So my weekend.
Hmmm. Where to start. I had Friday off but basically tanked the entire day by sleeping too late and then apparently I had some kind of cocaine binge or something because I don’t remember even a snit of the day after I woke up. I remember waking up. I sent email. And then it’s all a blur. I’m blaming it on the acid that my mother undoubtedly took while she was pregnant with me.
Oh, my mother. I forgot to ever say Happy Birthday to her and her birthday was like, oh, weeks ago. I’m blaming the acid for that too. That way it’s all her fault and she can’t really make me feel guilty. Ah, passive-aggressive personalities are so grand!
Saturday morning, I woke up quite early, took a shower, checked my email, and then woke Esteban. The plan for the day: go to Madison. Why? No reason. I really had a jones to visit Whole Foods and the closest one is in Madison. That was about it, really. It was a good reason for an adventure. But then, there was various mucking around town. Had to go to the bank, then Esteban completely skipped over my bank and we had to back track, making me grumpy at him.
(Oh! I just remembered what I did on Friday, partially. We went swimming at Ward and June’s house. Phew. I feel better now, knowing that it wasn’t spent in a crack fog or something.)
We had our pissy little snit early in the trip, me grumping that he was driving without purpose and didn’t really want to go and he because I am a control freak sometimes and want everything in the Weetabix ordained proper way. Both things were entirely true, we apologized and it cleared the way for a lovely day. We stopped at the snooty deli and I went in to get one of my lovely veggie sandwiches (yes, yes, this is the same deli with the Eeeuw! in the bread. Yes, I know. I just can’t help myself. Those sandwiches are just too good. As a testament to how good they are, let me tell you this. They have mayonnaise on them. MAYONNAISE! The most disgusting substance known to man! A thing made of raw eggs and oil and somehow becomes something which is neither raw eggs nor oil! It’s not enough that it’s a sneaky and distrustful food, but it also tastes like snotty slime. So I brave mayonnaise for these sandwiches. Scary condiments and the possibility of vermin in the bread. That tells you just how good these sandwiches are. But I digress.) but the number on the ‘Take a Number’ thing was 40 and they were currently on 28. The deli workers at the snooty deli work at glacial speed, taking time to learn other languages and wax poetic about the proper grind of their imported Peruvian coffee beans, harvested only by rehabilitated coke barons, so I gave up and went back outside to break the news to Esteban that no, he would not be sipping upon any lovely Peruvian coke dealer mocha that morning, as I had neither the patience nor the stamina to wait five days for my roasted red pepper, cucumber, and fresh mozzarella sandwich.
Thus, we hit the Machine Shed restaurant on the way down, where we had the most dreadful service imaginable. We had been given a lunch menu, which surprised me as it was quarter to 11 in the morning and they had a breakfast buffet going on until 2, but so it goes. We ordered and then proceeded to wait. And wait. And wait. Folks who came in AFTER US were served their food (and I noticed that they had meals consisting of eggs, bacon, hash and other breakfast type things). At 11:30, our waiter stopped by and told us that our food was coming but it would be after the kitchen got all the breakfast orders done. WHAT? Esteban wanted to walk, so I did the three minute rule. If he didn’t come with our food in three minutes, we were leaving. I try to be very fair about my pissy snits. And I wouldn’t have just walked out, I would have spoken to a manager about it and hopefully chewed someone’s countrified ass. But I didn’t have to because our food came at the two and a half minute mark. By that time, we were full of bread and cottage cheese anyway. It made us a little more grumpy but by that time, we had a common enemy and could be grumped about the food service industry rather than anything else.
The ride down to Madison was lovely. We sang along to the various CDs in my car. Esteban determined that my car seat was not in fact broken so that it could not move backward, but rather the kids at the full service car wash had moved the seat in such a manner that it seemed as though it was really close to the wheel but in reality it was just really high and really tilted weird. Phew. Because I had already penciled ‘Chew Ass of Auto Mechanic’ into my Franklin planner for Tuesday, because they had just fixed that damn seat two months ago. Gah.
We had no idea where we were going once we hit Madison. Unlike Milwaukee, I have no idea where anything is in Madison. Mostly because it’s a very confusing city. Everything is crammed around the capital building and two very irregularly-shaped lakes. Also, many roads were closed due to some outdoor festival smack in the middle of that. I called Whole Foods and got directions, so we headed out that way. There, we found the Madison dealer of my favorite spices in the world and went on a spice binge (which totaled $24.86′ got to love those inexpensive spice binges).
