Scott Desgrosseilliers

Dave Matthews Concert and Party Bus

As I get older I realize the importance of special events.  Free time is too important to waste on half-ass effort and plans.  I was invited to attend a Dave Matthews concert up in Wisconsin recently.  I decided to go, in part because I caught wind of a plan to rent a party bus for the pre-concert tailgating.  I was not disappointed.

I am not the biggest Dave Matthews band.  In 1994 I lived on the second story of the band house for the Muse, a bar on Nantucket Island.  The bands that were playing at the Muse would stay on the first story of the band house.  Dave Matthews band was just becoming popular in 1994, they played at the Muse, a 400-seat venue, for 3 nights that summer.  A band’s popularity on the island was partly due to their social and partying capabilities.  The bar closed at 1am, we cleaned up the bar, and headed out to the band house to party with the band until the sun came up.  This was a standard weeknight itinerary for the summer of 1994.  I recall that during the Dave Matthew’s post show parties, the majority of the band would stay up drinking and frolicking late into the night.  But Dave would sit on the couch sulking and acting like a prima donna.  This went on for 3 nights.  So I decided he was not my favorite rock star.

Little did I realize that a properly executed tailgate party negates any ill will.  I am surprised I did not wake up with “I love Dave” tattooed on my forehead.  24 people convened at the organizer’s house at 1230pm.  There was a ratio of 1 cooler for every 1.5 people.  This is not to mention tents, approximately 20 fold-up chairs, a keg, and various other paraphernalia.  I knew 4 people there, 3 of which I had only met once.  I was still giddy about the prospects for the day/evening.  The party bus pulled up and my giddiness increased.  Not only did it have room for all of the people and party gear, but there was also a toilet on board.  The biggest problem with tailgates is the decision on when to “break the seal” of your bladder.  You are having a good time and suddenly you feel the pressure down below.  The port-a-pots are most likely a quarter mile away, and you have to wait in line, missing out on all the fun, plus you have to deal with the stench.  So you hold it, and then you can only half-focus on the tailgate party, because you have to clench your pc muscle the entire time to prevent any dribbling.  So, like much in life, the breaking of the seal is a catch-22 proposition.  The party bus alleviates this, a personal bathroom, mere steps from your tailgate spot!

The bus ride there is a blast.  Beers galore, tons of yapping, no worry or concept of directions, waiting in line, someone having to be dd, much like the beer trolley.  The tailgate setup was intricate, everyone was swarming all over the site like a bunch of ants on an anthill.  Tents, 8 foot long tables, chairs, a bag toss game, keg, jello shots, some other random game involving balls on a rope (don’t ask), grills, dips, around 15 coolers…as big as the party bus was, there was so much tailgate loot on it, the party bus had the effect of a clown car at a carnival, items were pouring out of it at a ratio that didn’t seem possible.  A small crowd of fellow tailgaters continually streamed up to marvel, compliment, and gape in awe and jealousy at our situation.  A couple people got a little carried away, one young Indian dude stole a cupcake, I seriously considered the ramifications of kicking his teeth in.  Fortunately I cooled off my rage and went back to my game of beer pong.  I educated the Midwesterners on the proper beer pong rules.  1 cup on every corner, balls must be thrown above eye level (the newcomers continually cheated on this rule but I didn’t care it was still fun), drops are a drink, cup hits are a drink.  A simple game, fun, and you leave feeling happy.  There was also a bag toss tournament going on with brackets and seedings.  It was a blast, almost like an adult carnival all contained within perhaps 1000 square feet of space.

Time slowly became a joyful haze where laughter and chatter oozed together.  A great tailgate party has the effect of causing its participants to forget why they were gathered.  I thought I was at a party in a parking lot somewhere.  Someone mentioned Dave was going to be on stage soon, wait, what?  I turn around and notice the venue entrance and it hits me, umm, oh yeah, I came here to go to a Dave Matthews concert.  Bear in mind it is 9pm, 8 hours into the tailgate, people are slowly staggering away from the tailgate site like grenade shrapnel.  I have no idea how we are going to stay together while in a general admission show in this condition, particularly since I did not know anyone except my lady.  Not a concern, we kept bumping into people on the concert lawn all night.

