The Barryfest Chronicles

As the final notes of “The Curtain With” vanished into the cool Vermont air on August 15, 2004, I was exhausted, dehydrated and completely heatered-out (Coventry was the culmination of many things, not least of which being the most nicotine drenched six months of my life).  But more than all of that, I was confused.  A month-long hallucinogen binge and five straight days without a good night’s sleep didn’t do much in the way of helping me process the monumental events unfolding around me, but even if I was perfectly straight as Phish was supposedly drawing their career to a close, I doubt I would been any more clear-headed as I made my way back to the damp campsite I had called home for the weekend.

I was at a loss.  Even after following them around for the entire summer and amassing a gratuitously large collection of live recordings from their first 25 years, I only had a few years of legitimate fandom under my belt, making me a relative novice in the whole Phish game.  Plus, I got into the band during college – when free time was a renewable resource, substance abuse had no appreciable consequences, and the world was an altogether simpler place – and to be honest, I was already wondering about Phish’s long term standing in my life now that I was tentatively inching my way into the real world.

So suffice it to say, I didn’t know my dick from my balls as I headed to the Manchester, NH airport covered to mid-calf in caked-on mud and probably smelling like an ashtray that just ran a marathon. Then without ever really digesting what was going on and/or coming to a conclusion about how it all made me feel, I moved on with my life.  And the longer I went without queuing up a show, the easier it become to explain away my reverent devotion as something as innocuous as youthful indiscretion or as insignificant as a fluke.

I really did a number on myself in the fours years since Coventry, considering news that the band was getting back together could barely get a rise out of me.  I put in for the ticket lottery like the rest of the citizens of the world, but I did it with the caveat that if my number failed to come up, I would strongly consider letting the dream die completely.  That’s right, friends.  I was willing to let a random pre-sale drawing cast the deciding ballot on whether or not I was going to allow myself to enjoy the musical styling of Phish in the future.

And I’m embarrassed to say it, but I almost had myself feeling relieved that I got passed over.  I mean, imagine how impractical and inconvenient it would be to travel around the country catching as much of the summer tour as possible now that I have a job and other adult responsibilities.  And I haven’t earnestly listened to the band in ages, so maybe I don’t even like their music anymore.  And shit, after taking so much time off, who knows if they will even be as good as they once were.  Fuck it, right?  Maybe it is best that I leave Phish on the trash-heap of passing fancies that I go through life claiming to have outgrown.

This, of course, begs the question: When did I become such a fucking ninny?  It only took one listen to this past weekend’s reunion shows to realize I have been pulling the wool over my own eyes and I’ll be goddamned if I let the bullshit charade go on any longer.  Of all the reasons I could conjure for why I was done with Phish, not a single one of them even approaches “good.”  It may have taken me a while, but I’ve finally got it figured out…  just in time for the summer tour.

I’ve had a dog in the fight for four of the last six Super Bowls.  I know there are scores of people out there that would give any number of appendages or offspring to see their favorite NFL team play in a Super Bowl let alone have the luxury of a semi-legitimate reason to root for teams from both Chicago and Boston, but I want to assure you it is not all hand-pounds and reacharounds.

At the risk of sounding like a total ingrate, I think it is worth pointing out that there are actually a few negatives of having more than a passing interest in the outcome of The Big Game:

You have to sweat the small stuff. Anytime that any of my favorite teams in any major sport are involved in a game of any sort or significance, I spend most of the day worrying about how crowded the bar is going to be, or how big of a television my friend has, or whether or not I bought enough booze, etc.  I am growing increasingly neurotic as I get older, so if you combine that nervous energy with any doubts about the actual outcome of the game in question, I am pretty much whipped by the time live coverage starts.

This year, I spent Sunday evening alternately squished on an uncomfortable couch, perched on an armrest and leaning against a doorjamb.  For some reason the game was tuned to the standard-definition feed for the entire first quarter, and even after that problem was rectified, my view was partially obstructed as a result of my bad posture and one of my friend’s huge noggin.  Additionally, there was no room in the refrigerator for the 12-pack of High Life I brought so by about 7:30 I was drinking tepid beer.  But you know what?  I couldn’t care less.

