If you only see one concert this year, make sure you see Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band.

Okay, say you’ve already seen one concert this year and it was not Bruce Springsteen. Say you are Puerto Rican and you saw something that relates more to your culture. Say you don’t even know who Bruce Springsteen is. What then? Well, I think you have two choices and no they are not causal and don’t involve a noose and an erection. Instead, I think you should, one, buy a dog and, two, name it Bruce Springsteen. That’s it. Nothing super dramatic like killing yourself or getting off at the thought of your own strangulation, nope just a puppy and naming it Bruce Springsteen. To be honest, it’s pretty dumb, but I like the thought of all these Puerto Ricans yelling "Bruce Springsteen" and puppies running to them.

When I saw a few weeks ago that Bruce Springsteen would be taking his traveling freak show of aging rock musicians to Foxboro, Massachusetts, I knew I had to go. I mentally prepared myself for the pain of paying Ticketmaster $233,849 in convenience charges for the privilege of buying tickets to one of the many concerts for which they are the exclusive ticket distributor, and clicked on “buy”.

The day of the concert I borrowed my friend Farooq’s car. Farooq’s car is a piece of crap. It is a Nissan Pathfinder from (I believe) the late eighties which has no shocks. Driving over a manhole cover or a small crack in the road feels about the same as getting punched in the face.

I will punch Aaron in the face the next time I see him just to prove this point. After he is hit I expect him to lie on the ground making steering motions with his arms while saying things like, “Boy, Farooq’s car sucks.”

The drive would normally take about a half an hour, but this car tends to shake at speeds above 65 MPH, so it took a little longer. There is another reason it took a little longer and this is the fact that everyone else in Boston also decided to go see the Bruce Springsteen concert that night.

Except for all the Puerto Ricans who decided earlier in the year that they would see some other concert. It is okay. They now all have puppies named Bruce Springsteen.

The last five or six miles of the drive took over an hour, because Gillette Stadium is strategically placed in the middle of nowhere, so that thousands upon thousands of people must drive a combined hundreds of thousands of miles and then all park in the same place. I was surprised to see that oil futures were not trading higher on Monday due to the excess demand created by the mass exodus out of the city to the Bruce Springsteen concert. When we finally parked we walked about a mile to the stadium, pausing to hide from the lightning storm that immediately descended upon us. In the end, the drive there took over two hours and, after leaving at 6:00 PM, we arrived to our seats at about 8:30. This was actually pretty good timing, as the Boss and his elderly friends started playing at about 8:45.

They band was very good live, as I had been told they would be.

The concert ended after midnight. I really don’t understand what it is that allows the 58-year-old Bruce Springsteen to dance and shout and slide around on his knees for over three hours.

I talked to my grandfather today. He is seventy-five and still cuts trees in the forest for firewood. He says he has no problem moving around once he gets going. He says it’s when he stops that he feels it. By ‘it’ I guess I mean that it takes him a half-hour to stand up if he sits down in a chair. The same goes for Uncle Bob. He cuts wood with my Grampy. He moves around just as well when he’s in the forests, but once he stops he has to use a cane to get around. I am not joking. This is not some kind of bloated truth meant to be funny. My uncle Bob will probably have to get his hip replaced next year. He will probably still cut wood. I believe it is probably similar for Bruce Springsteen. Probably once the concert’s over he immediately sits in a wheelchair and is wheeled to his bed inside a tourjet or whatever they use on tour.

Maybe he is on steroids.

I have no problem with Bruce Springsteen using steroids.

All I know is I am 25 and in pretty good shape and even I was tired by this point, and I was sitting down for about half of those three hours. It took over a half an hour to find our way out of the enormous space station/imperial death star/Gillette Stadium and back to the parking lot. Once there, we sat in a line of cars waiting to leave the parking lot until after 2:00 AM. Not everyone was lining up to leave. Some concert-goers instead sat outside of their cars, drinking and listening to Bruce Springsteen. I thought it would not be a terrible idea to just relax like these people and wait for traffic to un-jam, but I realized that I didn’t really want to be on the road at the same time given how long they had been drinking. By the time we got to leave, traffic was not as bad as it was on the way in and the drive back to Boston was relatively quick and painless (and by painless I mean marred by constant bone-jarring collisions with minor bumps and cracks in the road). I was back home only 10 hours after leaving for the concert.

Driving to an event at Gillette Stadium is a pain in the ass. If you gave me free tickets to the 2008 AFC championship game at Gillette Stadium, I would not go (or at least I would not drive).

Oh, that’s good to know. I was going to give you 2008 AFC championship game tickets at Gillette Stadium (if they make it…haha if?) for your birthday. Instead, I think I will take a piece of cake, drop it on a piece of paper, eat the cake, lick the piece of paper until most of the crumbs and frosting are gone, and then give you the piece of paper with the words, “donkey ghost shit” written on it with an arrow pointing to the stain the cake left.