That’s right, there was a concert.  The few songs I managed to listen to sounded crystal clear.  There were so many conversations, beer runs, gossiping, walking around, and other activities on the concert lawn, that the concert was more like a background soundtrack for the evening.  I did think “Crash into Me” sounded awesome.  The new bluesy song sounded killer.  They didn’t play “Satellite”, which is one of my favorites, apparently that makes me an old bastard due to the fact I was dumbfounded that it was not a lock to be played.  Suddenly the show was over and we were back on the bus.  Nothing better than being able to use the bathroom and not lose forward vehicle momentum.  Got back to the organizer’s around 1am, twelve hours.  Apparently a few people stayed up grilling late night chow, I was ready to call it a night by this point.

My hat’s off to the organizer of the 12-hour tailgate.  Not only was he able to coordinate all the food, jello shots, keg, money, bus, etc., but he also partied his ass off.  When you are going to spend your time on a weekend event, going the extra mile to plan out the fun can pay off big.  I can’t wait for next year’s party bus.

Chicago Kindness

Chicago is a city that makes you fall in love with it.  I enjoy traveling to new cities and relish the adventure of moving to a new town.  But Chicago gets into your heart and soul and the thought of leaving the city, versus satisfying my wanderlust, is currently too upsetting to consider.   The people of this great city are what make Chicago the great town that it is.  Listen to incredible gestures of kindness I received this past Thursday night.

The Red Sox were in town to play the White Sox.  The social calendar was already getting packed so my only chance to catch a game was Thursday night.  I contacted a ticket seller on craigslist.com and bought some tickets.  The seller was nice enough to offer to drop the tickets to me while I was gorging myself at the buffet at India House even though he was over in the west loop.  The skies were clear and it looked like a great night was shaping up.

Things took a turn for the worse.  A mini-tornado touched down in west Chicago at 5 o’clock.  It looked like Armageddon outside my window.  The White Sox were stubbornly refusing to cancel the game.  My friends that were originally going to the game had either gone back to the burbs or bailed out due to the inclement weather.  I clung to the hope it would magically clear up outside, but it was still drizzling. 

It gets to be 8 o’clock, the game was supposed to start at 7, my girl is on the couch, I am frantically refreshing weather.com and trying to become an instant meteorologist.  I receive a call from the ticket seller.  He was in the stadium club, which is the luxury club area of the white sox stadium where you can eat and drink with a killer view of the field, and it is enclosed and climate-controlled.  He was worried that we were in the concourse getting soaked and he had talked the doorman into letting us up.  I thought that was nice but explained there was a tornado so I didn’t think we were coming.

9 o’clock rolls around.  They still haven’t called the game.  Although it looks crappy outside, it has stopped raining.  I called back the ticket seller.  He tells me it is not raining and they are taking off the tarp.   Game on!   My lady and I decide to drop a couple of tequila shots on a whim and hail a cab.   As the stadium comes into view, a torrential downpour occurs.  I get out of the cab and some lady comes running over breathlessly.  “Are you getting out?” she asks incredulously.  I nod my head and she screams triumphantly to a crowd across the street.  They sprint across traffic gratefully, rejoicing like they just got pardoned from an execution.  I look at my lady and we start laughing, this is not good.  People start streaming out of the stadium, the game has been cancelled.  I decide if we came this far ($25 cab ride) we are at least getting a drink inside.  I call the ticket seller as our clothes get soaked to the bone.  He meets us and brings us up to the stadium club. 

“The bar is closed” the doorman yells out to the crowd as we walk in.  Things are looking grim.  Drenched, no game, no booze, about to be out $50 round trip on a cab, but I refuse to be downcast.  The ticket seller explains he has to go close his tab to the doorman as he winks at us.  We follow him over and meet his son while he asks the bartender to get us a drink.  This is nice, he sees we are drenched and is offering to make it a little more bearable.  I hear him tell the bartender to “back them up”.  This is bar-speak for buying 2 rounds at once.  Things are looking up!  We enjoy our drinks and get acquainted while guzzling our vodka tonics, the doorman keeps gently reminding us the place is closed while we politely ignore him.  The ticket seller lives west of the city 10 miles, but he insists on bringing us back to the city.  This is going to cost him about half hour out of his way, it is a Thursday night and he has to work tomorrow, plus his young son is with us.  I politely offer to take the el or just let him give us a lift closer to the city where we could catch a cab more easily.  Luckily he refused.  The White Sox stadium is in a bad area and with the miserable weather there are unlikely to be many available cabs.  So my girl and I got to enjoy a quick, dry ride to the next destination of our Thursday night.

