To rid yourself of vanity and just go with the season

Made it to Flogging Molly. Couldn't coordinate plans with Nate so I would up going with Ben after all. It was an amazing show. The pit almost started before the band did, little physical flutters of anticipation through the crowd, and when the pit did begin, in did not end. There was jumping and pushing and screaming of the lyrics and some guy dumped a cup of mead on my head and I got knocked to the ground twice, which was temporarily terrifying. By that I mean, at a show like that, your emotions are cranked up to eleven and polarized, so one minute you are clapping above your head and shouting out the words to "Devil's Dance Floor" and exhilarated, then the next minute you're knocked completely off your feet and the music is actually muffled by the tightly-packed crowd around and above you and nobody is ever going to see you down here in time and you're suddenly in a helpless panic. Then hands reach out of nowhere like they always do and you're back up in the world above, back in the swing and sway of things, and until the next time you drop you're just going to jump and clap and yell like anything. What else can you do? You're alive and there's all this music, all these people.

On my second unfortunate drop to the floor I found myself face to face with another guy, there among the legs and dirty shoes, and I didn't even realize I was holding his hand until someone shouted "move back move back there's a guy down here" and they hauled him up. I thought that was funny. The emotion dial spun from "panic" to "ah ha ha when did that happen?" and then all the way around to "uh hey guys I'M DOWN HERE TOO" when the magic hands did not materialize to pick me back up right away. Granted some of us take more hands than others but come on you guys, if I die down here you're just going to trip on me and nobody wants to spend a perfectly good concert tripping on some dead chick so you might as well help me up. And they did.

I don't think I could do a lot of them, or that I would really even want to, but sometimes I have found that all I really need is the demented microcosm that is a decent pit. I'm not sure how to explain exactly what it is that I get out of it, what it is I find there. It's a crush of bodies, a howl, a shock of impossibly fresh air when an errant breeze finds your face in the madness. It's surrendering any delusions of control over what happens to you amid the mob and melee and the wild trusting hope that when you hit the ground and the your world suddenly becomes a very small and airless forest of stamping feet, there will be hands to haul you back to the sky. That you'll fall and rise and fall to rise again and every time you'll come up with your fists in the air. It's sheer unapologetic brute force catharsis.

It's also completely exhausting, and if you're way smart like Ben and don't wear any shoes, physically a bit detrimental. Although I suppose getting punched in the face wasn't really his fault, and who knows when he chipped his tooth. I came out of it all right, with just a sore nose from having a crowd surfer dropped on my stupid head and a variety of tiny bruises on my arms that make me look like a human dalmation. And sticky hair from the mead. And when that crowd surfer got dropped square on my upturned face I thought "whew at least I didn't get a bloody nose" but as it turns it, my nose was just so stuffed up from allergies that I just didn't realize I had a bloody nose until much, much later. And I'm tired and the muscles in my legs ache from trying to brace myself against the tide and it took me all of Sunday to get my voice back and I had to shower off dried sweat the next morning that was most assuredly not entirely my own. But that's all par for the course, really.