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.