in a chair at my gate waiting for my flight.

I woke up again to get on the plane, boarded the leg from San Jose to Denver, and fell asleep the instant I sat down. I had a weird dream where I was snowboarding, throwing spins off of enormous cliffs that seemed to go on forever, slow-motion 1260’s over the tops of trees and landing in head-high powder that exploded all around me as I pushed forward through endless untracked. Seemingly this mountain descended forever, lined with hucks and jumps like a video game with the world as my alpine playground. I was flying down full-speed, unable to stop when I spotted something on the horizon. It looked like there was nothing beyond a hundred yards, as if the world ended suddenly and there was just a great fall. I’d found it, the great break and as it came closer I didn’t try to slow down but in fact ducked into a high-speed crouch. Then it was under me; I hucked the cliff and threw my feet backwards over my head, into an endless backflip as I dove down into oblivion, free and unchained and unable to discern ground from ceiling – or for that matter if either of those existed. Just as the wind was picking up and the great light source was growing brighter, as if I was nearing full reality and nirvana, close to the source - I was jostled awake. The plane was landing at Denver International.
Since I had arrived in California, I had been drinking 2 to 4 energy drinks a day, living on little sleep and a lot of stress. These flights would be spent catching up on sleep and this weekend would be a soul re-charger. I looked forward to the music festival as a nice, relaxing detachment from the stressful non-stop life I’d been thrown into without any thought or preparation and I had basically slept my way from San Jose the night before to Denver the next afternoon, totaling almost 8 hours in between shuffling through the airport and flying.
At DIA I read some more of The Snows of Kilimanjaro, getting halfway through the story about the father and his sons when a hippie-looking girl sat down next to me. She was not attractive but not ugly, with freckles and a pale complexion. She sort of looked like the pro snowboarder Hannah Teter but softer, less athletic. She wore a loose white blouse-dress and reminded me of every neo-hippie stereotype I had ever heard or seen. Our flight was delayed and when we saw this, she exhaled “Man, I’m already missing the first show.”
“Are you going to Bonnaroo?”
“Yeah. Well I’m flying to Nashville and then somehow I’m gonna get there. I guess there’s some type of airport shuttle I could have gotten, but you had to sign up for it and I didn’t so I don’t know how I’m gonna get there.”
“Well my friend’s gonna pick me up at the airport and then we’re heading over there. You could definitely hitch a ride.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, for sure. No worries.”
She smiled and thanked me. The girl extended her hand and told me her name was Teresa. She was 32 and had left her husband with the kids for the weekend so she could meet up with some old friends at the festival. Her only problem was that she didn’t know how she would get from Nashville to Manchester. Much to her luck I came along, but she had every confidence that the universe would somehow have provided her transport. The cosmic powers make all things flow when you learn to accept them, allow yourself enjoy the ride, and condition yourself to glide along the banks of the great river in unworried peace. And so they acted through me to bring this girl to a three-day long orgy of drugs, alcohol and music just as she knew they would.
On the flight to Nashville we were sitting just across the aisle from each other and she passed out immediately. I had slept enough already, more than in the previous two nights, and my excitement at getting to see my friend Nikki kept me awake. Now that I had a second to think I realized I’d missed her a lot, maybe even more than the rest of my friends and my family. Of course she was a friend with benefits so that changes the whole situation. In all honesty I didn’t know what we were as I thought about it, “dating” or “talking” or just “fuckbuddies” but I figured there was no use in dwelling in title or status. That was not according to the plans of the great cosmic powers. We were simply elements floating throughout at the whim of the higher fates. To think we were anything more was a folly bordering on delusion. I smiled at the prospect seeing Nikki and then it widened when I thought about Bonnaroo. In a few hours I would be there with her and my brother without a single worry in the whole goddamned world outside of the immediate or the now. Nothing but a few days of depravity and music.
The second we touched down and began taxiing up to the gate I called Nikki. I told her I was bringing a girl for us to take to the fields she didn’t sound too excited. She attempted to cover it up, saying she was distracted by traffic, but I knew she envisioned me with some gorgeous California blonde who she would be playing third wheel to for the weekend. When she saw Theresa she would understand my charity and would realize that I wasn’t just giving rides to hot chicks I met in the airport. The tinge of jealousy in Nikki’s voice when she reacted to my new female guest, though, was nice if not a bit alarming. Where exactly did we stand? Would this be an issue on our tour?
