A few months ago we decided to get weekend passes for Pitchfork Music Festival. As you can tell by the date of this post, I haven’t made it to the second day. I never thought of myself as a festival goer, but since I had never been to a festival I couldn’t say for sure. I now have the definitive answer: I am a not a person that should be allowed to attend festivals. Standing in a sea of hipsters, some of whom had started to mudslide, while the rain poured down I thought ‘dear God, I can’t DO this for another 8 1/2 hours!’ And since I am once again in the land of the free I’ll use some baseball terminology to chronicle our endeavors actually getting down to the park which really set the tone for the day, and not in a good way.
I start to realize exactly what I’ve signed up for today: standing in the rain/sun for 10 hours. I turn down the block that Mapquest told me to and people start honking at me for god knows what. I did what us girls do best and burst out into tears. I pull into the teeny tiny train parking lot. No spots. )(*&^%$%^#! I pull out and continue down the one way street which leads me into the seedy part of town. I’d forbidden myself to come back here since the infamous hit and run of ’06. I was just learning to drive and I had hit an old junker parked on the street that hadn’t been driven since 1973. My mom said ‘well it’s not going anywhere anyway so put the pedal to the medal!’. Driving back to the general area of the train I park in the post office lot because I can’t figure out how to get the two blocks over and facing the right direction in order to pull into the other train parking lot. Strike 1.
Ryan continues to stare at this alien that inhabits the driver’s seat where his girlfriend once sat. I scream ‘forget the umbrella!’ through my sobs, only slightly reassured by the fact that I just saved a buck fifty on parking. We miss the train by 30 seconds. Strike 2.
After collecting myself in the blazing sun for an hour while we wait for the next train, some couple that looks like they’ve left the rest of their cult in the forest to crawl out and evangelize inner-city kids starts eyeing us up. They have a Jesus fish on their little buggy that they’re pulling around. You know how I feel about people who stick Jesus fish on stuff…As we walk towards the end of the platform that has less people and we pass them, the lady asks Ryan what his shirt says. He tells her, but fails to mention that it’s a Radiohead lyric, which means she thinks he just said something entirely inappropriate to her. She gives us the stare of death. We walk away quickly so they don’t call the other members of the cult to kidnap us. Strike 3.
The one awesome thing of the day was that The Chicago Diner had a food booth. Vegan corn dogs & Rueben’s all around!
Amy x