Finance box

$36 Round-trip ticket from Portland to Boston South Station on Concord Coach Lines, including complimentary pretzels (like the peanuts Ford requires Arthur to eat before hitching a ride with the Vogons) and water. In-flight movie southbound: Leap Year, which I had intended not to watch, but which kind of caught my eye 20 minutes in. Watching the film without sound and trying to imagine how the film might have begun turned out to be extremely engaging.

$4.75 Ticket for MTBA commuter rail to the Rt. 128 stop. A man who walked into the cafe while I was making myself sandwiches for later (almond butter on that black, square German bread with all the grains) was wearing an amazing stained-glass pendant, the size of which connoted an enviable lack of concern for social convention: a green equilateral triangle (base on the bottom) overlapped by three interlocking rings (like the John Bonham symbol (Drum Logos) but inverted). I had to ask him about this peculiar motif, and he explained that both the triangle and the rings represented the Trinity. Why two distinct representations of the Trinity were required, and why these two were united in a single design, remained unclear to me.

$10 Contribution towards gas and tolls for the Boston-to-Hartford ride. (Neglected to help Tarkanian on the way back; fucking loved listening to Newport '63 in his car.)

$8 Falafel plus tip at Tangiers International, LLC. Acceptable, but not really in the same universe as Mamoun's of New Haven. Tangiers is also a grocery, and though many amazing tins of Moroccan sardines were on offer, in the interest of financial austerity I contented myself with merely possessing them with my eyes.

$3.08 Two one-liter bottles of Poland Spring, purchased at a CVS, from observation of whose clientele one might infer that Hartford is still a very, very segregated city. The Comcast Theatre permits patrons to bring in one sealed bottle of water, though they will confiscate the cap at the door. I had a savvy friend sneak in extra caps for me. Refills at the water fountain were free. A Dunkin' Donuts shack shaped like the domed cup of a high-calorie summertime drink was devoted entirely to giving away samples of (extremely sweet) iced coffee and caffeinated slush; nothing was for sale. In fact, coffee was not available anywhere within the venue.

$2: donation to a bluesman busking outside the neighboring Connecticut Expo Center, whose "When the Saints Go Marching In" did serious damage to my prejudice against barre chords.

$1 Donation to the Phellowship table, in exchange for a yellow "One Show at a Time" sticker. Waiting for the show to start, I spied an extremely cool-looking guy a couple rows down in my section: tall, mustache and non-problematic goatee, long hair tied back, pink headband, purple bandana around neck, the black Joy Division tee with the waves, shorts worn with tall striped socks, hiking boots. His face suggested intelligence, detachment, and independence. Really the only remotely heady person in sight. And as he walked off I saw he that had a Phellowship sticker on his shoulder: fucking sobriety rules.

$5 Phish 2010 Hartford "merit badge." I'm don't usually go in for merch, but these little circular patches, modeled after Girl Scout badges, with a different design for every city, conform perfectly to my longstanding obsession with the kind of old-school tourists' badges one might collect for one's knapsack on a journey through Europe.

$60 Pavilion ticket to Phish at the Comcast Theatre (formerly New England Dodge Music Center, formerly Meadows Music Theater), Hartford, 6/17/10 ($50 for the ticket and $10 for two-day shipping by FedEx—my tickets to last summer's Hartford show arrived by U.S. Mail in a legal envelope with a 44¢ cent stamp, a miracle I did not wish to attempt to replicate); private sale. My comrades in section 700 row QQ saw me in the lot the next day and shouted "Glitz!" or maybe "Lids!" Either they had mistaken me for someone else or they had given me a name in my absence. In any case, I consider my "lot name" to be established.

$15 My share of one night's stay at the Motel 6, Windsor Locke, CT. Room 229: like a leap year. One of the two Amandas brought earplugs for all to compensate for her snoring, which indeed was not insignificant. (On my return bus trip, these served to wipe out all non-tinnitus sound except the crying of a baby in the seat behind me, which sound the earplugs radically foregrounded.)

$10 Dunkin' Donuts coffee and breakfast sandwich; half a personal pizza with anchovies at Francesco's Pizzaria and Restaurant, Suffield, CT. The DD was emergency tour food, ethically on par with the burning of fossil fuels as one scoots down the highway to the show. (On the ride back to Maine, I saw a McDonald's billboard advertising the Egg McMuffin: "You have 10,000 tastebuds. Use them all." The notion of using one's taste buds seems entirely appropriate, since fast food is scientifically designed to capitalize on our bodies' natural mechanisms of rewarding us for eating salty, fatty, meaty, and sweet things. In the case of most things we eat, we intend to nourish our body, and the enjoyment is kind of a bonus. But when we eat only for the bonus, we treat our body as a mere means (to pleasure) rather than as an end in itself. (It occurs to me that the one time I've eaten an Egg McMuffin since preconscious childhood was en route to a show last summer; it was sort of an accident of group-think: two out of three of us did not want an Egg McMuffin, but we each ate one in order to be doing the same thing together. (We will explore the fruitful analogy between the food of McDonald's and the music of Phish another time.))) Half a personal pizza at Francesco's turns out to be a great deal of food, too much, really—my body screams for vegetables—though Alex and Dave put away a large pie and were still able to dance their asses off. Warning: one slice's entire cheese, dermal in its toughness, tends to come off in a single bite. Amazing molded plastic water pitchers.

