I have found it to be true that trauma victims are bound together in an unbreakable bond for life. There is no bond greater--not mother and child, not husband and wife, not fat boy and cheeseburger.
Chad and I received two free tickets from a couple of our friends (they went with us) to see Taylor Swift and Rascal Flatts at Cheyenne Frontier Days last Sunday. We were excited to see Taylor. We have three songs as a couple, one of which is her ‘Tim McGraw’ song. Strangely enough, we were disappointed in her. We have decided we are no longer going to see female recording artist that are under twenty-five. We saw Colbie Calliat a few months ago, and she was equally disappointing. I get enough of young girls in my career; I don’t need to go see them trying to figure out who they are on stage. Rascal Flatts, to my great shock, gave an amazing performance. Unbelievable. They are truly amazing musicians and performers. I would see them again in a heartbeat.
I have been increasingly growing more and more sick of the general population. I am quickly becoming a snob. People are plain annoying. Whenever we win the lottery, Chad and I are buying an island and only allowing other people to move there or visit by invitation only. Teenage girl singers will not be on the list (I will still worship your CD’s but I don’t want to meet you). When we arrive, we staked out our spot. We were in the standing only area in front of the stage. Not long after, a short, late-twenties, couple came and stood in front of us. They proceeded to smoke—a hobby that if chosen to do in public, I feel is an innovation to be set on fire. In addition, the man looked like he had not bathed in several days and had frequently decided to wallow in dirt. To make matters better, he pulls out his cell phone, the same make and model I have. True to his roots, however, his phone was two toned, having taken parts from different devices. He ensued by showing his girlfriend/wife a vast quantity of vulgar, very detailed photos of a new model that his friend sent him. I preferred the smoking.
Before long, Taylor, who really is an very good singer and songwriter, came out on stage and incessantly twirled her hair in circles around her body, and continued to give what she intended to be her serious, model face, but looked more like she had just shit and was confused about where she was, who the people were in front of her, and why she was on stage. The one thing she was sure of, and held to firmly, from all that she was saying, was that she was Taylor Swift (in case we forgot) and she has countless songs on the top ten list. Wonderful.
After a couple songs into her set, a gaggle of girls (about six or eight) settled in right behind us. We have smoking, dirty, spread vagina picture man in front and a horde of teenage girls behind us. I begin to feel trapped. These lovely future of the female species were bitching loudly about how mean the other people they had been standing by had been. Seemingly, they had been yelling at the girls to the point where the girls finally left. I knew we were in trouble.
Each girl was at an individualized level of drunkenness. I am becoming less and less tolerant of drunken behavior in general. This sensitivity was heightened due to their underage qualifications. A couple of the girls couldn’t stand very well, and were constantly falling into everyone around me. Me included. At the risk of sounding like the hermit I am becoming, I don’t like to be touched by people I don’t know and who have not specifically received my approval for doing so. I missed a couple of Taylor’s songs, and I am sure many more of her ‘serious’ faces while I allowed myself to get lost in my rapidly seething anger. Before too much time had passed, the girl who had achieved the highest level of drunken debauchery crawled onto the back of her runner up. They were swaying more than a palm tree in a hurricane. After the second or third collision, I turn to the girls and told them to knock it off. To my credit, I did not curse at them. However, I did mention detox. They looked at me with a mixture of fear, shock, and anger. How dare I ruin their fun?
My relief was momentary. They proceeded to become more obnoxious. I forgot the adage ‘more flies with honey,’ and began to yell at them, still no cursing. I turned around and found a security guard type person and pointed to the girls informing him of their underage status and their attempts of becoming the Tanya Hardings of tomorrow. The two forerunners of the drunk game took off into the crowd. Good riddance. I had hopes they would stumble into the arena where they keep the rodeo bulls. That’s one show I would have paid to see, I would have lifted the cattle up to the highest of an Indian (the country, not the Native Americans) god had they been successful.
The rest of the vile girls stayed behind, and they were pissed. They proceeded to scream at the top of their lungs. Not the kind of scream most young girls bellow at the sight of Elvis, Brittney, or the Jonas Brothers (gag), but the type of screams that you feel in your bones and makes your stomach quiver. I do not exaggerate in the slightest when I tell you that my ears hurt for hours after.
It was clear that they were being very intentional in their actions at this point, trying to get us to move away from them. What they don’t know is, I’m the nice guy. I’m the patient guy. I’m the guy who really doesn’t care what decision is made and doesn’t get upset of he doesn’t always get his way. What they also don’t know about the nice guy, is that you don’t wanna piss him off. I let my stubbornness take control and I set my feet shoulder width apart, squared my shoulders, puffed my chest out, and blocked their view. Both John Wayne and little roosters everywhere were proud. I have never really had violent thoughts toward people, but during this time, I was clearly envisioning reaching around and grabbing fist-fulls of their hair at their scalp, yanking them down, and smashing their faces into the ground. I would like to say that it was my focus on loving people like Jesus would, or trying to be a better man that kept me from literally obliterating these wastes of humanity, but I would lying. It was the thought of the police that would come after. I was sure they would agree with my actions and would thank me while they put the handcuffs on me, but they would have to follow through with the law (however skewed it might be).
Towards the end of Taylor’s set, the girls increased their onslaught. In addition to the screaming (their throats had to be bleeding the next day, a thought that gives me great pleasure), they began to reach out toward Taylor (she was a good fifty feet away) and run their hands into the sides of Chad’s and my faces. As if we had one mind, we both whirl around and lay into the girls. We were both mere inches away (which was harder for Chad as he’s taller) and screaming in their faces. They stopped. They were pissed, but they stopped. They whined and whimpered and even got a little teary, but they stopped. Not long after, they moved on. The people around us gave us both their respect and their thanks.
By the end of the night, the dirty little man in front of me (one of the several who seemed to think we had saved the concert) continued to wrap his arm around my neck, and was constantly looking back to smile, pat my chest, or offer me one of his nearly twenty beers that he consumed. He had NO idea we were gay, which testifies to vast quantity of beer he ingested. The funny thing was, I loved this dirty little guy. We had been through war together and had come out on the other side victorious. He could blow smoke in my face for the next two hours and have shown me picture after picture of vaginas in various stages of bloom, and while I would have barfed incessantly, I would still have adored him. I loved every person around us. The funny thing was that I wasn’t the only one experiencing this emotion. Everyone around us seemingly felt that we had all united to survive the Fourth Reich and could now truly celebrate together. There was another group of younger girls next to us. Very nice girls who yelled and screamed in an appropriate manner. This one cute one, kept accidentally touching her elbow against mine, the normal way it happens in large crowds. Every time, she would look at me quickly and apologize, and I would do my best to smile sweetly and let her know it was alright and that it couldn’t be helped in a situation like this. I’m not sure if she understood the difference between herself and the girls that had been there previous. She wasn’t aware that she would grow up to be a lovely, strong woman, while her counterparts would grown up only to wither and sour by the time they reached thirty. She did, however, think that she needed to be afraid of me. She needn’t have feared. We had survived the Titanic together. I would sooner have thrown myself off the iceberg than have watched her go down into the deep.
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