I am dying to listen to last night's show—I mean, what the fuck happened? (the tapes won't move me any closer to that moment)—but I want to jot down a few notes before I rewrite my memories with recordings (sellout admission: Phish's official soundboards sound so amazing this tour (yet another aspect of Phish's increasing mastery of their product, Phish) that I have suspended my former principled insistence on audience recordings (though please read Taper Larry Stubbe's thread at bt.etree on why the culture of amateur taping is endangered)). My memory of the show's astonishing final moments—during the cacophonous, blinding (strobe-lit) coda of First Tube, Trey held his guitar by its body and waved it to sculpt feedback through the monitors, then finally raised it heavenwards, the tall way, as it sang—has already been contaminated by a video shot from the opposite side of the stage, and I closed youtube as soon as I realized that some dumb phone's shitty image was eclipsing the earthshaking truth of this apotheotic moment. It really did feel like Trey was atop a mountain, harnessing a god's awesome power (there's some Stockhausen 9/11 angle to the world splitting open like this (Hilary is a participant in a long-term study of witnesses of the 9/11 plane crashes; the project ostensibly ("ostensibly" since psych experimenters can be kind of devious about what they're really testing for) concerns the stability of memories of trauma over time. Though Phish is art and not war, experiencing their live show can also be a sort of trauma, and their fans become addicted to this strange pain the way that soldiers become addicted to war and during peacetime long to be back in the line of fire (why does the experience of war seem to be an experience of truth? (it is relevant to my account that I was very close to the band, so not only was the music inhumanly loud, it was visibly being made by particular humans (I really want to go song by song, but I must go to sleep at last