I decided to think of other things while walking through the Nashville terminal. I realized that this “project I was working on in Baltimore” would be a perfect reason not to speak a single word to Mary or Jack or Mark or anybody about anything having to do with TOR for the next 3 days. Get off the road and into a tent for a weekend. My mind was starting to decompress, my stress dripping out, one drop at a time and I already felt infinitely better than I had at the Santa Cruz Del Mar theater the night before.
We went to baggage claim and Theresa helped by carrying my laptop bag while I wrestled my body sized duffel off the carousel and out onto the curb where Nikki was picking us up. She arrived driving my dad’s Chevy Blazer which had brought she and my brother Adam down to Tennessee the day before. They had driven through the night from Baltimore, smoking bowls and trading stories until she dropped him off at Bonnaroo. From there she drove to Nashville, spending the night in a hotel there to pick me up at the airport. I’d told her this was her first duties as my assistant and she accepted them with all seriousness and dedication. Nikki stepped out of the truck and as she came hurried over to me I grabbed her and gave her a big hug, two great friends embracing in front of a strange hippie. I threw my bags in the truck, we pushed some of Adam and Nikki’s stuff over in the back seat to make room for Theresa and were off, burning east on the 40 towards Bonnaroo.
Common courtesies were exchanged between the girls as my brother’s bowl was pulled out and packed full of greens brought down by Nikki for the weekend. As the three of us grew good and baked, our talk started ranging from who’s playing now to how many people were there to how Theresa would find her friends. She was from Vermont originally but had moved to Humboldt. She was flying in to meet a couple heads driving down in an RV from the northern states. In classic hippie style, she didn’t have a cell phone, just the knowledge that a handful of friends were somewhere amongst the 90,000 people at the festival. After driving for over an hour I looked at the map and the recent road sign we passed and tried to figure out how far we were. I slowly fought the THC haze to make myself think. Nicole was driving east on route 40. Her route was taking us East to Knoxville instead of South to Manchester. I looked again, making sure I was correct before saying anything. Finally I turned to the girl driving and asked her if she knew where we were going.
“Why?”
“Uhh, because I think we’re going the wrong way. We’re going east. We’re supposed to be going south. You should have taken the 24 instead of the 40 out of Nashville.” She looked at an upcoming sign, giving mileage for Knoxville and none of us said anything. The embarrassment and silent exclamation of “Aww Fuck!” echoed through the smoke-filled car and single-handedly pulled us over and turned us around. I went to work recalculating a new route which had us backtracking to Cookeville where we would take 111 Southwest. After turning onto the smaller US-111 and knowing it more or less dead-ended into Manchester, we puffed again and our conversations resumed where they left off. We talked about life, relationships and especially marriage, since Theresa’s husband was amazing enough to have agreed to stay home with the kids while she went to a music festival 3000 miles away.
“Yeah, he’s cool, but after being married and having 2 kids you get all those personal jokes and weird rules that you can’t ever tell anyone because they’ll just think you’re strange,” the 32-year-old wandering married mother of 2 said. We agreed. We told her we had certain rules about stuff like sex and what’s allowed, what little things are exceptions and what people can get away with, all the friends with benefits shit to keep it from getting too serious.
“Yeah,” she went on, “Like he can fuck other people, but he just can’t get attached, you know? He can fuck other girls and I can fuck other guys, y’know? There just can’t be any emotions involved.” She silenced waiting for our approval, which at first we gave hesitantly. Then we looked at each other. Nikki and I didn’t agree. I didn’t want her fucking other guys, she didn’t want me fucking other girls. We backtracked though; it was okay now because we were fuckbuddies, just friends with benefits and so there were no rules about sex with other people.
“But if Nikki and I were dating, I don’t know how cool I’d be about her fucking other guys.”
“Yeah, you, uhhh, have a really special relationship with your husband,” Nikki said. I said we’ve talked about threesomes and we wanted to try it. Then I brought up the fact that we were technically just friends anyway and therefore any rules were silly and pointless. We laughed uncomfortably and, after that, relationships and sex weren’t mentioned for the rest of the journey to Bonnaroo.
When we got to our exit we saw signs saying “Event Parking” and assumed this was the only big event happening in backwoods Manchester. We followed them down a country road in Tennessee, following a paint-stripped Camaro to what we thought was our destination. The day before there had been a 6 hour line on the way in, Nikki told us; this day, the road was empty except us and the Camaro. We pushed on, taking a right turn still following the Camaro, hoping they were going to Bonnaroo. We were beginning to feel lost and our stoned minds started to become alarmed at this prospect. Being lost on the freeways was okay but back here, following a strange Camaro . . . visions of being ambushed by Tennessee hillbilles who liked to lure concert-goers into their backwoods compounds and gang rape them to death swirled around our heads. I went a step further by proposing that it was actually some rotten Manchester cult which took the stragglers and tortured them, then ate the children’s flesh as a sacrifice to some heathen gods after which they would drink moonshine and dance around the mangled bodies of the unfortunate people who wandered into their insane redneck death trap. This was a trap and we were going to die. The Camaro pulled into a driveway and we were alone, now even more scared. At the next turn we saw yards advertising event parking and we though about pulling over there until . . .
