I'm Doing This As Hard As I Can!

It is a commonly accepted fact that it is still the weekend until the sun comes up on a Monday.

Therefore it is still the weekend, I am not posting this late and could you all keep it down a bit?

The beer buzz is giving way to proto-hangover and my neck is killing me.

The week started out innocently enough, with me sitting in my office, tissue boxes on my feet, the evicted tissues jammed into the gaps around my closed door, effecting a self-imposed quarantine. Not because I was sick but because everyone else was* and I couldn’t afford to get any of their dirty dirty germs as I had tickets to Opeth and Disturbed.
In Adelaide and Melbourne respectively**.
Within two days of each other***.

Whatever doesn’t kill you might in some instances make you stronger but I didn’t appreciate the timing of this potential bout of viral empowerment. I had riding and rawking to do and didn’t want to be bubbling phlegm whilst I did it so I spent Monday and Tuesday eating meals comprised primarily of garlic (for both health and coworker repelling benefits) and mainlining orange juice and Echinacea.

One of my mates (whom I will call Awesome) was coming to Adelaide to see Opeth with me so Wednesday morning Awesome and I rocked up to the coach terminal for our trip to Adelaide and after a very short time came to this simple conclusion:

DON'T TAKE THE FREAKING COACH!

It’s 10 hours crammed into a recirculating box of smells, there are people loudly reenacting episodes of Days of Our Lives into mobile phones**** and they will try make you watch Nancy Drew on the coach’s AV system.
DO NOT WATCH! Close your eyes and listen to The Downward Spiral or something.

Adelaide may be a smaller city than Melbourne but it has some truly award winning nerd stores (everyone, go visit Shin Tokyo! Go now!) and we sacrificed a respectable amount of moolah at the Altar of Geek before washing up at the Opeth gig Thursday night.

OPETHIAN OBSERVATIONS

• Windmilling guitarists' heads look like adorable tennis balls whirling about on rubber bands
• Samantha Escarbe from Virgin Black(the support band) is pretty damn good
• Mikael Åkerfeldt is a funny bastard
• Martin Axenrot may look like Legolas but Legolas could never drum like that
• Opeth are freaking unbelivable live

The atmosphere was great, everyone was there for the music and even though Awesome and I are both quite short we had no problem seeing the show and didn’t get stepped on once!

When we surfaced on Friday there was recovery time and then I took the overnight coach back to Melbourne. A word of advice:

DON'T TAKE THE FREAKING OVERNIGHT COACH!

There is less foghorn mobile talking than the day coach but it can be bloody difficult to get any sleep depending on a) whether you can get comfortable and b) what you think the likelihood is of the person next to you doing something to you whilst you sleep. Also they will try to make you watch Grace Is Gone.

DO NOT WATCH! Listen to Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Radio Edit or something.

I rolled into Melbourne at 6:40am (blergh!), trolled around the city like a zombie splurging more cash on comics and sundries before realising that I am already not as young as I once was and catching a Nanna-nap at a mate’s place before the Disturbed concert.

DISTURBED OBSERVATIONS

• Yelling out the band’s entire discography in the form of requests/suggestions does not impress anyone, fella, we know the names of the songs too
• Hannibal Lecter gear is a simple and elegant choice of evening garb for a vocalist
• Boy I like dreadlocks…
• Disturbed are also damn good live*****

There were more shaved heads and ‘Hey, can your mother sew, pal?’ types about but the mood was still pretty decent. I did have to spend the entire P.O.D set standing in line for beer but then I bought double beer and was very very happy.So at the end of it all I have spent about 20 hours on the road, about 15 hours on the piss, about 7 hours at concerts, I have to turn my entire body like Robocop to look at anything on the periphery (as I may have overdone it just a tad with the rawking) and I’m pretty sure I’m coming down with something but that’s A-OK with me.
Everyone at work should have recovered from the last bug they tried to foist on me and I’ll be bringing them something exciting from interstate to deal with.
Now I’m just going to have a little bit of a lie down and try to stop grinning like a loon.



*Whenever one person gets sick at my work everybody gets sick in a pattern that could probably be excitingly depicted by toppling rows of dominoes, if as each domino recovered from its first fall it was knocked over again with decreasing frequency until all the dominoes had become immune to that current ailment in time to catch the next one.
**Opeth’s Melbourne show sold out in June and I do not take defeat gracefully.
***It seems like every couple of years every band in the world throws down rock-paper-scissors and they all agree to come to Australia at the same time (if you don’t believe me have a look at this year’s line up) and in previous years I have been too poor. Not any more capricious universe! I have some monies!
****Complete with vehement declarations that ‘You’ve got your f*cking money, don’t dare call me again!’
***** So now I am chock full of high expectations. Everyone I see must be awesome live or they will feel my wrath! Or be entirely unaware of it. Either/or.