I Miss Concerts, and other Pandemic Thoughts

“Strap yourselves in, please, it’s going to be a bumpy ride”

I’ve been lucky enough that COVID-19 hasn’t touched me personally. I haven’t gotten sick, and no one in my immediate family has, either. I’ve had cousins and aunts and uncles and close friends that have gotten it, which is very scary, but I’ve also been lucky enough that they’ve all gotten better. No one I know has died from it, as far as I can tell. I try to count my blessings about things like that, and tell myself that myself and my loved ones are safe and we’re going to get through this. I remind myself that I’m very, very lucky. Because it’s one of the only things that keeps me from getting super depressed when I think about everything else that this pandemic has cancelled.

I’ve maybe mentioned it off-hand in a post here or there, but I was supposed to go to Greece with my brother in the fall of 2020. That obviously didn’t happen, and that makes me really, really sad. My summer was work, eat, sleep, and spend time with my partner. But we couldn’t go anywhere, we couldn’t do anything. I mean, we technically could have gone to the bars, or to parties. They were open, they were there. But that would have been incredibly irresponsible and unsafe, so we didn’t. We tried to go on a couple weekend trips, but either planning around COVID was too stressful, or work got in the way. I was able to go to the east coast with my brother, but that was… stressful, to say the least. The second semester of my junior year of university, and now the entirety of my senior year of university, have happened under lockdown and zoom classes. These are the years when I’m supposed to be getting drunk with friends in the English building and wandering around Campustown until three in the morning, or going camping with a big group and building a huge bonfire. At least these were supposed to be the years when I could finally go to classes and not feel so awkward and self-conscious, like I had done freshman and sophomore year. But no. None of that happened, thanks to the virus. I’ve worked, played games, and seen the few friends and family I feel comfortable enough to visit. Went camping once or twice, managed a road trip. My normal college experience ended a year and a half early, and it feels like a whole year has just… disappeared. Poof. And that makes me really sad, and really tired.

I’ve never honestly sat down and really thought about the implications that the pandemic quarantine has had on my life. For a long time in the beginning, March and April of 2020, I just assumed that there wouldn’t really be many implications, and that it would be over by the fall. But once I realized that things weren’t going back to normal so easy, it still didn’t really hit me what I was losing because I did try to keep a more positive lookout, and reminding myself that I could have it worse really did help a little bit. I have been, and still am, stupidly lucky, and the things that I’ve really lost are all things that, well, I can do without, or I can do again later on down the road. I mean, I’m only young once, but I’m still going to be young when this is all finished, Fauci willing. But something hit me just recently. I sat down the other day with my housemate and talked for like three or four hours about our shared college experiences, since we met and, until we moved in together, largely interacted through Students for Environmental Concerns, or SECS, the club that I’m in on campus. And that was kind of when it hit me that, shit, I’m not getting this time back. So allow me a moment of self-pity while I reflect on the things that I miss.

Like the title says, I miss concerts. The last major concert I went to, over a year ago now, was in St. Louis. I went with my brother and my partner to meet up with a couple of close friends down in Missouri and go see Goldfinger, which may seem like a strange band to drive 10+ hours round trip to see, but I’ll be damned if it wasn’t worth it. And lambast me all you want, I really like Ska music. Punk shows are always electrifying, and the mosh is the best part, so I’m glad that my unbeknownst last hurrah was a concert like that. But there haven’t really been any shows since COVID started, for good reason of course, but I still miss those concerts. Riotfest 2021 is apparently trying to make up for a year of lost concerts by looking like an absolute masterpiece of music festivals, but I’m not sure if I’ll be able to go or feel comfortable enough going. And if I do go, will there be a moshpit? Will it be safe to mosh? if you aren’t moshing at Riotfest, what’s even the point? I’ve been to a handful of concerts in my day, but the ones with moshes are hands down my favorite. I really, really miss that, and I don’t know when it’s coming back.

Speaking of concerts, man have I got a lot of stories to tell about them. Riotfest 2018 is an especially batshit one, and I actually started out with this post thinking that I would be telling those stories here, at the suggestion of my mom. But I started writing and just kind of got… sad. I haven’t let myself feel sad about COVID all that much, preferring to unintentionally bottle it up instead. I’m on a roll now and the sadness train ain’t stopping. I’ll tell some of those stories another day. I mean, I can talk about Phish concerts, Dead and Company concerts, not one but two fucking Weezer concerts for some stupid reason, the Beale Street Music Festival, Flogging Molly at the House of Blues in Chicago, Riotfest 2018, The Who, Goldfinger, a handful of others my parents dragged me along to, the DuPage Symphony Orchestra apparently, and probably a couple I’m forgetting. It’s not even like I’m the concert type, I just keep ending up at them somehow. The mosh just keeps drawing me back in. And I miss that. I want to go to concerts again. It’s definitely something I never thought I’d miss, but damn it, I do.