The gates appeared right in front of us, at the end of the road. We were three fashionably late travelers in an old Chevy Trailblazer and they greeted us with concealed giggles. Their inside joke, that we had gone from fashionably late to missing some of the best parts of the party, did not go unnoticed. Adam had called me from within the gates a few hours before, while we were lost, telling us we had missed Jurassic 5 putting on one of the best shows he had ever seen. I made the announcement to everyone in the car while we were plugging along the highways of Tennessee and a deathly pallor filled the three travelers. Now it was all forgotten. The gate people were checking our tickets, giving us Bonnaroo cd’s and programs, and directing us in.
The Bonnaroo Music Festival is in the heart of Tennessee in the middle of June and this of course should normally make it miserably hot. I wondered while planning how I would hide my intense sunburn and dehydration hangover from Mary and Jack when they picked me up in Houston to continue on the tour since I was supposed to be back home working on a business presentation and all. On top of that, it sounded miserable being around all the other sweaty people, most of them stinky fucking hippies whose body odor, already strong because of their lack of hygiene, would be strengthened and compounded by the heat and humidity into actual creatures which would roam the grounds, eating small children and raping girls while they slept. I was sure I would have to fight off a few of these walking globules of sweat and patchouli in order to keep both my and Nikki’s honor intact. And the first day, when my brother and his friends and almost everyone else had arrived, the sky had been clear and sunny. But during a party that night the heavens had opened and it rained that whole eve into the next day. In fact the deluge had just stopped when we arrived. This would prove good because, for the rest of the trip, it would be raining off and on, keeping cloudy and cool the whole time and making it a pleasantly chilly experience. But rain, when falling on Tennessee dirt and driven over by many cars on their way to a music festival, creates mud. And when a Chevy SUV stops in it to get tickets checked, it tends to get stuck, especially when the four wheel drive doesn’t work. So we had to rock back and forth and drive over boards as all the ticket-takers helped us while sniggering under their breaths. Finally our wills prevailed and we were pushing forward, passing through the gates, down grass boulevards and into a parking field on the fringe of the festival.
We parked the truck next to a rope separating the makeshift lot from a walkway, a grass street that connected to many other mazelike roads and avenues which all led to music and people and drugs and sex and everything great about counter culture youth America in the modern era. Nikki and I grabbed a few things which we thought would be most important and consolidated them into our backpacks: toothbrushes, deodorants, toothpaste, a change of clothes, and a couple hundred dollars in cash, our lifeline for the next few days. While we loaded our travel packs, Theresa stood by the car and talked to us. It was nervous chatter, her voice more frantic than it had seemed before because now she was in the middle of the mayhem and chaos and realized that, without a cellphone, she was going to have a huge task ahead in finding her friends. Perhaps she wanted us to offer friendship, to take her under her wing but we did not sign on for more baggage. We were a taxi, not a hostel. We needed to find Adam, as he had our tent and a campsite; we needed to have some alone time to talk without a hanger-on; and mostly we needed to have sex as soon as possible. I was in desperate need of stress relief.
“Do you guys need any help carrying anything to your tents?” a last desperate question.
“Nope”, we said in unison, borderline oblivious to the traveler who had arrived at her destination and, like so many travelers in the world, didn’t know what to do next.
“Okay. I guess you guys don’t need my help. I guess I’ll go find my friends.”
“Do you have a cell? I can give you my number,” I offered to her.
“No, I don’t have one.” We knew that this was probably going to be the last time that Nikki and I ever saw that girl and the last time that she would ever see us. For a few hours our lives were intertwined and we were best friends. Now we were parted, never again to cross paths, the strange intersections on the road. That thought went through my head as I saw the girl, in her white hippie blouse and loose pants and backpack, disappear into the fields. Nikki and I went back to checking and rechecking if we needed anything else, and stood there waiting for Adam to call. His cell was almost dead and so he had his phone off unless he was calling us. When he finally did he told us to start walking towards the main stage.

