Wednesday, July 21
Dear Diary,
The names in this journal have been changed to protect the innocent. While most of the trip has gone remarkably smoothly, there nevertheless have been tense moments symptomatic of living in such close quarters. A sample from this morning, as we journeyed along the New York State Thruway:
Dad: Tank, your knee is in my back.
Tank: (silence)
Dad: Please, move your knee.
Sausage: Well, you’ve taken all the f***IN’ room. Your seat’s all the way back …
Dad: (screaming) I’M F***IN’ DRIVING, SAUSAGE! I’M F***IN’ DRIVING HERE! (silence)
Mom: (giggles softly)
Sausage: (long pause … screams) I HATE YOU, DAD!
Aside from more than a couple of moments such as that, things are just fine.
Our arrival at Woodstock ’99 was surreal. The irony of “Woodstock” taking place at a former Air Force base has been oft observed, but it cannot compare to the experience of entering the fortified festival area. We were told to “take a right at the bomber” in order to enter the facility. Indeed, the main entrance was around the corner from a B-52, and shortly after passing it, our media credentials were checked — I kid you not, diary — three times with 60 feet of the entrance. Upon passing the final checkpoint at the 12-foot chain link fence guarded by a member of the “peace patrol,” we drove to our spot in the “west village.”
Again, the surreality of the environment was reinforced profoundly when Mom observed that we were, in fact, driving down the base’s tarmac. Finally, after driving for close to a mile along the runway and passing through yet another security checkpoint, we arrived at our site. “Village” is a generous term, since the villages consist of three large tents separated from one another by hundreds of yards of grass-like scrub.
This place is without scale. It is beyond vast. Even if the projected 300,000 visitors should show, I expect that this place will remain stark and seemingly empty. The main stages are so far from one another that they are obscured by the curvature of the Earth. The grounds are scattered with stages, “vid rooms,” extreme sports venues, and complex Porta Potty mazes. all of these capitalist constructs are hundreds of feet from one another, rendering an already austere landscape a patina of deep-fried plastic-fantastic Gen-X post-baby boomer nostalgia.
So now we sit, sweating, in our “booth” in our “village” with the “bugs” on the “ground,” waiting for the latest example of the Disney-commercial complex to commence within the hollowed-out remains of the military-industrial complex. We have more than 36 hours before anything happens, and if we avoid killing ourselves or one another during that period, then another journal entry is sure to soon follow.
Later…
It has become clear that we, the Mother Jones four, must maintain a consistent level of inebriation in order to get through the rest of this week. After the consumption of a few cocktails, everything seems far rosier. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for our friend Sausage, who had been holding his head in his hands for nearly an hour, and upon mentioning that he needed to “walk it off,” has not been seen since. Pretty freaky, man.
Godspeed,
Dad
