an optimistic rebuttal
i recently spent a few days out of town at a music festival, which is weird for a couple reasons, including but not limited to:
- i'm too broke to buy tickets to events
- music festivals are loud and bright—two things i've always done poorly with
- a year ago, i wrote a post about how i'd never be able to attend a show again
on the first point, i only found out about this event because someone i'm not particularly close with or distant from was looking for someone who would help set up and run their booth, offering in return to get me into the festival for free and to give me somewhere to crash inbetween the days. this is obviously a good deal, and i had nothing going on anyway, so i agreed almost immediately.
second, the venue was actually more illuminated than i expected, which reduced the amount of nausea i would've gotten if only the stage had lighting. they also only had flashing effects from photographers' cameras so i managed to avoid my usual
light-related nausea altogether (obviously i still wore sunglasses.)
the special earplugs i was still holding onto were enough to avoid sensory overload, i suspect this was helped by the drums being so consistently loud that every set was a wall of sound and my brain would just adjust to the room having a sort of "default volume". that's just a guess though, i really don't know how i didn't get overwhelmed—even when there were two drummers on stage??
the biggest surprise came days after when i read through the pages and posts on this blog to see if there was anything i wanted to delete before i started blogging again. i knew that i had written a post about never seeing a show again, but reading it brought me back to where i was a year ago. how defeated i felt while i was in pain all the time and unable to eat anything but rice and unseasoned chicken. back when i thought i'd never be able to do the things i'd been dreaming of.
but y'know what, me? i felt it again. not the exact same thing, but after a year of isolation- a year spent watching the world fall apart and feeling like i was the only person who cared- i found that feeling of community again. greasy twenty-somethings wearing merch for bands most people have never heard of, old guys and young enbys wearing shirts displaying some variation of "Free Palestine" or other condemnations of the kinds of fascistic bigotry that the world around me is always demanding i stomach, and at least two clowns. apparently the solution to leftist infighting is to drum so loud that nobody can yell at each other!
really, though, i'm learning how important it is to actually go out and see your community, because the internet makes a habit of convincing you that everyone else is out to get you, but it turns out that there are tons of people who choose to be friendly even when it's too loud for anyone to overhear them being rude.
i'm definitely getting sicker, and i'm terrified of the future (personally and globally), but i saw clowns buying records and it's got me feeling like i can make things work out.
if nothing else, it's got me feeling like it's worth trying.
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if you're wondering why this post is called "an optimistic rebuttal", it's because i'm bad at naming things i like a song that has that phrase in its title and this post is about music
apologies to the one-or-two regular readers of this blog, i had nothing that felt worth writing about for the past year, so i just kinda let it rot. actually, i had things i wanted to write, but they were all abrasively political and i'm not a good enough writer for that (yet)
here's an album i think is pretty good
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