Continued in Backwoods Depravity pt. 2: From Mud to Drugs - Our First Day in Bonnaroo

Descent into the magical land (Outback Pt. 5)

I love reading my journals from this time, when the festival had actually started, and the feelings began to flow, because they are disjointed, distracted, or just plain missing. Sometimes when you are traveling, and really get yourself into something, you don't even have time to take a breath, to stop your inertia to reflect on it. It is an indivisible creation, a muon, or a string, or whatever the smallest particle is these days. Or maybe it is an atom, or a molecule, a fusing of disparate parts, but all swirling and vibrating and linking to form a greater energy than existed before. Harmonious disorder, quantum humanity.
As Taku and I traced a path toward the lights and sound, we began passing the fringe elements of the event, both animal and mineral. As at all festivals, there is no place that is not considered a dancefloor, so we snuck past moving bodies long before we could see the stage. We noticed the village area to our right, but decided to bypass the entry to reach the mainstage. We walked with wonder, stepping lightly, and scanning the scene as we proceeded with wide eyes and crazy grins.
"Ina!"
"Oru!"
"Haahahahhah, Taku, this is crazy. Sounds so good!" We were nearing the stages, and the bass was now really reaching our core. Soon it would be hard to communicate with anyone without yelling. WE somehow were smart enough to put a little bit of T.P. in our ears, which was eventually lost to the dusty dancefloor. Strange stretched cloth banners with holes in them glowed ultraviolet white, marking the fringes of the center stage. We were approaching from the extreme left of the stage, so couldn't see much, but occasionally a green laser would pierce through the early night and strike us in the chest, or squiggle on a space-butterfly frolicking with her friends nearby. The sound systems at these things, and the skill level of the musicians, are both overwhelming. Bass pulses could come out as wahing thump, and the synthetic sounds that accompany the downbeat will take you on little adventures in your head. We both began to walk-dance now, feeling fucking good, and now entering a fabulous parallel dimension called a fucking Eclipse Festival.
By random good fortune, we ran into the Brasiliernos on the edge of the main dancefloor. They were under the radiant rainbow lights, and under the anenome light spire that would twist to the beat, shaking its hundreds of glowing plastic arms, and under what must have been a clear, starry night, shining down on us all. We hugged and patted and smiled at each other, all linked hand to shoulder in a little drug-dance huddle for a while. Someone had already purchased one of those electricity balls that shoot lightning at your fingers when you touch them and of course its purple electric fingers, and its warmth, were popular with all.
It turned out that the BRA crew had done some acid, and were doing all right, but Adrianna was feeling a little ill, a little overwhelmed. Fabricio and Andre already seemed have their carinas, so I couldn't help but console her a bit. It seemed no odd thing to give her a neck and back rub, even as I bobbed side to side in my big shorts. We had a little mellow dance circle going when, low and behold, Sonya and Liam roll up, Sonja with her magenta-streaked dew and easy countenance, and skinny, grinning Liam, with his inconsistent chin stubble as sporadic and Taku's, with that Limey accent and deadpan hilarity.
"Hey!!" WE all shouted, but most of our communication was done via stomping and waving to the rhythm. From our spot we could see the DJ's now, bobbing away with one hand holding a headphone to one ear, and the other twisting dials and adjusting his fader, as well as the insane, computer-generated graphic displays taking place behind on the big screen.

I explained to S and L that Taku and I had ingested some inebriants, and they could too if they wanted. Neither had ever experimented before, but we decided a half each would be a good start to things. In a gloriously fun little ritual, we busted the sample in two, and they each threw back there heads and swallowed some precious H2O. We all grinned again.

