I’m sure I’ve mentioned it before in this space, but I was not a frequent concert attendee prior to my undergraduate degree. It’s partly not living in a major hub in high school, part a disdain for live music that I have since lost, and part a sense of urgency as I feel myself aging.
A concert is a weird beast, really. I’ve probably attended more in 2011 alone than most people get around to in their entire lives. Don’t get me wrong, live music is still a huge thing, but I wonder if the ubiquity of Youtube and easy, pervasive access to music has dulled people’s enthusiasm for blowing out their eardrums in large, sweaty groups of people.
You may recall that I received some bad news at an Anamanaguchi concert back in March of 2010. This is a story of the rise and fall of The Concert Curse (cue spooky music).
See, two similar events are easily dismissible as a coincidence, but three? That’s hitting pattern territory. Eric touched upon it in the comments of my April Smith post in last year’s Fukubukuro. A superstitious man would stop going to concerts while dating. I was not a superstitious man in early January.
Anamanaguchi was, coincidentally, in town yet again. I’d been dating Danni for about a month and things seemed to be just peachy. She was super into me, but I guess I had glossed over the fact that she was just re-entering the dating game after a broken engagement the year before. Danni was cool and she dug video games and was receptive to chiptunes so we decided to hit up the Black Cat with David and Kendra and catch Anamanaguchi doing their thing.
Pete, Ary, Luke, and James delivered in a set that was much stronger than the one we caught at Sonar and the night was awesome. Everyone had fun. Everything seemed like it was fine. Two days later Danni broke up with me. She said she felt trapped and like she was in too deep. Meeting my little brother was the straw that broke the camel’s back. It made her freak that things were moving too fast and getting too serious. I jokingly blamed David, but he and I both knew that it was something more insidious: concerts
Of course this all turned out to be a blessing anyway. The end of my relationship with Danni opened me up to dating Tiffany, who things were going well with, except…two concerts were coming up within three days of each other with a date sandwiched in between. Could my budding relationship handle that kind of mojo?
I frantically laid out the impending crisis to my visiting friend Liana in a night that I rather embarrassingly spent lamenting the woes of my love life rather than enjoying hanging out with my friend. That very night we were at an embarrassing half-concert at a Cornell event, but the real deal was that coming Monday. Min and I were set to go to Philadelphia to see Jonathan Coulton. Surely the melancholic songwriter would curse my relationship and doom me to loneliness yet again!
No. Not this time. The curse was somehow lifted. Perhaps I had confused it by cramming three (really 2.5) concerts into one month and it had forgotten to ruin my relationship. Maybe there never was a curse. Sure, sometimes I get a small tingling at the back of my neck when I’m about to attend a show, but all I know is that I’m free.
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