So last night, while I was roiling about in a crowd of people I've never met, sponging up the bath of countless sweaty rivulets amassing together on my skin, mixed in with my own concoction of salt, water, and whatever the hell else is in there, I was thinking: "How many people probably touched me that have some strange disease? Owe some massive payment from debt? Just lost somebody close in the last month from death? Or even have some paper they need to write that they haven't started on?" I started thinking about the wildest things that would make somebody worried, angry, upset, confused, bitter...things people would sweat over, to use the phrase contextually. When the show was done and over with, I was a half wrung-out dish rag, and I wondered how many peoples' burdens of life I carried with me in the fabrics of my clothes. I wondered how many people had excreted those pains, along with their sweat, in joyous celebration of music they enjoyed, and left that place with just a little bit less of a reason to sweat. Of course, we were all in the same environment, so those people were inevitably caught in the same cycle as I was, and I equally transferred any of my own sweat onto them too. Thus, they equally carried along my sweat in their clothes.
The great thing with shows too is that you don't really get much opportunity to wash it all off until you get home. You ride along and the mixture of dog breath dances with your immediate memories. You play back the scenes from an hour or two before, over and over in your head, along with the hundreds or thousands of other people that are likely doing the same, and it all never really escapes you until the shower hits, and you're standing under a stream of refreshing water. No salt, no other chemicals: just straight water. Then you start to break away from the correlation of the other folk who plastered you in sweat. Then you are free to move on.
The power of live music is majestic. Curing. Persistent. Enthralling. Enlightening.
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