Taku ended up finding one of his fire-dancing homeboys, and was headed to the firedancing area on the other side of the crowd. We planned to meet up, hugged, and off he went, smiling and jabbering excitedly in Japanese. Feeling the vibration more and more, letting the music thump into my cerebelum, I gazed around at this epic scene. It seemed we'd forgotton to pack our costume, but the other half of the dancing crowd had not, and sported wings, facepaint, scarves (or was it just in my head), if not crazy pants, moon shoes, and sparklers. It all swirled into the euphoric daze that is a trance festival on good shit, and I found myself shoeless, dancing with Adrianna. We hadn't spoken much, but there are stats on how much words really communicate anyway. Quite simply, we were destined to be each others' companions for these few short days in the desert. Our simple, in-sync jibs and jabs and stomps turned into a closer, private vibration. First our cheeks touched, sending those first shocks to the nervous system, the new skin of the opposite sex. We danced that way for a while before moving away. Everyone was in thier own little worlds, but still part of our little solar system among the spinning galaxy of people. I devolved into a bare-chested, barefoot, long-haired tribesman as the dancing warmed us all up. The whole crew seemed to also see that Adrianna and I would be a pair for this escape from reality-I was probably the last to know it; it felt so good just touching skin, I wasn't even thinking of the inevitable next steps. Slowly, our cheek dances began to be soft face skin mini-orgies, but slow, classy ones. When we finally slipped far enough back for our lips to touch, our minds turned momentarily inside out, and we just absorbed the whole moment for a bit, and the short day that we'd all had to bond, and what led us to this beacon of life in a desolate land. We pulled apart like surfacing from cool, clean water.
"It's amazing, no?" Adrianna said.
"It's amazing. Wow." We didn't have to talk too much, it was too loud, and we were already harmony, as we shared a Marlboro Menthol, and wavered from side to side to the rythem.

The night did not so much progress, as it evolved, being written in valiant fashion by our little bus and our connectivity. We moved our crew a little closer to the center, and it was there that the backbeat took a major switch, as a new DJ stepped in. This new groove had some laser to it, some bleeping, muted, digital loop that started out calm, and built. As in most electronic music, and especially new Trance, the beat, builds, and then drops, not down, but like a bomb, exploding in your eardrums and head, and squeezing out your most expresive moves and emotion. The crowd cheered our musical Dungeon Master as he gave everyone thier fix, telling our life with his beats. As the scene peaked, another familiar, and funny face appeared out of the crowd. It was Chick from OZ and he was wearing bug glasses and some sort of vest, and smiling at me. Shit, we were all smiling, or making The Blue Steel face as we twisted our wrists to the electro beats.
"Willie! Hey mate, how you goin?" Chick inquired, amused at my enthusiasm, and Adrianna on my arm.
"Great man, how are you." I, of course, gave him a hug.
"Stick out your tongue." Chick shouted.
"Wha?"
"Stick out your tongue!"
I did, and the young laddy opened a small metal vile, and placed a tiny square of paper on my tongue. A gift, from my new friend, that he deemed me ready to recieve.
"Holy shit man. I'll see you later? Whhooooooooo!" I put my hands up and jumped from foot to foot, my bare feet flattening the earth along with the hundreds around me. I turned back to Adrianna, took a few delicious drags of the menthol cigarette, and pressed my lips up against hers, sweet lordy, and we stood there, eyes closed, cigarette out to the side, swirling in the ethereal cosmic soup under the light of our good fortune.

In the thick of it. (Outback PT. 6)  Part. 4

Serendipity and the Beginning of the Show. (Outback part 4)

With multi-colored bills tucked in our fanny packs, and a box of groceries, our arrival back at the campsite was festive, if not dusty. After tucking our goodies into the tiny, respective corners of our tent, we headed out into the sun. I wore some random 40 inch waist board shorts, a white Tui Beer shirt, some sick grey Reef’s, and a yellow scarf to help keep the dust out my mouth. Some of our Brasilian brethren were at the tent circle, and we shared tokes with Fabricio, Adrianna, Layla, Donny, and (Kenny), who was from NZ, but was heading to live in China and work in his uncle’s arbotoir. That explained his goat toenail ankle Maraka. I chatted with Adrianna some more and bonded with the Brazil boys. Chick stopped in for a toke too, and after a bit, they meandered up and over the embankment toward the show. The first dj was just starting a set and the electro-goodness was beginning to saturate the red earth. Tak and I said goodbye to crew as we had something more important on our minds: drugs. It was approaching 4pm, we’d missed the opening ceremony a few hours earlier, but the first night was soon to be upon us, and we needed to get our heads right. The Herb put us in the right mindset for an unmapped, random, calling out to strangers acid/ecstacy mission, so we set off to the west. WE passed the first towering waterbarrel, and soon were inside the network of tents, campers, cars, caravans, and tarps-turned-into-hovels with hippies hovering inside.