Regardless of the outcome, Monday morning is going to suck. Super Bowl XXXIX fell exactly on my 21st birthday so my friends were gracious enough to organize an enormous viewing party/birthday celebration ostensibly somewhat on my behalf.  Dozens of my closest acquaintances filed in to a cozy off campus apartment and took part in cold beer, Buffalo Joe’s, and a football shaped birthday cake.

I am sure I would have really enjoyed the shindig if I wasn’t boxing out the keg in the corner of the room with the only other Patriots fan in attendance, nervously pounding chicken wings, Camel Lights and pitchers of keg draft at a superhuman clip because I was too locked into the game to enter into any meaningful interpersonal interactions but needed to do something with my piehole to cut the tension.

By the start of the third quarter I was nearly blacked out and had no voice after going apeshit during Paul McCartney’s rendition of “Hey Jude” and, after the game had ending with the Patriots on top, I proceeded to stretch my drunk into the wee hours of the morning celebrating many happy returns.  Even through the sheen of a Super Bowl victory, thought, the heartburn and hangover made Monday morning pretty hard to endure.

I spent the first few hours of last year’s Super Bowl XLII in a similar way.  Although I was in a bar in New Orleans as opposed to an apartment in Evanston and I was pounding Abita Amber instead of Miller Light, all the important details are the same:  the other Patriot fans and I were glued to the set, stuffing our faces with greasy food, soaking ourselves in booze and chain smoking heaters.  When it was all said and done, I still drank until the wee hours of the morning, but this time it was in commiseration, not celebration.  Suffice it to say, Monday morning was rough.

This year I cut myself off before the fourth quarter and made it back home in time for the outrageous hour-long episode of The Office, which I watched perfectly buzzed and from the comfort of my bed.  I still felt like shit on Monday morning, but then again, I always feel like shit on Monday morning.

Gambling loses all its fun. Between pool squares, strip tabs, mulit-spot props and side bets, Super Bowl Sunday is best day for gambling ever.  It is kind of a shame to have such a huge focus on the final score that you are are forced to ignore the outcomes of the dozens of other wagers you may have placed, ranging from the length of the national anthem performance to how the NFC teams’s score compares to LeBron James’ point total from that afternoon’s NBA action.  I mean, how much consolation is hitting the halftime square if your hometown team is on the receiving end of a shellacking?  And what good is winning $100 on the coin toss if you end the night with a tally in the loss column?

As of late, my proclivity towards gambling has been inching closer and closer to “degenerate” territory, so I was pretty excited by the prospect of indiscriminately laying money on any number of lines without even a second thought about how may illicit activities may interfere with the cosmos or tip the karmic scales.

I think that you can tell a lot about a city by the way it rings in the New Year.  Minneapolis, for example, is a fun enough time but not really anything to write home about.  Chicago, on the other hand, offers plenty to do but your options can be limited by the bitter cold winters and spotty public transportation system.  And then there is New York, which is more or less a crowded, expensive theme park.

While especially apparent on the last day of the year, I think the statements above hold true for their respective cities at all times.  So, after getting intimately familiar with New Orleans over the past 12 months, I cut my holiday family time short to make sure I could test my “New Year’s Eve as a microcosm” theory down in the Big Easy.

Now, New Year’s Eve is nothing if it is not another excuse for revelry.  And when it comes to revelry, if you give New Orleans an inch, in one magnificent swoop she will take a mile, your favorite watch and every clean pair of tube socks you’ve got in your top drawer.  Luckily, she will return them before you know they are even gone.  New Orleans is sneaky like that. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve always believed that if you make a habit of putting yourself in unusual situations, you can’t really get that upset when shit starts to get weird. And if you’re also prone to tipping the karmic scales with such flights of fancy as gratuitous alcohol consumption, light prescription drug abuse and unconventional party itineraries, you’re likely to find yourself on the business end of weird more often than not. With this in mind, I guess you could say I got exactly what I deserved when I decided to head into the French Quarter on a Monday evening last week.

