Raging towards Summer
OK, it’s officially GO! time.
Papers to write, papers to grade, finals to administer, and amidst all that, the first leg of Phish’s summer tour looms large on the horizon. Unfortunately for me, it’s difficult to get too excited about it all right now. Visually, I’ve got my Bethel tickets dangling in front of me like a carrot in front of rabbits, encouraging them to chase. Of course, all I can think about right now is my end of semester work.
In many ways, this has been the way it is for me with recent Phish shows. I have so much going on that my brain isn’t able to really process what I’m about to do sometimes until the day of, or even, on the ride to the venue!! It’s crazy, especially because when I was in college, seeing the majority of my shows, I would get that “holy crap I’m seeing Phish/Disco Biscuits/Umphrey’s/whoever” feeling sometimes weeks in advance. And it would build and build and I’d be overly enthused, listening to old shows, getting everything lined up and ready, and getting into the full mindset of “tour is coming.” School work, life work, everything else would take a backseat.
Now it’s the opposite. Now all I can do is concentrate on school and work, and in the background, there’s a Phish show on the horizon. But I don’t have that feeling yet (“feel the feeling I forgot” reference here? hehe). The excitement, the anticipation of “holy crap, I’m seeing Phish soon” is heavily overpowered by the “holy crap, I’ve got way too much to get accomplished in the next week before Bethel” feeling. So I will put my head down and rock it out, write those papers, grade those papers (including one on Phish!), give those finals, and re-post those amazingly bad quotes to Facebook. And then, Friday morning as I’m driving to Bethel, after all my papers are turned in and everything is taken care of, it’ll suddenly dawn on me: “holy crap, I’m seeing Phish tonight!!!”
Smooth Atonal Sound 