So, yeah, we really walked around and calmly and methodically inquired, ”Drugs? Drugs? Anyone got some drugs.” The funny thing about festivals, is not one person gave us a look of ire. On the contrary, people nodded or pointed us in the right direction, and after engaging many dreaded, mostly international (I met two Americans the whole festival) desert-dwelling freaks, we came to the freakiest of all. We finally found a camper that we’d been refered to, and the door was open. A good many of the sites were vacant as the show was on, but the two in our little caravan were having thier own show.
”Hello?” We inquired.
”Fucking hell, what’s going on here anyway,” The dude shouted in a friendly but loud Ausie Accent to no one in particular.
”Hey mate, sorry to bother you? Have you got any E’s” The dude sat up from the bench seat and looked at me with an unsteady gaze.
”Wha? Oh, hey. Honey, these people want some drugs.”
”Oh shit, well I think their in your pocket.”
”No. What. Bugga. Here they are. How many you wont?” He pullet out a little aspirin bottle and somehow managed to put 4 pills in a plastic bag, and pass it to me.
”If you guys want any acid, I think theres some down the way with some liquid. Fucking great stuff.” Homeboy squinted with emphasis as he described the goods.
”Thank you so much mate, have a fucking good time!” The two were probably from Melbourne, as were most of the most at-home, almost local, crowd; Sydney was just a big ass city two days drive away. This was Northern Territory, not New South Wales.
They must have been lit of at least 2-3 different psychotropic, or otherwise inebriating, substances, but somehow found a way to sell me four tabs for $100 bucks OZ. Not a bad deal, from what I hear. This was at least enough to get us throught the first two days, and definitely sufficient for the night. We took our goods, feeling like prospectors whod struck gold, and carved our way back through the tent village, it was a little past five, sun was setting soon, and it was time to prefunk.
My experienced with ’hard’ drugs is fairly limited, but I put on my thiz face one time back in college when I was dating this raver chick, must have been ’99, and fucking hell it was a damn good time. Only in the depths or a roll do you, with lights pulsing like some sort of ethereal squid, and bass providing cadence for your heart, do you find pure extacy in being the meat a hug sandwich with a hot girlfriend and her bi-friend as bread. But, it is one of those transcendent experiences that has fused itself into my neuroprocessors, a permanently link created by chemical processes both organic and synthetic, but neverless real. I held the same freedom tablets in my right board-short pocket, and dependent on drugs as it may seem in retrospect, felt complete.
For those of you young, imagine, and those of you old, remember 22, and if you are able, your first year overseas-your hair is to your shoulders, only 1 in 10 friends is a Yank, your blood is running hot with the sun, you’ve found yourself sharing a tent with a grinning Japanese fire-dancer who shares your penchant for drug-induced adventure as well as your five-day shadow, and all you have to wear is a yellow scarf, a cheap grass sun hat, orange and white shades and shorts, and some sturdy Grey Reef sandals-not to mention the music has just started, the sun is setting, and you’ve got enough drugs to get ripped for a half day. Good fucking times.
Tak and I returned to the Tent to form a ceremonial ground for our pre-funk. With fading sunlight, he sparked the important things in a tent in the desert: incense, herbs, and a candle. With our bottles of water we ate the blue pill (or is it the red, you fucking Matrix nerds) and were on our way to being on our way. It didn’t take but one spliff, and some minor tent organizing, for us to start chatting.
”Do you respec, yo fatha?” Taku inquired, inquisitively, a serious look upon his countenance,” I thought for a moment, and then replied.
”Yes, I do, my father is a good man, I love him.”
”Hmmmmmm,” Taku pondered my response.
”Yeah, what about you? You respect your Father?”
”No, he did not run my grandfathers company well. He was greedy.”
”Hmmm.” I pondered.
”You will remember me? Can visit me in Japan” He smiled, stoney-eyed, and unusually happy.
”I will totlaly visit you. I wanna go to Japan. Gimme a couple years, and I will visit.”
”Hmmmm. Hi!”
The conversation flowed on for a bit, and we lost track of time. Somehow we made up a call response, which may mean something in Japanese, but I don’t know what. It went: ”Ina!” ”Oru.” just like marco polo, but way more fun. After a final preperatory spliffy, we exited the silvery two-man, into the warm dusk of the first night of The Outback Eclipse Festival. As our chemical compositions changed, we hooted and hollered at the night. Taku carried his firesword and some miscilanie in his backpack, and I carried a water bottle in my board shorts. We eyed the sky, and then patted each other on the back in enthusiasm.
”It’s OK to hug?” Taku asked.
I looked at him for a second, fully pumped to climb the hill seperating us from the party ground, and smiled.
”Of course you can Hug.” I grabbed the vertically challenged guy and gave him a bear hug.
”Face can touch?” He said in a muffled voice.
”Yeah bro, your my bro.” I pressed my temple against his and gave him another squeeze of love. It is amazing how satisfying simple physical contact can be whether or not your rolling, or just huggin the loved ones. Here we were, two lone travelers drawn together by fate, and ready embark on an adventure worthy of a short story, if only in the book of our souls. We clambered up the banks of the burm like the apes in 2001: A Space Odyssy, kicking up red dust on our way. Within moments, it appeared before us, like an glorius alien visitation, a colony of psychadelic art pulsating in light and sound, an organic, vegan oyster of international love and dancing.
”Hoooooooo!” our voices gained pitch with excitement at the sight of such a glorious playground.
”Ina?” I inquired, barely containing my jubilation.
”Oru.” Taku replied without looking over. We made one last crazy face at each other and started down the hill toward the mainstage, and the beginning of the show.

