Living in the Moment and Staying the Fuck off Facebook

You've gotta get photographed with this dude, however. 

For much of the past two weeks or so I have been on a hell of an interesting journey throughout God’s own United States following American pop parodist Weird Al” Yankovic’s Ridiculously Self-Indulgent, Ill-Advised Vanity Tour, first in Chicago, then in Milwaukee, then Wabash, Indiana followed by Augusta Georgia and then finally my home town of Atlanta, Georgia. 

Seeing as you are reading the blog on my website, you are probably well aware of this fact, given my surprisingly healthy and productive obsession with Mr. Yankovic and his life’s work. But you would not necessarily know from my Twitter feed or my Facebook page. The whole purpose of this trip, beyond the obvious pleasure and enjoyment involved, is to document this once in a lifetime tour for posterity, for this website, the eventual Weird Accordion to Al book and a freelance outlet but I’ve been too intent on living in the moment to document this tour for the present. 

I have a hard time living in the moment. My brain is forever hurtling me back into the past or headlong into the future for the sake of anxiety and all-consuming fear. That’s one of the reasons I love, and am unhealthily addicted to social media: it’s a way of perpetually distracting yourself, of narrating and photographing and quipping your way through life to avoid actually having to live it. 

That’s why my most intense pop culture experiences tend to be the least photographed. I have almost no photographs of myself following Phish in 2011, for the tour that led to You Don't Know Me But You Don’t Like Me, for example. That somehow makes the experience more special. It’s reachable only through the fog of memory and the legal bootlegs of the shows I saw. Oh, and I suppose by the book that I wrote about the experience. 

I look at my time following Al on this tour as an extension of my time following Phish. A big part of the reason I wanted to do it in the first place was because, for the first and perhaps last time in his career, Al was touring in a Phish-like fashion, switching up the set list every night and playing multiple nights in the same venue. 

There’s something sacred about live music, something ineffable that’s impossible to replicate in any other form. This tour I’ve tried to be as present as humanly possible. Of the four concerts that I’ve seen so far in the tour, I have gone to the bathroom zero times. I’ve gone to the bar to get drinks zero times. I’ve gotten up from my seat zero times. 

This entire tour I’ve done nothing but sit in my (very good) seat and be entertained for two solid hours. I haven’t even taken any photographs, really, with my phone even though the lighting is quite impressive and there are all sorts of awesome photographs to be taken. 

Then again, when I was working on Weird Al: The Book I literally looked at maybe ten thousand photographs of Al performing in concert throughout the decades to determine which ones should end up in the book. I looked at those pictures until my eyes bled and my brain exploded. 

Those pictures said so much. Yet there were profound limits on what they could convey. They told stories but those stories weren’t necessarily true. 

That said, I am not entirely averse to taking pictures this tour. I would not be a red-blooded American if I did not get my picture taken with Al backstage after the first show and at an in-store I of course had to be photographed with Dr. Demento. It was, astonishingly enough, the first time I’d met or talked to him, so I wanted to document the moment. 

Then again, probably my only frustration about speaking at the Juggalo March on Washington is that apparently nobody thought a weird dude giving a speech about being a Juggalo while wearing a Phish tee shirt was worth photographing or video-taping and I would love to have a good photograph of myself onstage. 

Oh well. I know that I was there. I know that it was so special that it’s hard to even put into words, even if putting things into words is your profession. I feel the same way about this tour and you know what? That’s enough. In fact, it’s more than enough. 

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