If I substituted vanity for county, I’d be John Bunyan. Sorry.
My brother offered me the chance to see a country singer at the county fair - free tickets, something to do on Friday night. Well, I was kinda excited to go, to tell you the truth. And then my boss got around to putting the schedule together for the week on Wednesday, finally, and lo and behold, I am scheduled to close Friday night. I close maybe twice a month, and it just happened to be the night of the concert. I resigned myself to defeat, but apparently I was supposed to go.
Today is Friday, well, or we just left it ten minutes ago, so when I refer to today, it’s Friday. Today (see what I mean?) I was sitting on my couch, having just eaten lunch which was half of a large stuffed crust pizza with pineapple washed down with a bright and soft Blue Moon, when I received a telephone call. Mind you, this was 12:10, and I wasn’t scheduled to work until 5 (and I wasn’t going anywhere for a while, so having a beer at lunch didn’t seem like a problem). The telephone call was my boss. The person scheduled for 12 didn’t show, and he wanted me to come in.
Just to break away from the story for a second, I wanted to say I’m going to get another Blue Moon (I bought a 12-bottle pack and haven’t gotten through them as fast as would be good for their overall flavor, so think me a drunkard if you must, but I’m thirsty).
I walked into work at 12:20. That’s impressive since my drive is a total of three minutes, and at the time of the phone call I was watching the news in my underwear. Obviously I didn’t shower and shave before going into work, but you wouldn’t either if you worked fast food. You smell like toasty sandwiches no matter what you do, so you might as well get rid of the smell when you get off rather than try to avoid it going into the hornet’s nest.
Thanks to a seventeen-year-old’s inability to read and understand the schedule, or remember it, I had inadvertantly traded shifts with him, and I was in the clear to hit the Darryl Worely concert with my brother. Other interesting things happened at work, including my boss’s claim that he wouldn’t have a heart attack because he has “a small heart” (said by a 5′3″ 48-year-old, smokes unknown number of packs a day and hasn’t had a vacation in five years Vietnamese man), but I’m just jumping to the concert.
First, I donned my best country giddup. That being my grandpa’s Wrangler snap-botton short-sleeved shirt that is as hick as Texas. That was my ticket to looking country. Otherwise, I was in a pair of not-tight-enough jeans, Doc Martins, and a belt with no buckle. My brother had his boots on, but otherwise we could have been anywhere and not been very out of place (except maybe in third-world countries and… ninety-percent of the world). We had some Wendy’s prior to the concert. That will matter later. So we showed up only to have overzealous teens with traffic wands trying to tell us where and how to park, and followed the sound to the concert.
The last fair I attended was the Minnesota State Fair, which counts its attendence in the millions, daily attendence in the tens of thousands, and so the Clark County Fair was cute and somewhat dissappointing. They didn’t even have a place to buy a cowboy hat (which seems only natural to me, coming from Wyoming). My brother and I decided to wander the fair for a few minutes before going in to the concert. It was actually to find me a cowboy hat, but instead I just wanted to get a Henna tatoo. Didn’t happen either. We finally enetered the grandstands and took a seat a fair space from anyone, not far from the top of the bleachers.
And I remembered why I didn’t like concerts. It’s like when I try to eat tomatoes. It’s not that I can’t understand why they exist, or that I can enjoy them in another form (ketchup, spaghetti sauce, something for me to cut at work), it’s just not the taste that I want rolling across my tongue. Concerts are loud to the point of being obnoxious. Great for drowning out the people singing along which would obviously be more obnoxious. Not good for a person who cares greatly for music as more than hundreds of effects-driven decibles. And then I look around at the crowd. I realize this whole thing is far past mildly ridiculous. My brother and I laughed at three girls that were some of the few standing down near the front, swaying to the music, but unable to keep in rhythm with the songs, on the edge of being seductive with their natural hip movements, but too awkward to allow my shallow senses to enjoy the show. I mean, there was a cute girl in a cowboy hat, which means about the hottest thing that can exist on earth, but she left half-way through the show, and so all we had to look at was a man a hundred yards away on a stage (and even at that distance he looked uninteresting at best), and teenage girls in mildly slutty attire hanging on their boyfriends like French on the lips of Henry the V.
So with the bass notes vibrating the unhealthy dinner resting against my spleen and nothing to look forward to, I was fully aware of my disinclination towards the concert experience. It must be a sign of loneliness - going to concerts, that is. What else can you pull from it? I wasn’t unhappy that I went, just aware once again, like that bite into a tomato, that it’s just not for me. My brother didn’t seem very engaged either. We were both out of place when everybody started cheering about war references and saluting troops, ect. ect. I told my brother that I knew two of the best military people that could be, and because of that knowledge, I felt no safer about my country or the world at large. Oh well. So was the frighteningly conservative stronghold of the Clark County Fair concert. So I went home. Now I’m going to bed. Goodnight.