Part 3.  Descent into the magical land (Outback Pt. 5)

LOTS TO LOVE IN LAKE PLACID (Upstate NY Part 3)

Continued from Brews and Clues

Lake Placid is paradise. If you can handle long periods of extremely cold weather you can live there and be in heaven all year round. It is a mini Lake Tahoe with no gambling for all you wild westerners. I went there for delicious craft beer, legendary sports history and some great live music. Two of my favorite brewery-restaurant combos, the 1932-1980 Olympic Museum, and the Snoe.down music festival were all on the books on that sunny day late in the thick of March Madness.

12:27 After a beautiful drive I found myself entering the quaint town and headed straight to Lake Placid Pub and Brewery for a beer sampler and some eats. It was a heady place full of interesting locals and the diverse festival crowd. I had six excellent beers placed in a unique wooden tray and a delicious meal. The standouts were the Ubu Ale, their deep garnet red, English Strong Ale named after a a trusty hound, and the Frostbite Ale, a tribute to West Coast-style American Pale Ales with a great scent and aftertaste. Their offerings were all fresh, quality brews with pronounced scents and top tier taste. The rest I ranked in this order: the deep copper 46'er Pale Ale, the smooth Sunrise Stout, the crispy golden Moose Island Ale and the roasty Imperial Stout. Check the website for info on their regionally popular beers.

01:39 I asked for a tour and one of the brewing assistants was glad to show me around. In a small brewing space they manage to make magic. I checked out some live yeast and got some great shots of their equipment. The guy was so good I tried to tip him but he wouldn't take it so I thanked him sincerely and headed to the Olympic Complex.

03:11 The main hockey complex, called the Lake Placid Field House, was my next stop. I got a thorough look at the two rinks 195 196 and ventured back into the showers and locker rooms to get the Olympic athlete's full insider experience. Then I was off to the Lake Placid Winter Olympic Museum where I would learn all about the 1932 and 1980 Olympics. I left full of knowledge and appreciation considering I'm the opposite of a winter guy and know very little about anything that involves heavy clothing.

04:02 Great Adirondack Brewing Company was on my way back to the lodge and I could not wait until the next day (when I planned to tour the facility) to sample their suds. So I popped in and scheduled a tour for the morning on the way to the bar. There I found myself extremely under-dressed. It was a rarity, a fine-dining restaurant that had their own beer brewed on premises! I immediately noticed and enjoyed the classy Adirondack motif and the attentive professionalism of the staff. I was served well by a guy who had probably been bar tending for twenty years. I started with the sampler, lavishly presented in a hand carved wood carrier that trumped the one from Lake Placid Brewing. Check-plus honors went to the smooth-drinking Haystack Blonde Ale (5%), the perfectly-hopped John Brown Pale Ale (6.4%), the mildly-sweet Skyward Stout (5%), and aromatic 2006 Cloudsplitter Barley wine (9.5%). The check ranking went to the overly-sweet Adirondack Abbey Ale (7.1%) and over-hopped Adirondack Gold Cream Ale (5.5%). My least favorite was the Ausable Wulff Red Ale (5.6%) because I found it too malty and too sweet. I ate a delicious burger served on an English muffin with crisp, savory fries and headed back to the lodge for some rest and March Madness analysis on the tube. 

