Baby's First Mosh Pit

______I went to my first real concert last Thursday night, you guys. Perhaps you've heard of AFI, short for A Fire Inside, also known as a metaphor for my middle school existence: composed of angst, sorrow, and studs, they owned the stage that night and the audience before them. I would have never expected them to come to a place near me, but lo and behold, they did. So I managed to get a dear friend of mine to abide me and we did jam like the jammiest of fruit concentrates. As we sang and  to all the familiar AFI tunes, the horrors of middle school flooding back into our thoughts, he suddenly asked, "You want to go up?" I wasn't sure what he meant, and then it clicked.

______Crowd-surfing.

______Nodding then subsequently putting on a mask of urbane swag, I shout-asked a random fellow to my friend's right, "Can you help me up?"

______And within an instant, I was floating above a sea of undulating hands, unable to control the direction or velocity at which I was being transported. I was a helpless turtle on its back being guided solely by the black-clad human beings below me. My hands were scrunched in toward my core and flailing ever so slightly, and my mouth was most definitely producing screaming noises. I was just being so hardcore in that moment, you guys. Such. A. Punk.

______Take me to your leader, I thought, and as if the shaking bodies below me heard such thoughts, my being was slowly transported toward the stage, and closer, and closer... I saw a strobing blue light,  heads furnished with mowhawks, ears gaged with chrome, the lead singer's combat boots, and even gazed up for a short second to meet eyes with him for a bloody 1/60th of a second. The best 0.01666666 seconds of my life, naturally.

______I did the math for that fraction. Don't check it.

______Suddenly, my shoulders dropped and my body slanted at an angle toward the ground. As soon as I knew it, I was half-cradled, half-flopped in the muscly arms of a security guy who skillfully slipped me upright and onto my feet. It was plausible he had done this many times before.

______"You okay?" he asked with a half-laugh. I nodded, but apologized immediately for being in the empty lane between stage and crowd, and waddled back toward the chanting swarm of black-clad human beings with my tail between my legs. As quickly as possible, I integrated myself seamlessly into the dark blob of thrashing organic matter. Don't you just adore how I refer to people as thrashing organic matter? I do.



______When the moshing began, I did not know it had. I had always presumed that moshing was nothing more than highly intensified fist-pumping and jumping, much more energetic than the usual kinetic motion that reverberates through concert-goers' bodies. What happened was that all of a sudden, I realized that these turdbuckets next to me were shoving each other. Like, chill you guys. This is AFI. We are a chill folk: act like it.

______OH.
______But then.
______But then.

______But then, a sweaty man with a ginger beard and a rubbery belly smacked into me. His momentum propelled me into one of the three long-haired Gothic Fabio-bros that had been swaying peacefully alongside my friend and I the entire concert. From there, Gothic Fabio One propelled me into Gothic Fabio Two with a hearty shove of both hands. I felt absolutely betrayed since we were all bros signing along and smiling and stabbing the air with our hands just a moment ago. Now, the brotherhood had been ruthlessly torn apart, like a piece of bread unable to be mended, and so tossing all logic aside, I shoved Gothic Fabio One back at his other two clones. They seemed unfazed and continued to shoulder into whoever they could.



______From there, I dashed away from the mad mosh-y merriment, dodging the wild Spartans about me like a football star and using my arms to bounce from one human to the next. I was a pinball in a game of flashing lights and shifting obstacles, and the floor was my beer-and-sweat-drenched battlefield. Taking care not to slip, I took refuge behind a chill couple in their mid-thirties who were surveying the situation with eyes saturated with wisdom and amusement.

______I was so not being hardcore in that moment, you guys.

______But it was no matter, because the evening was rad nonetheless, and I zipped back to the center of the floor when the moshing ceased. The presence of the lead singer (and love of my life), Davey Havok, gave off the presence that he presented in his videos, interviews, and tunes, but he performed above and beyond what I thought. He did all his jumps, hair flips, and sassy Davey-gestures were just the way I imagined in the flesh, if not better. I did fangirl. Hashtag no shame.

______What was your first concert experience like, if you had one? If not, what's your favorite steamed vegetable?