Thoughts I had while waiting

I arrived 20 minutes early to pick up my friend for the concert we were going to this evening. Just some local band who will no doubt butcher a few Zeppelin tunes and regale us with their own originals. And by originals, I mean derivative crap.

I'm not a big fan of concerts nowadays. I've been to quite a few in my time. Some great ones. Tool, Black Sabbath, Eric Clapton, Paul Simon, just to name a couple.

I've come to hate crowds, though. Not the people in them, per se, but the idea of the crowd in general. As I've grown older, I've enjoyed being in a crowd less and less. When I was a teenager, I loved the idea of hundreds of people I didn't know pushed together in a room too small for everyone to fit comfortably. The more the merrier, I'd say. To me, it just meant that there were more joints being passed around, and I was going to get that much more stoned. Bring 'em on!

But now, as I am not a teenager anymore, I don't seem to enjoy it as much. Steadily I've grown less and less comfortable among these large groups of drunken strangers. Maybe it's because I no longer take the joint that's being offered to me. That's right, I now pass on grass. Dope: Smoke it today, be it tomorrow.

Is it possible to develop agoraphobia (more specifically, enochlophobia) as an adult? I'm not sure if it is, but I am increasingly more uneasy whenever I'm around more than say 50 people. I start to sweat an inordinate amount. What I really want to do is go outside and have a cigarette with the 5 other people left in the world who still smoke.

I'm just not a fan of 20 year old drunk idiots, male or female, constantly bumping into me, or spilling their drinks everywhere. You can never hear what anyone else is saying, so you're forced to yell. And then invariably there's a lull in the music, and everyone has been informed that I'm going to take a leak.

Just let me be at home with like 5, maybe 10 people. Good conversation, good wine (or beer. or vodka.). No thumping bass lines, no self righteous lead singer and his semi-autobigraphical "lyrics".

Just give me interesting people and compelling conversation and I'm a happy man.

Finally, my friend has exited the shower after three refrains of some insipid Maroon 5 song (truthfully, I'm embarrassed I even knew who it was). We can finally go to the damn concert.


Oh goody.



**Edit: it was brought to my attention that this seems like i composed this tonight. not the case. it was composed on sunday january 13th**