Welp, I’m alive. Haha just kidding. So I guess you (Mr. Chinese man) want to know how Firefly was. Music was phenomenal, loved Cage the Elephant and Paul McCartney absolutely killed it. But the whole camping experience, not so much. A colleague of mine on this Firefly excursion wasn’t enjoying the miles of walking and the scorching heat and neither was our whole group by the end of it. At some point during the festival, this colleague establishes eye contact with me and says “George… we’re not built for this”. I totally agree, plus I thought it was the funniest thing. Hey, its true. We’re a bunch of non-adventurous, air-conditioning lovers. It was a great learning experience, would I do it again… probably not.
Potential improvements: 1. Canopy! Major blunder on our part for not getting some sort of canopy cover to hang out under whilst at the camp. We ended up having to jack some shade from our neighbors at the campgrounds. It was pretty grimy, but what are you going to so. SIDE NOTE: I have a horrible farmers tan, and a tan line shaped like the firefly bracelet and its pretty embarrassing. 2. Also, definitely need a propane/gas grill. Funniest thing, we couldn’t get our charcoal grill working on Thursday. Our neighbors probably thought we were such spoiled teenagers. I thought it was so funny that we couldn’t feed ourselves. We finally got it working on Friday, cooked all our food so it wouldn’t go bad. 3. More snacks, we underestimated how much three guys can eat, also some sort of iced coffee/tea would be nice.
Let’s talk about the…drugs. Wow do people do a lot of drugs, it was pretty fun people watching at the festival grounds. “Hmm, that guy is on acid, she’s on molly, that kid is on at least three different drugs.” Great learning experience.
The worst part about the festival was the rain, the first day we were there it rained pretty hard, and for the rest of the festival it was disgustingly muddy. Like grotesque. We were walking through the main entrance from the VIP camp, at one point I thought it was straight manure.
I felt as though the beer bottle added some character to the photo.
BY the end of the festival, our shoes were disgusting. One of my colleagues may have made the worst decision of his life, he brought a pare of Aldo suede shoes. Never wearable again. Here is a picture of our shoes at the end of the trip…..
But yea, he cut up the back of his foot pretty bad.
I’d say the top performances from the festival include: 1. Cage the Elephant, 2. Paul McCartney, and 3. Zedd.
Here are some videos of them at the concert, I’m pretty happy with our position within the crowd. Also one of my friends crowd surfed, made it probably 6 feet and the crowd couldn’t support him, and he fell straight into the mud. It was hysterical. The whole crowd surfing thing is just a bad idea, between the mud, scolding heat, humidity, and the lengths of some of these headliners (Paul McCartney was 2.5 hours), it really results in poor conditions. Hydration is super important, and I totally understand why throughout the festival I saw at least 15 people carried away on stretchers. For drugs like MDMA you really need to stay hydrated, which is pretty difficult because Firefly did a HORRIBLE job with there refill stations. Midday the line was at least 45 minutes to get your water, and they made you dump whatever you had in your bottle prior to refill; that’s just wasteful.
Ok so videos:
Oh, and at CTE, there was a mosh pit. I’ve never seen a mosh pit before, it was so intriguing seeing all these teenagers on drugs running at each other. Not in attempts to hurt each other, but solely to produce a mosh pit. It’s this intricate relationship between low-functioning (because of the LSD and MDMA of course) festival goers working in unison with a common goal. But yea, here it is…
The festival is actually 4 days, we went in on Wednesday (1 day early for VIP camping) and it’s supposed to end on Sunday. But, we got hit by a pretty severe storm Saturday night and knew it would be a mess. The mud would have been horrible and I didn’t know if we could handle another day of this, you know, because “We’re not built for this…”, so we left early and missed The Killers which I was pretty bummed out about. We also missed Bastille and Cold War Kids. Also, during Kid Cudi, which was a pretty big deciding factor for me to go to the festival, we were all excited, blood pumping, we run into the crowd to get a good position. Its Cudi, you have to see Cudi. Wait there for an hour as the people behind us stacked and stacked. “CUDI! CUDI! CUDI! CUDI!…”, the crowd went. He walked on stage, stared into the crowd in this slight moment of silence across the at least 45,000 people in front of him. BOOM, the satellite flight intro went on and the crowd went crazy. Everyone started jumping and rapping along, it was honestly a great time. After four songs though someone from the Firefly administration walked on stage and said “Excuse me firefly, but we apologize for the inconvenience, there are 60 mph gusts on the way, everyone should evacuate the area!”. In an instant, 45,000 people went from ecstatic, to nearly trembling in fear/angry because Cudi had to stop his show. “Refund!, Refund!, Refund!, Refund!”
As we walked back at 10 PM on Saturday, the storm brewed…
“Winter is Coming….”, I tell my friends jokingly, just as a lightning strike lit up the sky.
So we ran….
All in all, Firefly was a great learning experience, but it would have to be a pretty bomb lineup for me to go again. Also sorry for the long post, I wanted to get everything down for the major events these past few days.
Oh and the featured photo was one I took at the Zedd concert just as the beat dropped. Apparently it’s a thing at EDM concerts to throw the glow in the dark sticks just as the beat drops. Looked cool, hurt more. But I got a sick photo, I shot up the contrast and messed with the focus/blemishing tool. Pretty happy about this one.
Last but not least, here is today’s song:
Don’t Slow Down by Matt and Kim, who had great stage presence, they really like to get the crowd involved…
Mildly Muddling 