I Went To Warped Tour And All I Got Was This Lousy Sunburn

I am a brunch person. I am a forgiving brunch person; I will overlook burnt toast, the occasional stale bagle, even O.J. from a can. That is how much of a brunch person I am. So it is with great confidence that I can say that I will never, under any circumstances, eat the Sunday brunch at T.G.I. Friday's again. There are Zimbabwean babies who would not touch that food. Miraculously, Kyle made the most of it.

It was the beginning of a long day.

Warped Tour is admittedly not my first choice of music festivals. I do like some punk/rock/emo bands, but not very many. Mostly I like shopping for cool band t-shirts no one else has. But this year, something was missing. And that something was: clouds. Oh sweet clouds, mystical protectors of the Irish people. There is a reason the sun does not shine in Ireland. If someone with Irish blood is exposed to the sun for more than 10 minutes, they will immediately burst into flames. My father is a great example of this; most of my childhood memories are of a gigantic flaming red man limping back to the car from the beach, screaming whenever we accidentally touched him. So with no clouds to protect us (me especially), Kyle and I both got badly sunburned approximately 17 minutes into the festival.

We'd only been there a few hours when we split up, Kyle to go in a mosh pit and me to hunt down some much-needed ice cream. Warped Tour is one of those places, like the movie theater, where under certain circumstances--mostly a lack of alternatives--you will gladly wait in a long line and pay $3 for a water, or $5 for an ice cream cone. And you won't even die inside more than a little. So I was waiting in line for ice cream going on 25 minutes, and was finally getting near the front. As I practiced my lines---"Double-dip mint chocolate chip, waffle cone, please"--I noticed that things were beginning to look...darker. And fuzzier. And they were moving too fast. Then suddenly a blonde girl with a giant ice cream smiley face apron was swirling in front of me, and it was the big moment to say my lines, but what I really said was something like, "Double-dip me waffle mint please." Somehow she understood my request, because next thing I knew I was holding a waffle cone, and the next thing the guy behind me knew, he was holding an unconscious girl whose waffle cone had just dropped on his shoe.

Luckily, this story has a happy ending. I got loaded on to an EMS golf cart, driven over to where the firetrucks were spraying the crowds, and was revived back into nauseous reality. Also, I got another ice cream cone, which was all I was really concerned about; to wait in line for almost a half hour in the sweltering sun, only to pass out just as you finally get to order, is something only Orwell could appreciate. Kyle emerged from the most pit and it was decided we'd leave early, missing most of the bands we came to see. But it was a good learning experience. Next year I will stay in Traverse City for the film festival, and Kyle can go alone and buy the cool band t-shirts for me. Some solutions are so brilliantly simple that you just overlook them.

Fianlly, to the owner of the silver sedan parked next to us at the Silverdome: sorry about that. We were in a hurry to leave because I was sick, plus we didn't have anything to write with. But say, wasn't that some festival?