Is This What Getting High Feels Like?

Austin City Limits was fantastic, but there was this one point that wasn't as cool. That was when a drunk girl burned me with her lit cigarette.

Blanton and I camped out at one of the larger stages, the AMD stage, for a little over five hours. Stages alternate shows, and each stage features an artist who plays a one hour set, then there's a one hour break, then another one hour set. At AMD we saw the Avett Brothers, Phoenix, and John Legend. All were great, but I really wasn't expecting anything out of the Avett Brothers, and they made it rain. At least they brought the cloud cover, which was highly desirable in the Austin heat.

However, in the waiting hour between the Avett Brothers and Phoenix, standing with Blanton at the front of the crowd (that's what you wait five hours for - to be at the front), I felt something that, at the time, I thought to be a mega wasp sting on my elbow.

I once saw a movie on the SyFy channel called Mansquito. I believe what I felt must have been comparable to what Lt. Randall felt fighting that monster.

After crying aloud in pain, I turned and saw a drunk, heavy girl holding a beer and a cigarette in one hand. She apologized - a lot - but really, when was the last time you burned a stranger with a cigarette? That sort of thing doesn't happen. It's like accidentally dropping a baby, or unintentionally selling state secrets to a Soviet Bloc country. Her kind of negligence was what put Nero in power.

As consolation, she showed me a mark on her arm where she had put a cigarette out by snuffing on her skin. How does that make me feel better? All I know now is that not only are you drunk, but you've also shown yourself to be a consistent idiot. To try and make her feel stupid, I took my elbow and put it on her forearm, so that the burn marks touched, and said, "High Five." She didn't get it.

The Unsung Heroes of ACL

I went to Austin City Limits yesterday with Blanton, and yes, it was great, but I can't talk about that right now. My heart is so full for one specific issue that I have to pour it out before it starts to boil and I die. I think that's what happens, from my rudimentary understanding of anatomy.

Sign language translators at music festivals. These women (I didn't see any men) are valiant - they process live lyrics and output them into the sign language format deaf people have come to know and love, all while maintaining some semblance of rhythm and meter. The best part: I have no idea why.

There were translators at every show I saw, and they all behaved differently. At Phoenix, the translators was shuffling her feet like she was in a step train, pumping her knees like pistons while translating the stutters and French accent of the lead singer. During John Legend, another woman focused on communicating the whole sex appeal by slowly swaying her very wide and old body. She may have spoken with her hands, but she was communicating with her hips. And the last show, Kings of Leon, had a spotlight at an odd angle, illuminating only half of the translator, so that her signs became gigantic shadow puppets on the muslin that covered the speakers.

My personal favorite was the woman at Andrew Bird. That lady deserves a medal, or at least a VIP pass. Maybe some time at the autograph tent. She managed to communicate about half of Bird's lyrics while keeping her involuntary laughter at her own incompetence to a minimum. This is not because she was bad - I think that she had ACL's number one hands - but because Bird's lyrics are so weird. There probably aren't signs for words like "formaldehyde" and "anoanimal" and "vestments of translucent alabaster." I'm pretty sure she translated that last one as "gown of see through rock." I really don't see another way to do it.

The best part was watching her try to communicate whistling, violin, and xylophone all at the same time; she had to find some way of expressing the idea of looping, but the best way she came up with was to try and stifle her laughter and point to her puckered lips, as if she was undergoing asphyxiation.

Deaf people can taste the delicious Sweet Leaf Tea, smell the weed smoke, feel the burning cigarette a drunk girl pushes into the flesh of their arm (and when you read deaf people, think Cass Trumbo), but they hear no noise. Really - why are deaf people going to a music festival?