Given the fact it was so early in the week, it didn’t surprise me when I encountered far fewer barkers in the middle of the street holding up signs advertising the drink specials or lack of cover featured at the trashy saloons that line the front of Bourbon Street than I was used to.  But even in this relatively serene setting, hip hop was still pulsing out of a fair share of dance clubs that were most certainly open for business.

I’ve heard “Lollipop” at least 350 times in the last year, but the song takes on a bizarrely fascinating and frightening sheen when it is accompanied by a tubby waitress sporting coke-bottle glasses and visible c-section scars gyrating on top of a bar in a haunting manner that is at once repulsive and mesmerizing.  That was the scene just beyond the threshold of a sparsely populated bar known as The Old Opera House, and even though I should be immune to the allure of Tha Carter III by now, the morbidly intriguing nature of what I was looking at gave me pause. Read the rest of this entry »

Dear Kanye,

I spent Saturday night at my first holiday party of the season, so I unfortunately was not able to watch the original airing of the most recent Saturday Night Live, in which you were featured as the evening’s musical guest.  No worry, though, as I have been DVRing that shit since I first equipped my audio/visual set up with DVR technology almost two and a half years ago in my apartment back in Minneapolis.

I’ve always been a huge SNL apologist, keeping faith in the show even through the doldrums of the turn of the century with all it’s Jimmy Fallon-tainted misery.  Even then, when the majority of each broadcast featured Horatio Sanz in a variety of ill-fitting get-ups trying in vain not to break character and laugh while delivering terribly written lines, I found it amusing enough to keep watching whenever the mood struck and my schedule cooperated. Read the rest of this entry »

I used to subscribe to a pretty antiquated school of thought when it came to the common practice of untagging yourself in pictures that show up on Facebook.  If you got caught from an unflattering angle or in one of those drunken “one big eye, one small eye” smiles that very few of us can pull off, I was cool with knocking yourself out of the caption.  I mean, no one should have to deal with the pitfalls of amateur photography.  But I was patently against people untagging their mug solely because the picture showed them engaged in behavior that they, under sober examination the next morning, found embarrassing or incriminating.

Untag all you want, I reasoned, but that shit still happened.  Just because there is no longer a blue box around your head in the shot of you cavorting with a group of ladies of ill repute – one hand holding a 32 oz plastic cup that says “Big Ass Beers,” the other throwing up “the shocker” – doesn’t erase that episode from the annals of history.  And just because there are no pictures of you smoking heaters directly above a link to your full profile doesn’t change the fact that your efforts to cut back on tobacco after college were flushed down the shitter once you got to the international waters of New Orleans.  You can hide your flaws and missteps from all your friends and networks, but you can never hide them from yourself. Read the rest of this entry »

You can count on the holiday season for many things, most of them welcome traditions that involve seeing friends and family and eating like one of Method Man’s torture victims.  But in this day and age, the last few months of the year wouldn’t be complete without a few people you may only be auxiliarly acquainted with wishing you well via a text message that was very likely sent to dozens, if not hundreds, of other people.

Don’t get me wrong folks, I sincerely appreciate you taking the time to tap some generic season’s greeting into your cell phone and send it to every number you have stored in your address book.  I mean, if you are still banging that out on a 10-key, you could have spent 15, hell, 20 seconds assembling such moving prose and disseminating it to anyone you have made contact with since you first got wireless service.

Of course, with one of those newfangled smart phones that most people are carrying around these days, messages like these practically write themselves.  Couple that with the growing popularity of all-inclusive service plans that usually include unlimited text messaging, and the barrier to entry on this type of communication is at an all time low.  So, while more common around major holidays and playoff victories by your hometown team, I am suspicious that mass text messages are becoming more and more prevalent. Read the rest of this entry »

Dear Sarah,

It wasn’t too long ago I declared war on you and the types of people that subscribe to your irritating brand of anti-intellectual populism.  See, after your reprehensible campaign antics spiked the enthusiasm already cursing through my veins with a toxic dose of vitriol, I went from simply supporting Barack Obama and his message of change to promising not to let any misinformed comment made by your uneducated, bigoted, racist followers go unchecked, regardless of the context or situation.  I was angry, and I was letting everyone know it.