Coincidentally, we realized that Whole Foods was right across the street, so Esteban hung out and sipped coffee at the Atlanta Bread Company and I went shopping at Whole Foods, where my inner hippy child is at peace and feeling right in the world. I couldn’t buy any perishables because we stupidly did not bring a cooler, but I got many pasta sauces, a crystal deodorant (I just spent entirely too long looking for a link to an entry where I talked about crystal deodorant but I can’t find it. Trust me. It’s out there. Really. Oh wait, here it is.), a bunch of Luna bars in new cool flavors (Peanut Butter and Jelly? Ohh yeah.), and some other stuff I’ve since forgotten. It was so weird to walk in Whole Foods because they carry a lot of the brands we used to use when I was a kid. There is this short and squat bottle of shampoo that we always used. I almost bought some to give to Mo, just to freak her out and now I wish I would have.
We then wandered around Borders. I picked up some short story collections by Joyce Carol Oates, Alice Munro and Ethan Canin. Esteban scored some science fiction stuff. Then we endeavored back to downtown, where I browsed around a poorly-lit used book store while Esteban sat in the car and read.
We started to drive around after that, searching for a place to get lunch, but then found ourselves heading south out of Madison.
‘What do you want to do now? Go home and maybe see a movie?’
‘We could do that,’ I answered. ‘Or we could head down to East Troy (which was about an hour southeast of where we were) and go to the Dave Matthews Band concert.’
Esteban looked at the clock. It was quarter to five.
‘I thought you didn’t get tickets.’
‘I didn’t. But we could go to an ATM, withdraw like $300, go to the concert and see if someone is selling any.’
He furrowed his brow. He’s not big with the spontaneous. He needs to mentally gauge any new situations, plan for them and commit himself to it before he can enjoy things. He’s a planner, a leader, not a go-with-the-flow guy.
‘Get that map. If you can get us to East Troy without going back through Madison, we’ll do it.’ He sighed.
SCORE!!!!!!! I quickly devised a complicated and yet more or less direct path from our location on the southwest side of Madison to the concert venue in East Bumblefu’I mean East Troy, Wisconsin. And when I say ‘more or less direct’ I mean on these tiny winding roads that pathed through every ounce of picturesque rolling meadowy acre in southern Wisconsin.
It was truly breathtaking but we were nervous about getting there too late to get good tickets. And we would have to find an ATM at some point between here and there. The ride was lovely, however. I kept singing the ‘Leetle Baybay!’ line from ‘So Much’. There was a proliferation of horse farms, which I love, having spent ages 6-9 on a horse farm, and yellow butterfly habitats. I don’t know what was up with the yellow butterflies, but it was incredible. The fields would just literally be swimming in these little yellow specks of sunlight. They looked as though flower petals were dancing on the wind. They would also gather on the gravel along the sides of the road in these little fluttering colonies, a hundred maybe in a six inch circle, all fluttering and milling about. Esteban theorized that they might be mating. I thought maybe they were gossiping. Butterflies are very social creatures, you see.
We made a pitstop in Fort Atkinson to grab some munchies and get some cash. By that time, it was after 6:30. Esteban was very tense, which is what happens when he is late. We’re very symmetrical that way, as I too get crazy if I am slightly late for anything, however I was fully aware of the fact that there would be an opening band. Or at least I hoped that there would be an opening band. I finally said that I wasn’t certain if it really did start at 7:00 or possibly it was 7:30 and that seemed to relax him somewhat. We finally got to our destination at exactly 7:00. Esteban was lulled by the fact that thousands of people were still parking, which meant that we weren’t terribly late.
We parked and hopped out of the car, figuring that we’d start to walk up to the gate and look for the scalpers. I heard the people in the car next to us say that they ‘didn’t need any’ and a very nice gentleman started to walk away. ‘Do you have tickets?’ ‘Yeah, do you need tickets?’ He answered. ‘Yes, we do. What have you got?’ I asked, cringing because they had run anywhere from $130 upwards for reserved seating. His tickets were reserved in the 30th row. ‘How much?’ $150 for the pair.’ ‘Sold!’ And all within three feet of our car. Got to love our ticket karma.
We then had an enormously huge walk from the parking lot to the gate. Alpine Valley is actually a ski resort and thus even though it was likely only half a mile, it was through enormous hills. I think we may have at one point actually been walking vertically. It was unreal. Someone with a golf cart was charging $20 a ride to the gate and the cart was loaded down with no fewer than 8 people when they went by us, if that gives you an idea of how much the walk sucked.
The entire time we walked, Esteban kept exclaiming that our seats would be restricted viewing or something because it was just too easy to get good tickets for such a low price. But I had a whole ticket karma thing going on. We have very good luck with scalpers, it seems and I think it is due to the fact that we once went down to see a Sting concert at Summerfest and got caught out in the rain and utterly soaked to our skin and frozen. We then decided that we would have rather gone home, so I gave my tickets to two young girls who were going into the festival. Ever since then, we’ve purchased tickets for Sting (18th row, below face value) and REM (20th row, $20 above face value, but we then sold our nosebleed tickets for $25). Incidentally, the folks we were sitting next to had scored their tickets from a broker out of Chicago, after doing a bunch of research. They paid $100 a piece. It’s good ticket karma. I’m digging it.
