D.A.R.E.

Another month, another show. It's a hard life, I tell you. Let's talk about drugs and concerts.

My first drugs and concerts experience came secondhand: my friend Alan told me about his trip to a Grateful Dead concert as a young lad, where a fellow concert-goer, somehow (somehow, indeed) ignored his youth and inexperience and offered him a hit off a joint. Alan was young enough to be freaked out.

Much, much later I had my own concert-going drug-taking experience: a time in college when a friend brought a pipe and a free ticket to see Phish in Albany and I partook of both. I remember a lot of long songs and two guys jumping in synchronized fashion on trampolines on stage, so it must have been a good show. However, I had yet to have the quintessential drugs-in-the-crowd show experience - the one that doesn't involve doing coke off a stripper's backside - until about two weeks ago.

There I was, crowded into a corner of the Roseland Ballroom, the venue's acoustics-destroying balcony hanging over my head and the heads of hundreds of others squeezed to the fringes by the moshers and the capacity crowd. Machine Head was on, rocking my socks off, while I clutched my camera to my chest, trying to watch the stage, not get knocked down by a crowd surge and avoid damaging my precious photograph-taking instrument. Then the raggedly-looking man in front of me turned around and offered me the rapidly shrinking joint burning in his hand. He might have told me to take it, or I think he did; it was pretty loud, so he might have been firmly gesturing in an effort to give his thoughts about the weather over the noise. In any case, I took him up on his offer, not pausing to think of the possibility of anything laced and enjoyed a few moments of the glorious community of metal. Booyah.