Epic Saturday

(originally a letter to a friend. Edited and presented here because I am proud of it)

From the beginning seems the best place to start. The time is 1230am on Saturday and the evening is quite alive as I am still trying to secure a 830am ride to Cleveland club’s first ultimate Frisbee tournament on the east side. a gchat message from one captain leads to a call to the other captain and that call leads to a text from the assistant tournament director who, because he has to be there significantly earlier than the start of the tournament, will be picking me up at 630am instead. After 4 hours of sleep, two wrong turns and a ride on the supply van (because my team was playing on a field another 30 minutes away) I found myself setting up fields in a downpour.

The team cleats up and is preemptively demoralized by hangovers, bad weather, and the full realization that we are Cleveland’s B team. Our spirits are further driven into the ground by a crushing defeat from a youth team full of high schoolers. Later finding out that they had been the runner up youth national champions the previous year did not help one bit. With a long break until the next game the hangovers thinned substantially and a group of 3 or 4 of us took it upon ourselves to pump the team up and remind them about the fact that we are playing the greatest sport on the face of the planet, and we are going to be playing this sport all fucking day. It worked. We continued to get crushed game after game, but each time with a smile and some rather ruckus cheering.

With a victory over melancholy secured the day continued in sweaty and exhausted glory. The tournament (but most certainly not the day) ended with free grilled food that, despite it’s low quality, tasted like it had been crafted by a lesser angel.

After a meandering and blurry car ride home the day had already hit the 13 hour mark, by most standards the day was coming to an end, but today 5 hours of running, 4 hours of sleep, and 13 hours awake would not be what brought me down. There was samurai jack to watch, a girl to find, and a party to be had.

The evening began pensively. The plan was to meet Danielle (a girl I have been flirting and adventuring with since the start of this month) by 9pm at the latest and head down together to the Cleveland Museum of Art’s grand opening of their new east wing which had started at 5pm and was going until 2am. 930 rolled around and I received a call that two of her best friends where in town and they where taking a while to get ready. Moments before I had just realized Dan Deacon was going to be playing. Lets pause and absorb that for a second. Dan Deacon was going to be playing on the lawn of the CMA for the grand opening of the east wing.

There simply was no time for their girly shenanigans, drastic action had to be taken. Jumping on my bike I rode as like lightning as I could given the disrepair my calves were in from the day. The destination was not the CMA though. Time would not have allowed. Instead the ride went from Cleveland to Lakewood so I could drive in my parents car back to Cleveland’s east side. I made fantastic time, found a free parking spot and was only running minutes late for the start of Dan Deacon’s set.

Then there was the line. My hopes and dreams seemed like they where being stampeded on by all 150 people who would be in front of me. Hoping there was some mistake, I walked towards a middle section and asked if this was really the line to get in. With this the evenings unstoppable magic began. I had unintentionally approached a waiter named Tony from Johny mango’s who my sister and I had befriended simply by being regulars for a few months in the school year. With fantastically quick wit, he did not answer my question but instead said “We where wondering when you would show up, we have been waiting” and pulled me into the line before I could even register how kind he was being.

Even being 80-ish people closer, the speed of progress the line had been making kept my hopes of seeing Dan Deacon fully suppressed, but because of Tony’s kindness there was an air of something bigger about the night now. Anticipating the evening might sell out (though two staff members assured me that was not very likely) I bought tickets for the 3 girls who would be joining me soon and headed in. Confident that I had missed Dan I moved with no hurry into the ongoing party.

There where snacks, sweet and savory both, that instantly set the tone that this might be the end times that Andrew Bird sings about. I wandered slowly and was one turn and a hallway away from the lawn when I received notification that Danielle and her friends had arrived. Dashing and dodging between drunken socialites (the results of a cash bar on every floor) I met them at the front door. Fears of a sold out show had come true and I suddenly become the well planned hero as the girls realized they would not have made it in without me.

Brimming with confidence we sauntered in and ordered drinks; Great Lakes brew for two of us, white wine for the others. A fairly straight forward path led us past the hilariously intoxicated, the sophisticated, strange live performance art and eventually to the lawn where I assumed there would be nothing but between-set music might be playing before the next performer.

Walking out the door I hear nothing. No music and no DJed set, just the mumblings of a crowd. Suddenly and subtly I hear a very familiar “oooOOOoooo.” Saying “wait” and creating a dramatic pause for the group, I listened more intently and hear just a few voices saying “silence like the wind overtakes me, ooooOOOooo”

I squealed “DAN DEACON!” and demanded the girls follow. There was no time to explain, but we had to get closer. “But no one is on stage…” said one girl. “Exactly,” was the only response (Ntoe: Dan Deacon always performs in the crowd). And in we made it just in time for the song to explode. Green trippy skulls flashed and more human to human contact was made than many think possible with strangers. What might be less familiar part of the experience was the giant Parade the Circle puppets wandering the edge of the crowd and socialites dancing on the low walls while we danced, moved, screamed, played, and smiled with the largest of smiles for the last two tracks of Dan Deacons set at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

What followed was decreasingly intense and momentous, but equally magical. Indian techno filled the lawn as pensive rich white people did their best to get into the scene. We discussed science fiction, religion, sex, art, and college. I walked hand in hand or arm in arm all evening with the target of my affections and meandered about the newly minted east wing sober enough to appreciate what we where seeing, but drunk enough to make the entire situation flagrantly hilarious.

The evening ended in a booth at Diana’s where the owner suggested I might be the luckiest man there tonight, what with the fantastic guy to girl ratio. He also approached us later creating one of the greatest moments in my Diana’s history when he asked in his broken English “lots of this?” while shaking his portly hips to mean dancing, and “lots of this?” while throwing back the imaginary beer stein.

We answered “Yes, lots” and the 4 of us wiggled our hips in unison.

Infinite Summer: Reading Infinite Jest

The challenge

Join endurance bibliophiles from around the world in reading Infinite Jest over the summer of 2009, June 21st to September 22nd. A thousand pages¹ ÷ 92 days = 75 pages a week. No sweat.

1. Plus endnotes^a.

a. A lot of them.

I am going to try and do this. For Jordans sake I am going to try and find it tonight at a local book store.

Care to join me?

With the roommates out of town I got to start my day in a most favorite way. Blasting my best dance-rock.