But not only was I locking political horns with every Republican I could find, I also started flying off the handle in unrelated situations.  I was yelling at my neighbors when they asked me to turn down the Chromeo, and shattering empty High Life bottles on the sidewalk outside of Pat Fannie’s because they don’t allow indoor heaters.  You got me riled up, Sarah.  And my aggression was unfortunately extending beyond mere political discourse.

This type of militant liberalism and general douchebaggery was exhausting, for sure.  But ever since that Tuesday night when staffers banned you from the podium as John McCain was graciously conceding defeat in the presidential election, my blood has calmed. Read the rest of this entry »

“That was the sweetest, but also the saltiest, victory ever.” -Kenny

Another season of RW/RR Challenge is in the record books, and I don’t know about you, but I have this bizarre urge to quit smoking and join the Army.  And although I find the “Sunny Side of truth” and “Army Strong” ads equally asinine, I have to admit that the media buyers vying for MTV airtime have got the viewing demographic at least half right.  But how effective can even a well placed anti-smoking campaign really be when, right after the corny PSAs air, they cut back to a bunch of hip young derelicts looking cool as they grill heaters while getting shitfaced on a beach?

And I have to think that the mere presence of Dan on this challenge has the bean counters in the US Army marketing department wincing each time the camera shifts to him during an episode.  All the money they are spending to underwrite the production of the show and buy ad time during the commercial breaks can’t change the fact that the one member of the cast who is a actual veteran of the Armed Forces has shown himself to be nothing more than an alcoholic with a notable track record of violent mood swings and piss-poor performance when he gets the chance to win a key.  I sincerely appreciate his valiant service in the defense of our country, but I haven’t quite figured out what “core Army characteristic” is exemplified by getting into an absurd argument and then passing out in a drunken stupor every night for a solid month. Read the rest of this entry »

“It’s gonna take that heart to sail that boat” – Robin

I have been following The Real World franchise since it’s grainy, poorly lit inception over 16 years ago.  And while I have been pretty adamant about the recent decline of civilization in the last few Real World houses, I realized last night that I have been overlooking a very important fact that has undoubtedly bended my perception over the years.  I’ve grown up.

See, I still consider The Real World: Seattle the undisputed high water mark of MTV programming.  My memories of the show are filled with authentic interactions between dynamic people in real-life circumstances.  There is no doubt that these memories may be entirely accurate.  An equally likely scenario, though, is that at the time the series aired I was a 14 year dork who didn’t even know what “authentic interactions,” “dynamic people,” and “real-life circumstances” actually were. Read the rest of this entry »

September is half in the bag and the heat and humidity down here are still turning my brain to mush on a daily basis.  I’ve been told that there is an end in sight, but I sure as shit haven’t caught a glimpse of it.  I will never act like I am going to miss the Chicago winters – the way they arrive out of nowhere with bone-chilling cold and don’t let up until the torrential rains of spring blow through – but I do feel another dose of seasonal affective disorder creeping into my UV-damaged, sweat-soaked psyche.

I think New Orleans is slowly making me insane.  Thankfully, this is not the type of “insane” that is caused by a bad breakup and then fueled with a steady diet of prescription pills and whippets.  No, no, no.  The “insane” I am feeling now is a good thing; maybe the best of things.  It is a liberating and enlightening psychosis that makes the Charles Shaw taste sweeter and the drunken heaters seem more satisfying.

Unlike up north, where even in the dog days of summer a pleasant cool breeze tips you off that day is turning into night and, eventually, that summer is fading into fall, the shitbird weather down here is in dire need of a desk calendar and a fucking Flick-Flack. Read the rest of this entry »