How many ticket scalping experiences turn out this way?  The seller gave me the tickets at face value, bought my girlfriend and I a couple of drinks, and then drove us home 30 minutes out of his way!  The game was rescheduled to Friday afternoon.  I received a call from the seller at 10am, he had put me on the stadium club list for that day’s game again!  This enabled us to enjoy a nice seated lunch with a waitress while overlooking the field for the first few innings of the game.  The seller once again went out of his way to do something nice for us.

Genuine kindness to strangers is a wonderful thing.  In Chicago I have bumped into strangers at bars and expected a fight.  Instead the stranger would buy me a round and try to set me up with one of his girlfriends.  And ticket scalping can be a dicey experience wrought with fraud and angry guys with big heads.  But as my experience last week showed, Chicago hospitality can make even the crustiest New Englander love the place.

Gary Renard's Disappearance of the Universe - Background

Spirituality, reincarnation, the meaning of life, God, “we are all energy”, “let spirit guide you”.   I have attended numerous seminars and workshops attempting to discuss or educate people on some of these ideas.  Too often the moderator falls back on “we are all One” or “trust in God” to explain tricky spiritual debates, or the presenter is wearing 30 crystals and playing new-agey synthesizers in the background.  There is nothing wrong with doing this and it doesn’t bother me.  But a large portion of the population gets immediately turned off by this approach.  I have become a huge fan of Gary Renard’s teachings on the nature of reality and spirituality because he presents the ideas in a down-to-earth, matter-of-fact manner, without any pretense of ego.  Gary Renard does not claim to be a master that is graciously providing his time so lesser beings can learn/worship from him.  Finally there is a person that can explain intricate concepts of God, how to evolve, and doesn’t shy away from any debates, concerns, or pointed questions about God, afterlife, or what we are here on Earth to do.

I remember a trip to a Boulder, Colorado bookstore where I first discovered Gary Renard’s work.  I was having a computerized astrology chart generated, which was a pretty lame process by the way, and I kept getting drawn to his first book, The Disappearance of the Universe: Straight Talk About Illusions, Past Lives, Religion, Sex, Politics, and the Miracles of Forgiveness, on the book rack and thumbing through it.  No matter where I flipped to in the book, I stood entranced by what I was reading.  Somewhere in my scanning I found out the author lived in Maine, any other hesitations about buying the book faded once I found out the author was a fellow Mainer, I added this book to my stack of items I was purchasing.

Gary Renard has written two very popular books, The Disappearance of the Universe and Your Immortal Reality: How to Break the Cycle of Birth and Death.  The books are meant as companions to understanding The Course in Miracles.  The Course in Miracles consists of 1300 pages of material channeled by Jesus on what his teachings meant, how to view reality, the real meaning of the crucifixion, and so many other things I can’t being to tell them all in a blog post.  Now, I realize the statement “channeled by Jesus” is going to be interpreted wildly differently by everyone.  On one end of the perception spectrum, people with exposure to metaphysical teachings might read that statement without skipping a beat.  At the other end, Verne in Maine who still can’t believe I won’t eat chicken anymore will probably say “Desgrosseilliers you have lost your mind!” and then write a story about this on our fantasy football site!  When I am reading something, and this is especially important when it is a new or esoteric concept such as metaphysics and perception of reality, I suspend judgment and take the author’s side during the reading.  Simultaneously I keep tabs on how I am feeling while I read it.  I find this approach allows me to assimilate the information easier when the inner judge/critic is not constantly evaluating every statement.  But when feelings of “this is total horseshit” rise up inside of me, I hopefully will take notice and quit wasting my time on the book.

With Gary Renard’s The Disappearance of the Universe, I read the material and felt like it was the answer to a number of questions and concerns I had with organized religion.  Keep in mind this is my opinion and belief.  You are expected and welcome to have your own, and if your religion or church has made your life a joy, great for you.  It’s not my bag though, because too many things bug me about it.  For instance:

• Original Sin – This seems beyond retarded to me.  How have I committed a sin by being born?
• God on a throne in a white beard casting judgment – Let me get this straight.  God creates the world, and then spends his time nitpicking over whether I have said enough Hail Marys because I dropped an F-bomb when the Red Sox blew another lead?  I just don’t see how that is possible or how He would care to waste his time over something so trivial.
• Attending church to talk to/commune with God/Jesus – I have always felt I should be able to communicate with God or Jesus without going to a designated holy area such as a church sitting on a hard bench.
• Guilt – Why do I have to always feel guilty?  Feeling guilty sucks.  I don’t want to feel guilty because I had a few beers, made a few bets, and spent some time with a lady.  In my heart I feel God wants us to feel in love and joy all the time.