$1 Donation per the Seventh Tradition of Alcoholics Anonymous. Some of my Phellowship friends were going to the Friday noon meeting of the "Phoenix Group" of Suffield, CT—hitting meetings is the other part of their tour—and I figured it would be more fun, and better for me, than hanging out at the hotel. Though I do not consider myself an alcoholic, issues of addiction and recovery, let us say, have figured in my life, and I've benefited from reading the Big Book, so it was kind of neat to go to a real, live meeting, even if I felt like a total asshole sitting in that room listening to people's stories.

$60 Pavilion ticket to Friday's show (6/18/10); private sale conducted hand-to-hand.

$1 Donation to bluesman on the second night ("What a Wonderful World"). A half dozen teenage girls with complicated sunglasses were singing along. One effect of this summer's decreased demand for tickets is that teenagers are more able to go to shows, which is awesome. (One effect of our musical culture is that there's pretty much no way that teenagers could be exposed to Phish, except by word of mouth.)

$1 Donation at the Phellowship table, second night. (The pink headband guy was wearing a Black Sabbath Vol. 4 shirt for this show.)

$5 Partial compensation to a man whose near-full cup of beer I knocked over while looking for my seat in the 400 section of the pavilion during "The Moma Dance." It is hardly reasonable to set one's cup of beer on the floor and expect it to remain undisturbed at the concert of a band so renowned for performing dance music; yet this is what one man in section 400 did. After I gave the man my money—not enough to buy another beer, but proportional to the degree of responsibility I was willing to accept for the accident—he asked me if I had "any good molly." I continue to be flattered when someone thinks I might possibly be dealing drugs. (I was on my phone with a friend who was trying to find me and waving my free hand to make my location conspicuous. In my hand was my bag of almond butter sandwiches. A guy walked over and asked, "Are those boomers?" I said no, but that if he wanted to stick around, he could meet "my friend Molly," who had spotted me and was walking down the lawn toward us.) See, for years I've had to endure suspicion of being a narc—my long hair must really be working! It is also possible that I dance like someone who is on drugs. The thing is, the slower you dance, the bigger the music gets. I noticed that the girl next to me was picking her satchel up from the floor, and the beer owner said something about "the guy who spilled my beer." This was my cue to leave section 400 and not return for the rest of the show. It took me most of "Julius" to make my way back to Wally and his crew on the lawn, just in time for "Reba," my first since 1994. I don't know how to describe it, but at some point Page started doing this incredible other thing during the jam. I opened my eyes and right then Wally exclaimed "YES!" It's always amazing when Phish is shared; the community of listeners who hear things like why that chord is important is probably way smaller than the 30,000 people the Comcast Theatre can hold.

$4 Two Charlie Cards, one apparently non-functional, for the ride from Central Square to South Station.

$6 Bagel sandwich and coffee at Au Bon Pain in South Station (went to Cosi first but balked). Another travel food failure of virtue: under normal circumstances, I'd rather put a dagger into my stomach than farm-raised salmon, but in the setting of South Station, the prospect of a salmon wasabi bagel was inexpressably alluring. The coffee was served in an amazing mustard-yellow cup. As I drained it, I reflected on the decreasing likelihood of my sleeping on the bus home. I hoped Leap Year would be shown again, so that I'd be able to test my hypotheses about the script. Instead it was Night at the Museum II; a large man's head mercifully blocked my sightline to the screen. I read several chapters of Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul, from which I drew the conclusion that if I am not writing, I am wasting my life. (I need to read more, too.) Shrek II or III was starting just as the bus pulled in to Portland. In the film's opening moments, Shrek wipes his ass with the pages of a fairy tale and takes a shower under squirting mud while the names of the stars who did the voices appear on the screen. The mismatch of the film's celebration of the ugliness of the individual body, its irreducible excesses forever outrunning mastery, with its stars and their branded personalities is shocking—not because of their managed physical perfection, but because of the universality of their names, which have entered the language, leaving behind no trace of the grotesque, unknowable individual; this incongruity is a clue that something is deeply ideologically wrong with this film.
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total: $232.83