the fourth day

I was woken up by the heat, yes, but mostly because of fear. Fear that my eye would fall off. So I quickly put on some clothes, a hat, a pair of sunglasses, got the prescription for my eye medication that they gave me last night and walked to the info desk to get directions to wall greens.

The lady gave me a face, “honey, wall greens is far. You have to leave Bonnaroo.”

I had no choice. Wouldn’t it be a good idea to come stocked with medicine for an infection that spreads like crazy, especially if you’re making a town of 100,000 people? I wish Bonnaroo had thought of that before putting a giant fountain that everyone showers in in the middle of centeroo. But hey, like everything, you have to take what shit you have. So I started walking. Half hour. My eye was hurting so bad, like a sharp piece of glass was in it and tearing it apart. I knew I had a long way to go. Then a tuck stopped next to me. Nice man drove me to the exit. There I asked a police man how to get to wallgreens,

“I have pink eye and I need medicine.”

He asked one of those people who buy and sell tickets to drive me. I got on the back of his tractor and we drove to his car. Then Matt drove us out of Bonnaroo, into town, to wallgreens to find it closed, and then he drove me to the rite aid pharmacy and waited for me to come out 30 minutes later with my medicine. It was his 23^rd birthday too.

He drove me back but dropped me off at the entrance because he had to work. I hitched back with 2 other people before getting dropped off some place familiar. I got back to my tent 2 hours later to find the gang exactly how I left them, almost dead looking. An hour later we were up and ready to start our final day. This time we were dragging our feet. Dana, Katie, and I slept everywhere we went that day. We went to the Budweiser tent where they sprayed you with a hose and had misting fans. They had tents where we took a nap on the ground and met 2 really cute guys. We walked to the ford factory. It was a room of salvation. It had air conditioning, couches, TVs, radios, carpet, we passed out for like 2 hours there and sat on the couch for another hour. Finally we got energy back to see Dave Mathews band. Boy did we get energy.

Before Dave, we asked some guys for weed, then some guys who had weed came up to us and we all sat down in the middle of the field and had a friendly smoke sesh. Right in the middle of the crowd like it was no big deal. It struck me and it pains me to think that people would look at us and say we were criminals, we are dangerous druggies doing illegal things. But look around, the reason these wonderful music festivals exist is to keep those bad people out and so we can live in a land that is how we want, that is peace and love and harmony.

The next day, concaved and nearly dehydrated, we said our goodbyes to our friends. We rode 5 hours back to South Carolina. The next day, we flew back to phoenix. The next day I’m sitting in my room in Tucson writing all about Bonnaroo.

I’m sure there are things I have missed here and I’m sure I will write stories about this one time and that one dude for weeks but for now, this is what I could come up with about my time at bonnaroo.

It was paradise in mud. It was a vacation in dirt. It is necessary for every loving soul to recharge and keep on loving.