listen to the music

There's an old "Treehouse of Horror" episode of The Simpsons where Homer is trying to fix his toaster and manages to turn it into a time machine. He goes back to the prehistoric era and accidentally kills a mosquito, irreparably altering the outcome of the future.

Right now I'm trying to convince myself that if time travel were possible, minute changes such as these could actually change life as we know it. Had I brought my camera to the concert last night, the whole evening may have turned out just okay as opposed to the UNBELIEVABLY SUPER AWESOME OMG ARE YOU KIDDING ME experience that it ended up being. The same goes for the presence of a certain blanket and the absence of my husband.

A couple of months ago, my friend Scotty and I decided to check out a concert featuring The Doobie Brothers and Chicago on Father's Day. He was a Doobie fan, I was a Chicago fan, and general admission was ten bucks. It was a no-brainer. I was fully prepared to spend several hours sitting in the grass in 100 degree heat surrounded by hundreds of old stoners trying to resurrect 1974 with large amounts of pot.

Now Scotty is a concert expert. He's been sneaking into concerts and um, "upgrading" his seats to much better ones since he was fourteen. I sat on the lawn and wrangled with my moral values regarding this while he scoped out the arena for open seats. The problem, however, was the monstrosity of a quilt that I had brought for us to sit on. Kind of hard to sneak into the seating area when you are hauling what is the equivalent of a twin sized mattress.

But, heh heh heh...

As I folded it up to make it as tight and inconspicuous as any joint those old hippies could roll, we were approached by some guy offering to give us some extra tickets he had. I could have cared less if they were good or not, I was just relieved that I wouldn't be worried about my everlasting soul while sitting in someone else's $35.00 seat.

Dude. They were for the SIXTH ROW!!!!!! No kidding! And the show was incredible. I screamed my head off, jumped around in the aisle like a fool, and sang as loudly as I could for the whole show. Part of me wishes that Jonathan wasn't out of town then, but like Homer learned the hard way, things might have turned out differently. Had I not brought that ridiculous quilt, we probably would have already snatched some marginally better seats only to get bounced back to the lawn 20 minutes into the show. And if Ticketmaster's website hadn't incorrectly stated, "NO CAMERAS OF ANY KIND", I would have brought mine and been walking around, snapping pictures of the goofy pothead guys and the dried-up old cougars that made up about 90% of the audience. And good ole Bob from Louisiana would have given those tickets to someone who would have appreciated them less.

*Sigh*

So I have to fill this post with long, grammatically incorrect sentences and not one picture. I'm actually really upset about seeing such a great show with my buddy and having only my memories as souvenirs, which tragically fade with time. But the whole day was a super cool adventure and an unforgettable experience with no photos is better than missing out on it entirely.

That episode of The Simpsons ends with Homer finding a seemingly normal alternate reality, only people eat like frogs, zipping out their tongues to get their food. He resigns and says that this is "close enough". I suppose I should quit kicking myself for ditching the camera and agree with Homer on this one.