And speaking of concerts, I also miss an entirely different type of concert; the staple of Urbana’s nightlife, the underground basement shitshows that I love so much, the grimy, low-quality beerfests that are college house shows. I’ve been to so many house shows in my college years (though not nearly as many as the people who really like them) that they all blend together at this point, and I wish they were up and running again. Hell, I’ve been to a house show in the basement of the American Football house, if that means anything to you, where I saw Fredo Disco perform live while my friend attempted to literally tear the pipes from the walls. You can fall in love and have your heart broken in the same second at a college house show, and that’s the kind of shit that I live for. I miss college parties in general, really, but the house shows were where it’s at. Forget frats; I’ll take someone’s dingy, overcrowded basement while part-time students play loudly and the beer flows freely over any sort of greek life event, any hour of any day. House shows just get so much more interesting. Like even the advertising is better; one of the local venues in town is called Waluigi’s Mansion. I love it. I love it so much. You can’t hope to ever attain that same level of pure chaos from pledge brother Steve’s bid party at Kappa Dappa Doo.

But I miss the more relaxed parties, too, the social ones where you get your twenty or thirty best friends and cram them into someone’s studio apartment and just drink for hours at a time. Sometimes everyone leaves and goes to a different house for no apparent reason. Usually that’s planned, but not always. That club I’m in, SECS, we used to do stuff like that every other weekend sometimes. One of our parties was disco-themed, and we all dressed up in sequins and got trashed to the sound of the Bee Gees. Another party was emo themed, so we all channeled our inner tween, dressed in black and ripped-up metal band t-shirts, and played My Chemical Romance for a night. Sometimes parties are just parties, and a door would get kicked in or someone would projectile vomit off the balcony. At least once that was me. But it didn’t matter what the exact circumstances were because we were all together, and that’s what mattered the most. I don’t know when that will happen again.

I think what I miss the most, though, are other people. Groups of people, interacting together, in a singular space. I miss my friends. I talk to them, yeah, and we’ve gotten together in small groups when we can, but it isn’t the same. Masks are up, we’re outside, six feet apart, and everyone’s on some sort of low-level anxiety kick. It didn’t even have to be a party; club events, sitting in the grass in between classes, going to our favorite bar (it’s Murphy’s, by the way), or just having a regular SECS meeting where we’d actually be productive and talk about how to get the University of Illinois to divest its funds from fossil fuels. I didn’t realize it back then, but sometimes those meetings on Wednesdays and Sundays were the only things that kept me going. With more than a year of retrospect, I can say with complete certainty that I miss them, and I miss the people. Even when we had zero plan as to what we were doing, or when things seemed impossibly bleak for our activism goals, I miss those days.

I miss the normalcy of those interactions, of not having to worry if my presence was going to cause someone else to literally die. We used to go to an Irish pub after meetings, and even when I couldn’t drink, it was great. Yes, I know that I could still go now, but it wouldn’t be the same. I could technically go to a crowded bare or technically find a basement party somewhere, but it just seems too dangerous. On the day of writing this, my partner and I were driving out and saw literally hundreds of people lined up to get into UIUC’s premier bar and/or sticky piss floor, The Red Lion. 75% of them had masks, none of them were social distanced, and they were outside when we saw them but they wouldn’t be outside for long. A year ago, I wouldn’t have thought twice. Now, I loathe those people with a semi-irrationality that’s fueled equally by public health standards and jealousy. I could be in that line with them. I’d love to be in that line with them. But I could get sick. Or someone else could get sick. And while I’m young and will probably recover, what about my roommates? My partner’s coworkers, some of whom are over 60? That random lady that greets us at the Meijer? There is a non-zero chance I could contract COVID from that bar, transmit it to someone else, and actually kill them. And the flippancy with which some people disregard that fear is both infuriating and captivating. I’m doing everything right and it doesn’t make any difference, but they get to go to a bar and party it up without consequences?

Maybe that’s the most tiring thing about covid, knowing that your contribution to slowing the spread, staying home and staying safe, is not only openly mocked by some but also very likely to produce no tangible results, at least not for a while, if ever. I don’t know why the US is now the most covid-friendly place on Earth, but I can’t help thinking it’s because of people who don’t do the bare minimum to slow the spread. But doing the bare minimum isn’t rewarding, especially when things just keep getting worse and worse. It’s this awful treadmill of depressing milestones and numbers of the dead, and nothing seems to help. It’s so easy to fall into thinking, “Well, nothing I do makes a difference, I might as well go to the bar.” But I know it isn’t that simple, and staying home and masking up does something. But… is it worth all this lost time? The straight answer is yes, of course, if my actions help prevent even one person from getting sick, or help stop one hospital from blasting over ICU capacity, then it was worth it. But, from the inside, it sure as hell doesn’t look that way.

