So, the lineup is announced yesterday, and I take a peek at it. Aside from the Chili Peppers, included on the roster are Wilco and Poi Dog Pondering, my two absolute favorite bands, especially to see live. And I’m thinking, hmm. There’s no Primus this year. There’s no crazy hard-rock band. There’s not even any country. No Willie Nelson or any of that. So how in the HELL am I going to convince my husband that it’s a good idea for us to spend $300 on a couple of concert tickets? And to spend three days in the city going to see music? In August? Because if you think it’s hot in July (remember all those news reports about it being hot at Lollapalooza last year, and how they had to spray everyone down with fire hoses?), you’ll not survive August. In Chicago. In Grant Park. Under the sun.
Then, this morning, I’m dreaming away about being a child (in this part of the dream I was a boy with long hair), and being shown by a father (presumably of the long-haired boy) how to use a little bomb, which looked like a crazy fun candle for a birthday cake. And though he told me not to light it until it was necessary, I thought it would be fun to do it RIGHT NOW, so I lit it, and as the wick burned down, I ran out the front door and threw it as hard as I could but it only went about four feet, and it lay there on the sidewalk right in front of my house, and I ran, ran like a little scared chicken, leaving this bomb to go off right in front of my family’s home. I ran around the corner of the house and waited for an explosion but it never came, and when I walked into the back door of my house, I was me again, myself, not a little long-haired boy, and everything was different, and I found a plane ticket in my purse and I thought “Where the hell am I supposed to go now? Can’t I just stay home?” and I showed it to the airline stewardess who stood there and she did something to it and handed it back to me and it didn’t have my name on it anymore, so I wandered around the house and went up some stairs and I was in the home of somebody I know, and everyone was drinking and having fun, and then I had to climb up some very narrow, steep steps, and I kept slipping, and when I got to the top I saw that I was on the upper deck of a cruise ship, and this slutty young thing, who apparently worked for the cruise ship, tried to show me how to climb over this railing in order to get to the deck itself from the stairs, and when I peeked over the edge, it appeared that if I fell while climbing I would slide right into the ocean, and I was afraid, but she convinced me to do it and as I dangled from this metal rail, the chipped yellow paint digging into my palms, feeling with my foot for a place to step, I spied another way, an easier way, and I said to the slutty chick in her hot pants and bikini top and side-of-the-head pony tail, “What is that?”
“What?” she says, smiling at me.
“That over there, is that an easier way of getting up here?”
“Well, yeah, but you went this way instead!” and she laughed at me in a spiteful, mean way, and left me dangling there but that’s where it ended because at that moment I was awoken by my husband pouncing on my bed, pouncing on me, and saying “Guess who’s in the lineup for Lollapalooza? Huh? Huh? Guess!”
“Who?” I asked.
“Ween! Ween!”
And I was still a little asleep and I said, “I like wieners,” even though I meant to say “I like Ween,” and then I woke up a little more and I said, “You want to go to Lollapalooza to see Ween? Ween of push the little daisies and make ‘em come up fame? Are you fucking kidding me?”
“No. After you make my lunch, go buy tickets.”
The moral of the story is, folks, that sometimes you get what you want without even having to try, and in a very weird way, and you never would have thought to get what you want by saying something like, “Look! Ween is on the bill! Ween! Push up the daisies, baby! Ween!”
And also, that it takes me a really long time to get to the point. Lolla ‘06, here I come!
