Friday, April 8, 2011

Echoes of the Scream

Like Santa's birthday on Christmas, Spring Scream happens only once a year and it comes and goes faster than you can say, "LOLZ". We prepare our gigs, our stalls filled with savory snacks, our silk-screened garments, our spazzed out costumes for on stage and off, our frozen portraits of Spring Screams past..and we slog through the time-stretched, torpid week leading up to this unique and cathartic experience... We arrive--hearts pounding to the soon to be heard thumping of bass drums, we await the entrance of longtime friends from around the world, nervously anticipate our performances, we crack our first cold ones...and it's on...and then...we poke our heads up once in a while through the fast-forwarding, time-dilated joy of a fleeting orgasmic festival that I wish could go on forever...and then we say goodbye...

And when it is all screamed and done, our bodies are baked and bruised; our voices torn to jerky shreads from pealing bursts of uncontrollable laughter; and our hearts broken as we kiss this beloved entity goodbye...for a time. We head back to our "real" lives and jobs like dry sponges, exorcised of the very salt of our souls, secretly hoping for after parties and faint little echoes of the Scream.

I would waste your ocular motility telling you how F'ing OSM Spring Scream was this year, how it keeps getting better, because we all know that. What I will share, however, is my greed for another mini-version of the festival half way through the year somewhere and when. I can only climb on the wagon so long, Charlie. I need a fix. I need Spring Scream to be a dual solstice, so that I might again creep out from my office tomb and roast my marrow with vein-melting, semster-palpitating live music. I implore the higher ministers with my chalice brimming with rubies and mead that this will come to pass.

Mingled with my so many great memories of this year's Scream is a sense of how relative the passing of time really is. Each emotion and activity we experience shifts the tempo of our so-called atomic counters. In anticipation, it creeps like eons, while in the throes of true bliss, it jettisons us through the flip book pages of the present. And for a short time, our memories hold like frozen frames of film, but then they too begin their sneaky transformation into the void, ever fleeting like an invisible pink unicorn.  I only hope that I can continue to refill that void with future ripples of the Scream...