08.17.22 – Weds. – 6:16PM Eastern – EWR Airport

What’s the matter, New Jersey? Too soon to put a dispensary in the airport terminal? I should think not, you bunch of squares.

I think a plane just landed at my gate. Watching the people come off, dude in the Rick and Morty shirt a must — is that still a thing? — families, the odd old lady, etc., I’m trying to properly discern if any of them have sabotaged the craft, which may or may not actually be the one I’ll fly on. Doesn’t matter. Shifty bastards in from somewhere.

Maybe you haven’t flown since the pandemic entered our lives, but it’s provided airlines a usable excuse for continuing to pay their workers shit while demanding more from them, cut services, cancel flights with less notice — they tell you to download the app, because I’m really sure United sending me “marketing updates” is going to help anything; I downloaded the app — and generally provide a product that’s inferior to the chicken-coup-in-the-sky experience of flying economy in the Before Times, while also reaping record setting profits and pleading poverty for government subsidies. The US should nationalize every airline operating in its borders. At least if someone shits all over you in government, you can vote them out — enjoy that while it lasts, by the way. Can’t even do that with middle management, let alone a CEO or the entire structure of a corporatocracy.

My flight leaves at 8:30 to Psycho Las Vegas. Newark Airport is packed. Ton of people in Terminal C. Some kid somewhere is singing “Itsy Bitsy Spider.” Every time I hear a child call out “daddy!,” which has happened a few times in the 20 minutes I’ve been planted in this spot, I flinch. My own son, four and a half, I left home with my wife, and I leave home knowing that my doing so was a mistake. Yeah, I’m sure Psycho will be cool, some good music, lots of good people in a big, weird and, yes, hyper-corporate setting. This festival has both a golf tournament and Church of the Cosmic Skull playing; I’ll be honest, part of why I wanted to go back to it in the first place was to see if I could make sense of what it’s become since the last time I was there in 2018. Eons ago.

In the ensuing years, in addition to the plague, the fest has moved casinos twice. It’s at Resorts World now, which is fine I guess? I have no idea one vs. the other and I sincerely doubt it matters in anything beyond finding where I’m going — a challenge, I’m expecting — but I’ve seen the schedule and I’ll mostly be holed up in the smaller spaces, so whatever. Tomorrow is the pool party. Pool party? Uh, excuse me, sir? I like heavy music. Are you sure I’m allowed at the pool? At the hotel more generally?

Oh sure, boss. The Strip takes all kinds. Bring in the working and middle classes with the promise of the highbrow ritz, a chance at a big life, a dream of some cash, head in the shower, whatever it is. Pump pheromones into the air conditioning; they can’t hold their breath forever. Hey you, you wanna be human? You gotta spend money to make money bro. Last time I was in Las Vegas, the sun beat down hard north of 105 degrees, and no different is expected this week. It’s cloudy in Jersey. There are birds flying in the terminal. A plane to Paris, a plane to San Fransisco, and me. A plane to the playground.

But yeah, it’ll be cool. It’ll go till Sunday, I’ll fly home Monday, blah blah. Last time I traveled for something music-related was in June, and my kid was almost over it. This will be a setback there, as well as a strain on my marriage, and as these are the two most important relationships in my life — the rest of my family, up to and including my wife’s mother and sister, are a support system not to be trivialized — I am not looking forward to landing, deboarding or de-planing or getting-off-the-fucking-aircraft or whatever they call it now, and finding myself directly in the shitter. I didn’t even make it out of the airport last time I got home before being bit by my son. Hard.

It must be worth going though, right? If it wasn’t, presumably I wouldn’t, but nobody rides for free. And while the weekend will no doubt be a lengthy celebration of gonzo ideology — I prefer Gonzo the Muppet; leave it to the Baby Boomers to ‘invent a journalism’ that happens to place themselves front and center; points for consistency, and hey, how ’bout that white privilege? — a kind of Fear and Loathing at a Luxury Hotel, but I guess that was true anyhow. I never read that book. I got Hell’s Angels as a gift and read that out of curiosity. Turns out if I want self-indulgent, self-aggrandizing, druggy-alt-culture posturing, I can just read my own shit. I’m more interested in myself anyhow that some dude who did drugs when the stakes were… nil… and plus that way I get to find all the infuriating typos, sometimes years later. I am a lucky man.

But I’m going. Thank you to Psycho Las Vegas for having me back. Suppose I shouldn’t talk too much shit, lest I wear out my seemingly tenuous welcome, but I have to wonder how long a festival that books the likes of Mercyful Fate for an exclusive show and has pop-up tattoo parlors and  a mascot who’s a chimp in a Hawaiian shirt with a joint in his mouth and tinted glasses and their own beer and their own golf, really well crafted marketing language in their email updates about nothing, and their own VIP weekend passes is going to need me around to start with, especially considering they never did. But fuck yeah, I’ll go. Be a little stoner rock curio footnote on one of the US festival season’s most stacked bills — certainly the biggest fest in America for heavy; Maryland Death Fest is/was a different animal; this is more like Coachellapalooza, but righteously blitzed — and sneak my way through in nowhere-near-cool-or-relevant-enough-to-be-here-but-am-anyway style. Hell’s bells. I’m not even an influncer to my kid, let alone whichever social media is relevant this year for people who like making money.

My flight gets in late tonight. It’ll be past midnight by the time I get to the hotel. Tonight I stay on the cheap side; my bill. Tomorrow the fest puts me up in what I’m imagining is full-on swank, but we’ll have to see how it goes. I brought my favorite water cup. I brought my over-the-head pillow. I brought protein bars and a new camera lens and two laptops, neither of which I put in my checked bag because fuck you I’m never doing that again. I need to get up and get some water because the family sitting across from me has just gotten Wendy’s and I can smell the sugar in the bread and it smells fucking disgusting. I had a salmon caesar salad, cheesy as hell, before leaving the house. It will hold me at least until tomorrow. Then it will be all about coffee, iced tea (which I can be confident at finding because I’m in America and iced tea is a thing we do), and the odd bit of whatever it takes to survive. Maybe I’ll check in before, maybe not. You’ll live either way.

I’m winging it on coverage. I might not even talk about music. Whatever. I’m gonna see what I wanna see, take pictures when I want to do that, and try my best to make it worth the fuckstorm I’ll be returning to early next week. Maybe more travel writing less list-of-bands-who-were-good? I don’t know yet, but I’ll keep you posted.

Hour-plus till I take off. Should be an interesting time.

Thanks for reading.

Tags: Las Vegas, Nevada, Psycho Las Vegas, Psycho Las Vegas 2022, Psycho Las Vegas 2022 Coverage

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 17th, 2022 at 7:09 pm and is filed under Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.