www.adirondackbrewing.com   

07:00  I arrived at the venue, the setting of the USA ice hockey team's stunning miracle victory over the Russians in the 1980 Olympics, and was just in time for the Brazilian Girls. They are an original and interesting band worth checking out live at any festival that they play. They played well but their sets always sound the same to me. The lead singer was very captivating as always but I eagerly awaited the Disco Biscuits. The Bisco set was top-notch and full of energy but one set wasn't enough. I needed more of the electronic untz that they effortlessly lace into the bass-heavy boots and bits. If you are near somebody say "boots and bits and" over and over while they repeat "untz" and you will know what I'm talking about. They frequently play rave-party music that they create as a live jam band which blows me away every time and leaves me wanting more. Thats what's so frustrating about seeing your band at a festival. Unless they headline you are left unfulfilled after the lone set. Lucky for me, the headliner of this fest was moe., a band who has played enough festivals to know this. To the surprise of everyone, they brought Bisco back out in the middle of one of their jams. The Biscuits came on stage one by one and each slowly took over their respected instrument. Once they were all up there on un-familiar instruments they dropped into Cyclone and instantly rocked the arena! I stayed until the end and was rewarded with the epic song called Plane Crash at the end of the encore to send me home happy.

                        

?? ??  The walk back to the lodge in the snow was refreshing but all i could think about was eating the deli meats waiting patiently on my open windowsill.  I was in an increadibly comfortable and well furnished room but it lacked a fridge so I had to leave my munchies in mother nature's hands. Once my sandwich was devoured I slid into my welcoming Tempur pedic bed, turned off ESPN News, and passed out

God Bless Upstate New York - stay tuned for the next voyage through the great upstate in The Adriondacks are Gorgeous

BREWS AND CLUES (Upstate NY Part 2)

(Continued from Who Knew there was so Much to do in Upstate New York)

The F.X. Matt Brewing Company has stood the test of time. It opened way back in 1888 and is still going strong. Through all these years they have produced almost every variety of beer and even produced sodas during prohibition to stay open. I had to see the place so I got there in the afternoon for an organized tour. As I went through the gate I noticed the Saranac summer stage and imagined that a concert at a brewery was the coolest possible thing that there ever is to do in Utica NY.

 

The brewery facility was top notch in every way. It was very clean and organized everywhere we were taken and the tour brought us to most corners of the cavernous building. Elevators here, stairs there, and memorabilia everywhere else. It was a very well scripted tour but the problem was the guide. She was a very nice, intellegent girl but my problem was that she was in still in college and knew less about beer than me. I want an expert that can teach me something I didn't know already that wasn't read off a piece of paper. It's just not the same as having a brewer or someone who has worked there for decades. Thankfully, was over a century of history on the script and it was all interesting and/or funny. I was a big fan of the "confidence" chair as I believed it was called. This chair, shown below, was for people to speak to each other in confidence so nobody else could hear them. The legions of steins were all from Germany, the home of the Matt family. There were dozens of different themed steins spanning the decades. Shultz and Dooley are the main characters and have been very popular in this chilly city for ages. I got to see a jam on the assembly

line fixed in front of my eyes and I suggest you check out this video.MOV99 The tasting room was the gold at the end of the rainbow. I had some great brews but they didn't have any that I hadn't had before so I have no notes for you folks. I just did some casual drinking before a night at the theatre.

 

The Stanley theater is a premiere showplace and movie palace designed in 1928 by a famous theater architect named Thomas Lamb. It was built with 2,945 seats and was designed with a stunning Mexican Baroque mix of styles throughout. The lavish gold leaves accompanied by lions, Indian faces and cherubs were all in excellent condition and exuded opulence. I had to see this landmark of Utica so there I was at a murder mystery. For twenty-five bucks I got a ticket, succulent hors d'oeuvres and my first drink free. The mystery put us in groups and we got to walk through every room of the theater as each character told their stories. Through the labyrinths of hallways under the theatre were posters of all the big shows that came through there over the years. Those walls had seen it all and I was sure had interesting stories to tell. The interactive show I was witnessing was chock full of thirty-six characters all equipped with back stories. It was great stuff and seemed to really bring the local theatre community together.

I found these chilling paintings in a room upstairs...

(Next stop to be continued in Lots to Love in Lake Placid, New York