Alcoholic Blackout

Tonight, I went to Atlanta to see the Arctic Monkeys.

I guess they rocked.

I really don't remember anything about the show. I mean, nothing. I remember seeing the opening band, Be Your Own Pet, but the rest of the night is a blur. The Tabernacle in Atlanta has a smoking section beneath the main stage, and the bartender in charge of said section took a liking to me and started feeding me shots of Cuervo Gold, leading to a a genuinely huge memory lapse.

For what it is worth, Be Your Own Pet fucking rocked.

My friends tell me I liked the Arctic Monkeys. Can't imagine how I wouldn't -- it's a great space, acoustically true, accommodating and tilting down toward the stage, like every good theater. I'll bet that I look good on the dance flooor, don't know what I'm dancing for. There is evidence that standing beneath a high ceiling increases creative thought, and while I can't vouch for that, it does seem true.

I went with Tim and Terry, which made for a good mix. Tim has every twittering neurosis known to man, and Terry has hereditary spastic paraparesis, so he's forced to be calm. Being with Terry is a weird blessing: it makes me aware of the stuff I can see that he can't (he's one of the roughly one percent of folks with his condition who have ocular and mandibular complications, meaning he's functionally blind and very difficult to understand). The huge crane hanging over that office building, the 8-year-old kid with the "Sarcasm Is A Free Service" shirt, the girl with the slutty tattoo , The Mark of the Skank, peeping from beneath her T-shirt. Describing this to him makes it more real. Plus, Terry says surprisingly illuminating things, like when Tim was commenting on the abundance of cute young girls at the show, he remarked, "Yeah, and they all smell like soap and lavender", which instantly made them all the more desirable to me. I guess the old cliche about smell compensating for sight has some validity, or else Terry was going around sniffing people, which is entirely possible. Just because he's a blind spastic doesn't necessarily mean that he's a nice guy.

Rock music isn't dangerous any more. Guys with strollers were negotiating for balcony seating as we went in. It was odd to see people with 3G cellphones setting up the shot and acting like National Geographic photographers.

I felt old.