Hey Hey They Were Monkeys

I think my days of attending concerts without chairs might be over. This isn't exactly a monumental shift. I was never a rabid concertgoer -- I tend to save my shekels for the bands I really love -- and I'm not a huge dancer (understatement) so the pleasure of live shows was mainly in the staring at celebrity and hearing variations on songs I love, with a dash of "oh so that's how they make that noise." 

Tonight, we went to see Bonobo at Antone's, which seemed like a good allocation of funds for two reasons: 1) I'm always intrigued to see how top-notch electronic artists make their live shows work, and 2) for Pete's sake I've lived in Austin for nearly two years and I hadn't been to Antone's yet. Turns out, there were two major monkeywrenches in the plan: 1) The show started at 10, which meant the headliner hitting the stage well after midnight on a weeknight, and 2) I'm goddamn old.

We managed to stay through about half the set before my feet started to die and V's lids started to droop. Bonobo was very good. (Their opening acts, not so much.) And I am now going to have to seriously consider start times and venue types before I drop cash on concert tickets, which is so depressing I feel like eating a sleeve of Oreos and going to bed ... still, at 3:30 pm the next day.

But in my defense, there does come a time in life -- and I believe this has less to do with age than aesthetics -- when being surrounded by teenagers on drugs loses its charms. This one girl in particular, who was three foot tall if she was an inch, kept backing into my butt while enthusing to her boyfriend about how she was really rolling. She'd drink some more of her Heineken and he'd loll his head. He had this razor-sharp Adam's apple. 

Another dude, in the middle of the crowd swarm, started to get aggro because someone was dancing too close to him. These two guys started to ramp up the altercation about it, and both of them were sufficiently large that a fistfight would have seriously impacted about 15 people in the vicinity. They were not rolling, though they both independently toked up maybe ten minutes later. I thought smoking was banned indoors in this town? Oh, right, because it's pot, it's not rude.

This other couple spent most of their time making out. Can't really complain about that -- I've been there.

And then there were the swirly dancers at the margins in their hippie skirts and dreds, doing a stoned and unstable whirling dervish impression while bored, out-of-it dealers slowly stalked around the concert hall in their moe. shirts and unkempt beards. 

So I didn't have a problem with any of these people -- except maybe aggro beat-up-the-dancer guy -- because we should all get a little chance to completely lose our minds in public and bounce around however we see fit. I just don't want to be in the middle of that anymore, because, well, it's annoying. And I know I'm growing green fur and talking out of a trash can just for writing all this. Where are my Oreos?