The concert’.. well, I’m still smiling more than 24 hours later, it was that incredible. Dave was like a man possessed. The guy next to me thought he was Dave Matthews, doing this weird wiggy jiggy dance with arms flailing. It reminded me of that Fat Boy Slim video with Christopher Walken. And yes, the curse of the gigantic people in front of me continues. I kept swapping with Esteban and the tall guy in front of me would move with me. Mofo curse. Gah.
Then we had to walk back through the Alpine Valley Death March’. Now with Added Drunk People. People. Gah. Kids. They were kids. I am so old. I just kept thinking ‘You cannot be LEGAL! There is no way that you are 21.’ I swear, I saw eight year old kids with bottles of Citroen. And did I mention that it was still 90 degrees out? I was so parched that I contemplated drinking from a bottle of Budweiser I saw abandoned in the parking field which still had a good three inches of liquid in it. Gah.
We miraculously located our car amidst the thousands and then dove into the backseat where we guzzled a half a bottle of piss warm Dasani and some warm, limp grapes. We then proceeded to attempt to get out of the parking field but after waiting in the line for more than twenty minutes without moving, Esteban got creative and began to drive through the empty spots of the actual parking area, figuring that he’d go as far as he could and then break into the line. It was like a video game or something, searching for openings, avoiding drunk little girls wearing slip-type hippy dresses and vacant expressions. I started to channel someone whenever Esteban would hesitate ‘No, Dooood, you’ve just gotta keep DRIVIN’ to the road, man, you just gotta get us to the ROAD!’ no no no, what are you doing man, what’are’you’doing? You’re messing with the plan, man’ you’re messing’with’the’PLAN!!’ and then I broke into a peal of giggles because I just crack myself up sometimes. I think it was the dehydration. Esteban looked at me and said ‘You know, you’re not as funny as you think you are.’ But I was. Oh yes. I was so very funny. It still makes me laugh thinking about it.
But we did manage to skank our way out of the parking area with not too much hassle. We had a slight moment of guilt for all of the people behind us, still stuck waiting in lines that hadn’t moved in half an hour, but then we got over it. And that’s when I decided that my life has been led down the wrong path. All of this time, I’ve been doing things the right way, the MORAL way, preparing for stuff, making sure things happened in an orderly fashion. But here we had just waltzed in, LATE, had awesome tickets literally dropped into our lap, and then we broke the rules and baha’d it over the field to squeeze out of the queue in record time. Screw order. Anarchy is the way to go. I gave Esteban my new code of living and poignant moment was had by all, during which he wryly stated that he was glad I had taken away a valuable lesson from this. And then I passed out from dehydration. Never negate proper fluid consumption, people. Dehydration is probably at the source of most major felonies.
We then had to drive home. We stopped at the wee little town of Big Bend to get Taco Bell because we hadn’t officially eaten anything substantive in thirteen hours, if you didn’t count a Luna bar for me and a Skor bar for Esteban. I then sacked out, with my jacket over my face.
Esteban, hyped up on Red Bull, proceeded to jam out’ LOUDLY’ to one of the mix CDs. The later it got, the more strange his singing became. At one point’and I am not making this up either’he was singing ‘Voodoo’ like Donald Duck. People, you have not heard Godsmack until you’ve heard it in the vocal stylings of the residents of the Magic Kingdom. It brings an entire new depth to the music.
We got home at 3:00 a.m. Tilly sulked because she’d been alone for sixteen hours. I don’t even remember going to bed.
We’re getting to old for this shit.
Dear Allison,
Your boyfriend Scott wanted me to wish you a Happy Anniversary, and he’s got a lovely letter written for you as well as many other things planned, you lucky chica. So Happy Anniversary!
Best wishes,
Weetabix
Dear Dave Matthews,
Great concert. No seriously. Great concert. And I don’t mean that the same way that you meant it when you said that Alpine Valley was your favorite place to play in the world. Because I know you were just saying that because 40 thousand kids had to trek over hill and dale and big fucking hill again just to see you. But seriously, though’. I could have understood it when you didn’t do ‘Satellite’. I might have even understood it that you decided that you didn’t want to sing ‘Crash’ which is my favorite song ever. But no ‘Ants Marching’? Seriously, Leetle Baybay. WTF?
Oh, and Dave? ‘There’s blood in the water’? Dude. Maybe it’s time to cut back on the drugs now, ok? You’re scaring me.
Sincerely,
Weetabix
(the sweaty old looking curvy girl in the 30th row)
