Four years ago

I must be in the grips of depres­sion, as I’m think­ing about the past.

In par­tic­u­lar, there’s an inci­dent from four years ago, pret­ty close to four years ago to the day. I bought tick­ets to the Rolling Stones show at the Oak­land Col­i­se­um, not because I care much about the Stones, but because I fig­ured that if I had tick­ets to a big pop­u­lar sta­di­um show that per­haps I could get a date. I don’t have any­thing against the Stones, but I don’t real­ly think there’s much point in see­ing any music con­cert where the seats on the floor are far enough away from the stage that you can’t see the musi­cians play. The Stones just seem like a par­o­dy of them­selves, and they have been for oh twen­ty years or so. At least.

Any­way, I don’t know exact­ly what I was think­ing, but I bought two tick­ets for the show, down on the floor. I think they were like $130 each, and that was because I knew some peo­ple who knew some peo­ple. So I basi­cal­ly spent a months’ worth of gro­cery mon­ey to see a con­cert that I did­n’t want to see. Why? because I fig­ured that I might be able to get a date.

Now the humil­i­at­ing part is, it did­n’t work. Or, I guess it did. When I relat­ed this embar­rass­ing bit, I actu­al­ly had a girl I’d nev­er met before say that she was avail­able «if they were Stones tick­ets.» I could have thrown up. I end­ed up tak­ing a woman who was most­ly inter­est­ed in see­ing Pearl Jam (anoth­er band in which I have very lit­tle inter­est) play their open­ing set, and she gushed through the whole set about how good-look­ing Eddie Ved­der is. I spent the entire con­cert feel­ing stu­pid and humiliated.

It’s love­ly how my mind tracks back to these humil­i­at­ing experiences.