There's a music festival going on at Golden Gate Park this weekend. We live about two blocks from the Park, so we're going in to the weekend prepared to deal with the ensuing craziness. I thought I'd be able to sneak home after I got off work at 6:00 yesterday, before the madness really got in full swing. I was wrong.

See, I mistakenly thought the music festival was the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass fest, so I didn't think it would be a big deal. Turns out that festival is in October. This festival is the Outside Lands Music Festival, which is considerably a bigger deal. As in, the headliners for Friday night were Radiohead and Beck. Shit.

So needless to say, the two bus lines that I could take from downtown back to my house were PACKED. And that was even with the bus lines running every 2-4 minutes. I knew I had no chance at my regular stop, where only one line comes by, so I walked seven LONG blocks down to the Powell Street stop. There were about 80 people there. I am not even joking. It was like seeing the queue for the last chopper out of Saigon.

Fortune was on my side, as two #21 buses pulled up at the same time and the majority of the people at the station--being out of towners--were waiting for the #5, which is the more direct bus line, so I was able to shove my way onto the second bus and even got a seat! Hurray!

That's about where my luck ran out.

You see, the thing about Radiohead is that in the last few years they've started to attract of cadre of White People as fans. I hate White People. Now, don't confuse that with white people. White People are the Euro-Americans who can identify with the majority of stuff on this blog. And I was surrounded by them.

No problem, just bust out the iPod and crank it up, right? That was the plan--until my iPod immediately took a dump on me and claimed it was out of battery power, even though there had been a little bit of a bar on the battery indicator seconds before. WTF.

So I was trapped on this bus ride, which was about 10-15 minutes longer than usual (for a total of about 35 minutes), listening to inane White Person chatter. Like, as they popped open their Red Bulls, they compared energy drinks. Or how they reminisced in exacting detail about scenes from Growing Pains ("Yeah, Robin Thicke's dad was in that show!") and Family Ties. How "I have little faith in the franchise now that John Favreau is no longer writing the script." I think the best was when the Barbie doll in the seat in front of me proudly announced to her friend that she was getting a tattoo, "but a small one behind my ear, so no one can see it and only I know it's there."

When I at last stumbled off the bus, I had a raging headache. It was just so bad.

In some ways, though, it was illuminating. It coalesced my distaste for White People, which I'd never really been aware of before, not beyond a vague sense of discomfort whenever I was around them. I realized it's the reason I don't like certain people, the type of people who go out drinking on Friday night and then spend the rest of the week talking about how drunk they got; it's the people I found myself amongst at the Wolfmother and Faint shows (in addition to the freaks and weirdos I feel much more kindred with, of course). So I guess in the long run, it was a good thing, this bus ride. Still, it took me all night to recover. We watched Meet the Feebles and it barely fazed me.

Post-script: Like the aforementioned shows, it's not so much the bands playing at that festival as it is the people attending that bothered me. When I got home and checked out who was playing at the festival, there were actually a few acts I found myself thinking, "Shoot, I would've liked to have seen them!" The Black Keys, Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, Black Mountain, Rodrigo y Gabriela, etc. Ah well.

Post-script the second: After getting home, I stumbled across this cartoon which kind of sums up how I feel about my place in the world:



Post-script the third: For no reason at all, a hedgehog: