Ticketmaster is the devil

I need to be stopped.

I think I need to be restrained from accessing the site because it’s a money suck. Some people gamble. Others get shitfaced until they’re pockets are empty. I wait in an electronic queue, eager like a little child when they’ve just seen their parents come home with large bags a few weeks before Christmas, knowing that it means they’re going to get to snoop around the house till they’ve found their new gifts.

I have managed to refrain myself so far cos I have a bunch of gigs coming up in the next month to satisfy my gig hunger for now. But once they’re all over…it’s hard to tell. I live for that rush, that thrill of a live concert. There is nothing else in the world that I have experienced that is quite like it.

You can grow so close and intimate with an album in the weeks or years after you first buy hear it. It becomes a friend who you can go talk to when you’ve had a bad day at work, or when all your real friends have let you down. It’s that constant, unwaivering presence that will never, ever let you down. Some people prefer dogs or cats or other animals. I prefer music.

But when you see an artist live — one that you really, really love — those same songs that you thought you knew so well become something new and profoundly more affecting than you could have ever thought possible.

Sometimes it’s the way the artist performs them. Sometimes it the camaraderie you share with the people you go with – whether you know them or not. Sometimes it’s just the vibe. You just feel good in the time and place that the show is happening. Sometimes it’s the artist: they’re funnier/smarter/better/hotter/{insert adjective here} than you expected. Sometimes there is no reason. Sometimes it just is.

The thing I love the most is the way the music can fill you. It can start in your ears. It seeps into your veins and pulses through you until you can feel the drums and the guitar and the big motherfuckin’ bass throbbing in every last finger and toe, to the tip of your nose to the backs of your ankles. It fills you. Fills you everywhere.

It is more amazing than I could ever express.

It’s what I live for.