Your aging concert correspondent

I'm really tired and a little sore, but my hearing and voice have held up surprisingly well. Yes, I went to a concert last night. It was a good concert, and I will write many things about it, but today I am focusing on concert-going in general for this time of life.

I have been 42 for about 2 1/2 weeks now. It's not really that different from 41. It is quite a bit different from 14, and even 29.

I am tired. I went to bed around 1 and got up around 6:30. My feet and hips are sore, but less so than when I crawled into bed. My shoulders are better than usual; I think they got loosened up a little when I was waving my hands in the air like I just didn't care. (But I was waving them because I did care, so I'm not sure that expression makes sense.)

I wrote about getting knocked around at AFI. While I don't have any memory of the how the bruise that appeared on my left shin the next day got there, I do know how the right shin bruise got there a few weeks later. At Third Eye Blind there were some people in front of me who left early. I planned to move into their space, but those dividers for the bar are on raised boards, which I hadn't realized until I hit my foot on one and went down.

There were no injuries last night, but having now been at Branx, I think my decision to not go to the Torche show was correct. Even with a show that ended at 10 (and they were pretty much on schedule), getting home involved finding a not obvious route to the Burnside Bridge, walking past sleeping vagrants and people who were shouting at each other but maybe not fighting, and about a 20 minute wait for a bus. And I know homeless people are more likely to be victims than perpetrators, but seeing people going through trash and sleeping outdoors on a relatively cold night does not necessarily make you feel great about humanity.

(Obviously I could have grabbed a taxi, and I have done that before, but I hate how expensive that gets. So I spent an hour longer in transit, probably, with a lot more walking, but I finished my book.)

So there is kind of this question for me of "Am I getting too old for this?" I keep thinking that the right protocol would be to take one Advil before I leave, one when I get back, and to always remember to have ear plugs, but I never remember to do this.

This would be a reasonable time to retire. I have seen so many of the bands that I've wanted to by now. For the various lists I have had of bands I needed to see, and that I cruelly missed out on, I've seen them all except Maroon 5 now, and I have become really ambiguous about them.

So, having had so many good experiences, and with concerns about money, time and general stamina, letting that go would be completely reasonable.

I'm afraid it will also be impossible. More on that tomorrow.

http://sporkful.blogspot.com/2013/11/concert-etiquette.html