But it isn’t like I’m the perfect quarantiner, anyway. I’ve had my fair share of questionable moments. I went on that big road trip and came in close contact with dozens of people, even though my brother and I did everything we could to limit any possible transmissible event. I went to a wedding back in September, that even though was entirely outside and a masks-on event, going so far as to require a negative test result to attend, from solely a greater-good, public-health, covid-slowing standpoint, we probably still shouldn’t have gone. And I’ll be going to another wedding in April, this time requiring me to fly on a plane to Florida. I have actively made a decision that flies in the face of everything I’ve been ridiculing people for in the past year. “How could you be so selfish to go a crowded bar?” Who the hell am I to be throwing the first stone? I’m not some sort of covid perfectionist, able to throw shade on others with impunity. None of us are. Sure, maybe there’s a difference in that this is an isolated event, I’ll be wearing two masks from the moment I enter the airport to the moment I get out of the next one, the wedding will have limited attendance and will mostly be outside, and I’ll be taking, to quote my mom, every reasonable precaution I can the entire time. Maybe that’s different from going to a bar with your mask tied to your wrist so the bouncer will let you in. But is it? I don’t know.

There comes a point where you have to balance your own mental wellbeing against the risk of infection and transmission. Chidi Anagonye would probably tell me that we owe it to each other to put public health first, or something like that, but what kind of quality of life is that? I have lost so much. We’ve all lost so much, but even with the vaccine available, there isn’t really a clear end in sight. So at some point I decided to say “fuck it,” and I would try to live a little, once again, during quarantine. For old times’ sake, maybe. To stick a middle finger to the virus and get on a plane. Maybe I’ll be vaccinated by then; the parents of the bride, my aunt and uncle, already are. Some of the rest of us might be by then, too. But I feel so dirty about it. Like this action is going to negate all the quarantining I’ve done since the start. That maybe I shouldn’t have bothered at all if I’m gonna quit now. But it isn’t quitting, since I’ll be going back to being isolated once the wedding is done. Right? I’m just so tired. We all are.

Like I said, this is really the first time I’ve actually taken mental stock of what’s changed in my life since the pandemic hit. I didn’t think it was a lot, but compared to what I would have been doing this senior year if not for Covid, the loss feels immense. And it isn’t just the big things, it’s the little things, too. I miss walking to classes, having an excuse to breathe between classes and look at the trees instead of knuckling down and writing another paper. I miss having bake sales on the quad to raise money for forest repair in the Amazon, even when those bake sale fundraisers were more just vague excuses to get everyone together on a weekday. I miss being physically in class; it’s way harder to play video games during class when you’re force to be in person, and I think that’s the reason why I’m finding it so hard to focus these semesters. I miss feeling like a college students, and everything that came with it. I miss my old housemates from Harvest House, having a chance to sit down every day with half a dozen people and break bread together, sometimes actually breaking the bread with improvised hammers. I miss being able to see my friends from SECS before and after meetings, of running into them unexpectedly in the halls of school buildings and saying “What are YOU doing here?!?” like some sort of sitcom character. I miss being able to hang out with my friends from high school without having to take up an entire basement because any closer would pose a risk of transmission. I miss hugs. Actually, I miss hugs a lot.

I used to think I was pretty introverted, that I’d rather be alone most of the time, but I’ve learned that isn’t entirely true. There’ve been times now where I’ve had nothing but time alone, for months on end, and it was boring as all hell. My partner asked me today why I text so many people, even when I’m patently bad at responding to texts in a timely manner. But I think I’ve figured out why. I miss people. I miss my friends. I miss my family. I miss feeling normal. I think we all do, whether we’re aware of it or not. But I think most of us are keenly aware of it. Why else would you go to bars but to socialize?

If I’ve learned one thing from all of this, it’s that I like people. I enjoy social interaction. And I dearly, dearly miss it. If you’ve chosen to read this far, thank you for letting me vent and be sad. You probably know the feeling. If we haven’t talked in a while and you’re lonely, send me a message. I like texting with people, even those I haven’t talked to in years, regardless if it’s only to share memes. Or even if we talk regularly, just send me a “hey, what’s up?” It’ll brighten my day, and I’ll do my best to brighten yours. Or if you’re still reading this and don’t want to text me, text someone else. Reach out to a friend you’ve grown distant to, check in and see how they’re doing. Throw out a message of goodwill to someone you’ve been on bad terms with recently. You’d be surprise how much it could make both your day and theirs. I’ll be reaching out to people, too, don’t get me wrong, and if you’re still here, maybe you’re only my list, too. Wherever we are, whoever we are, we’re in this together. At the end of the day, I think we could all use the company, no matter how virtual. And it is my hope that one day in the future, when this is all over, I can give everyone in my life a hug again. But until that day, social distance will have to do.

Thank you. I love you all.