We need to talk about a few things on thishereblog.
We need to talk about Durant, Oklahoma, which is about 90 miles north of Dallas. We need to talk about Oklahoma City, my second favorite city in the world (first in Nashville), and we need to talk about Dallas.
The first blog will be about Durant. I have to say, this place holds a special place in my heart.
During a show in 2018, a week after a relationship that I was in ended, Eric Church hopped down into the audience during Springsteen and signed my copy of Rolling Stone (with him on the cover).
So, I'm just going to leave that right there.
Durant, Oklahoma rocks.
---
First off, I will say that I'm going to an Eric Church concert at the end of July. The show was postponed from last year. I've been looking forward to attending that show since the Covid vaccine first hit my arm back in January.
But the thing is, Mr. Church had a show scheduled for Oklahoma last week.
And sometimes when Mr. Church is in the state beside you, you just gotta go see him and the band and have a damn good time.
The thing you need to know about the past year of my life is that nothing has gone according to plan. So when life totally sucks, sometimes you just need to take some time for yourself and do some good, old-fashioned self care.
I looked at the distance between myself and Durant, Oklahoma, and I discovered that I could totally make the show if I wanted to.
...but the show had been sold out for weeks.
Bummer, man.
About a week before the show, life got really stressful. I realized that I needed to attend that show to give my soul a little relaxing time. Single tickets starting popping up on Ticketmaster (people release them back onto Ticketmaster when they realize they can't attend, usually the week before the show).
There were no pit tickets left, which was a major bummer because that's my favorite spot in the world, but there was a single seat available in the seats right behind the pit.
Hey, that works for me!
I left town that afternoon and started my trek south.
I will say that I pulled into the parking garage at Durant at 8:05, with the show scheduled to start at 8 p.m. However, my favorite artist is usually 30 minutes late, so I figured it'd be all right.
Good thing, too, because that line of cars in front of me moved at a snail's pace through that parking garage.
On the way to the show that afternoon, I passed the most horrible wreck I've ever seen, on the interstate, just inside the Oklahoma line. Traffic was stopped for about 30 minutes, in broad daylight on the interstate. Like I told my parents later, I couldn't even tell what the vehicle was.
Car? Truck? SUV?
All that was left of it was a giant piece of twisted metal that resembled something that I've never seen before.
(I Googled it later that weekend. One person died.)
The entire time I was stopped on the interstate, before I drove past the wreck, I figured that someone had probably just lost their life.
And it's hard to be irritated about possibly being late for a concert when someone just died 1,000 feet in front of you. I wondered a lot while I was waiting why it happened to that person and not someone else.
Why do things even happen at all?
I didn't come up with an answer as to why things happen the way they do. All I could do at the moment was wait patiently, listen to some Church, and quietly say a prayer for the person.
---
I did make it on time to the show. I cut it pretty close.
And when I saw that beautiful casino appear in my windshield, I let out the loudest, most primal scream ever.
It's time for Church!
The thing that made this show special was that it was his first concert in 18 months, thanks to the pandemic.
Eighteen months with no Church in my life is a really long time, guys. Technically, I hadn't been to Church in 25 months. (But who's counting?)
So, I knew this show would be special.
I viewed it as a sign that the universe was finally moving on, and that the nightmare that the entire world has lived since Covid started was finally starting to end.
By the time I finally sat down in my seat, one song played in full, and then the lights went down and the opening song that he always comes on stage to starts blaring through the speakers.
He came onto the stage to the same song that he always comes on stage to.
In my heart, I thought, wow. The more things change, the more they stay the same. In a world where not much of my life has made sense, this one moment, this amazing moment, that's the moment that it all finally started to make some sense.
From there, it was more than two hours of plain happiness.
Durant screamed. We shouted, we danced, we clapped, we cheered on his mistakes and probably a few of us even cried.
I tried really hard to cry at the show. I remember standing there (because no one sits at Church, not even one single person) and I literally tried to cry.
No tears came, though. So instead, I just sang as loud as I could, screamed frequently, and danced like no one was watching.
It was the best thing ever.
It was totally worth all of the bullshit that I went through over the past year.
I'll attach something that I wrote on Facebook that night later in this post. Let's just say that those two hours were probably the best two hours of the past year of my life.
At one point, I sent a text message to my parents: "Eric is kissing fans."
That's when you know the artist missed his fans just as much as the fans missed him.
Oh. My. God.
Best concert ever.
----
My Facebook post:
No comments:
Post a Comment