These Are the Days

This is my 1st Blog in a while. I have been way busy the last couple of weeks between school, work, & partying.

This past Friday the team rolled down to Milwaukee to catch the Chevelle show at the Rave. Despite us forgetting to check things out on Map Quest, we made it to the show without a hitch. This was my 2nd time seeing a show at the Rave & it is officially my favorite place to see a rock show. You feel as if you are rolling into a haunted house as you walk in. There is ominous rock music blaring from the bar & the majority of my fellow patrons have a distinctly different style than my prep look. The whole place just looks & feels bad ass.

Strata & Future Leaders of the World played 1st. I wasn’t a huge fan of either rolling in & still am not. Then Crossfade hit the stage. Cole has been trying to sell me on these guys forever & I just never got into them. They kicked serious ass. They kind of have a Linkin Park feel to them when you see them on stage & use a lot more DJ stuff than their disc would lead you to believe. They sounded awesome. I would suggest the download.

Helmet then came on stage. J & Chris didn’t like them in the least. I thought they played really well but they were old & their bass player acted hella gay. Every time a song was done, he would put both fists in the air & scream. It was weird as shit. Like I said, I liked the music but the whole act was kind of whack. The crowd seemed to agree with the guys as they went from ecstatic from Crossfade to flipping off Helmet.

Somewhere in here J & Chris almost got in a fight. This used to be my job but I think everyone will agree I have mellowed the hell out. Dude was pissed because we were all 6’2” & he was about 5’2”. I really though J might throw down. One of the funnier things I have seen in a while also involved a near fight. Some college kids in front of us were drinking pretty heavy the whole show but were cool enough to us. These little girls came pushing through. (One was literally wearing a Celine Deon T!) Dude fucking flips & starts getting all up on them. I think we were all under the impression we were going to have to peel a UWM student off a 12 year old girl, classic. One last note before I continue, (a) rock tickets aren’t cheap. (b) PDA is one of the last things anyone wants to see. These kids next to us made out literally the whole show. They would go at it for like 20 minutes, pull away, wipe the slop off their faces, & go back at it. It was pretty funny. Jaren commented he was expecting them to have sex next. That would have been uncomfortable. In any event, don’t’ you ever get to that point where you just can’t kiss any longer. You are like, “Honey, please pop in a mint.” You cannot sustain even somewhat acceptable kissing breath for more than like a half hour like that. I was somewhat amazed.

Chevelle headlined & they didn’t disappoint. I think everyone reading this has heard The Red & recognize its greatness. I just liked the show & the band seemed like a bunch of kick ass college students. Everyone in the place was into the show.

Now to the meat of our Milwaukee experience. We get on the highway & start to head back home only to find that the Green Bay interchange was closed, weak. So we go into the city looking for an alternative route. Me, of course claiming to be the human GPS system, decide I am going to off road this shit & navigate downtown Milwaukee on my own. Here was my thinking, I know where UWM is, I knew where I was (kinda). If I can get to UWM, I can get to the highway we need to be on. I have driven that road a 100 times in the last year. As we start our adventure I began telling the guys my stories of arguing with girlfriends on directions & virtually always getting in a pickle in big cities when I go on weekends trips. It is like dawn, I am going to get lost at some point. With this in mind we proceeded. I start rolling down city streets & then hit a neighborhood. Chris never had faith, Jaren never really gives a fuck, & I wanted to prove I am Christopher Columbus. 10 minutes in I even start to doubt myself & decided to turn around in retreat. (Yea, I made like the French.) This is where things started to get scary. I stopped paying attention to the stop lights & road signs & was just driving. I may have run upwards of 6 red lights in this time. (I will anxiously be awaiting tickets from those cameras that bust that crap now, shit.)

After some scary moments we got back to the highway we had exited from & got back on. We back tracked & hit another highway that would bring us back to Green Bay. Just as we see the Green Bay sign, a wall of orange barrels emerged on the horizon, shit. We were soon right back on the stretch that headed into the city again, shit. OK, at this point most would give up, not us. We decided to look at street signs & soon Highway 43 detour signs became prevalent. Who knew you were actually supposed to look at these little orange flags? We were soon right back in the city.

With J & Chris spotting (It really took all 3 of us to spot the detour markers. I think they wanted to make this America’s most difficult detour.) we weaved our way into the ghetto. You know those row houses you pass as you come into large cities & think, “Who the fuck would ever want to live in those neighborhoods?” We were driving by those, shit. After finally starting to run parallel to the highway, we began to feel a sense of relief. I drove right past the 1st on ramp, shit. The 2nd one was nearly as elusive but I managed to navigate it & after a half hour, the team was headed home.

Of everyone I know I am easily the most experienced city driver & completely comfortable driving in the city. That was until this experience. Last year I was in Chicago & didn’t have a single problem. That’s the nations 3rd largest city. We come through Milwaukee & the DOT craps all over our parade, shit. J & I took solace in knowing Chris will soon be an officer of the law. In addition to planting evidence & racially motivated beatings, they also exact revenge. Chris has vowed to find whoever designed this detour & kill them, thanks Chris.

I always try to get a moral out of my experiences & was able to find one or two Friday night. If I was lost, it meant I exploded. I used to just blow my lid in frustration. It wasn’t pretty for anyone involved. As Jaren & Chris will attest, I was never once frustrated. Although the tone of this Blog is decidedly a tone of annoyance, it wasn’t anything like that. We laughed the entire time (between gunshots). We always seem to find a way to have a good time in every experience I have noticed, even the most trying times end up in us laughing. I think that is healthy. In researching this Blog, I discovered something very interesting. Had I trusted my instincts & stayed on the road we were on. We would have found UWM, literally driven right into the campus. Through our friend at MapQuest.com, I was able to discover we were within 6 or 7 city blocks of the UWM campus, shit. That would have saved us a half hour but the story is more than worth it. Friday was a kick ass night. Peace.

Posted by D. Schwa on Monday, February 14, 2005 at 12:09 AM | Permalink