Gary deals with these issues in his books in a way that left me awestruck.  The answers seemed perfectly logical, but more importantly, when I read them, I felt like they are the answers that make the most sense to me about the world and God.  If you haven’t found your religion/creed/sense of the world that makes you feel at peace, give Gary Renard’s books a chance.  I will expand on his explanations of A Course in Miracles concepts in my next post.

Lollapalooza at Grant Park Chicago 2007

Yelling until you feel the sides of your throat start to stab with pain, and then finding a new decibel level after you get inadvertently elbowed in the ribs by the stranger next to you who is feeling the vibe.  Grabbing your friend by the collarbone and shoving him into your other friend who isn’t looking.  Hearing a great sound or beat that stops in your tracks and compels you across the field to check out who is making you nod your head subconsciously.  Jumping up and down like a lunatic without a care in the world.

Those feelings and actions are all signs of a good concert.  The music starts vibrating inside of you and all of your thoughts stop.  It’s what will make music never go away, why concerts and raves will always be popular, those moments when you are listening to music and can think of nothing else.

Lollapalooza 2007 in Chicago provided a lot of those moments.  The band that made me stop in my tracks goes by the name Ghostland Observatory.  I was trying to leave the show to get in a triathlon swim workout before the bands I really wanted to see were scheduled to come on.  I kept hearing this sound and looking wistfully down at the stage that was about 10 football fields away.  Yep, another triathlon swim workout was about to get blown off.  Ghostland Observatory is a 2 man band, there is one guy that does all sorts of electronic noises while also playing the drums.  Then there is the singer who also occasionally plays guitar.  I have never seen a singer who became more one with his music; it was like he had a demon inside of him.  Plus the beats that the electronic guy kept spitting out, the crowd was really into it.  I was so into the tunes I did not realize I had my shirt off for over an hour, until my face starting feeling tight and it felt like someone was holding a hot skillet against my neck.  Sigh.  Yet another sunburn has snuck up on me.  Ghostland leaves the stage and I go take refuge from the sun.

Daft Punk light show – If someone were to tell me “I saw this awesome light show at Lollapalooza” I would smile and think “doubtful”.  I would base this opinion after the lightshows I have seen through the years, where the show consists of some grade-school level designs in a planetarium dome while Pink Floyd’s the Wall is playing.  I would be, once again, so completely inaccurate and wrong it is ludicrous!  I have uploaded some of the videos taken from my phone to try and do the lightshow justice. 

In order to view these files, right-click on the link, choose save target as, and then save them to your desktop and double-click on them to view in windows media player.

Download daftpunk_3.wmv

Download daftpunk_3.wmv

Download daftpunk_2.wmv

Download daftpunk_1.wmv

I spent a lot of time with my mouth gaped open.  How the hell do they do that?  Daft Punk is 2 guys that dress up in full motorcycle gear, so you cannot see their heads due to their helmets.  The stage consisted of a huge 50 foot tall pyramid, and the top opened to reveal the two of them at their turntables.  Lights would …how do I say this?  Lights would somehow create these shapes and lines zapped all over the pyramid and onto the 80 x 300 foot stage behind them in perfect synchronization with the music.  I’ve uploaded some phone videos to try and due justice to this show.

I had randomly heard mention of Silversun Pickups on the web and downloaded a tune that I absolutely loved.  They had become my blogging band.  I put them on when I am getting ready to write.  None of my friends had seemed to have heard much about them, and they were playing on a smaller stage at Lolla.  However, apparently my friends are just not in the know like I am, because it was a mob scene at their stage.  I heard someone behind me remark that he didn’t realize anyone else had heard of them, I was thinking the same thing when he said it.  Listening to Silversun without having seen them in person before, I had no idea what sex the singer was.  Come to find out it was a guy, who has perfected this higher pitched squeal as his singing voice.  Silversun would start most of their songs with ethereal, long, different sounding guitar notes that would leak into each other, creating a synthesizer effect.  Then the tell-tale opening riff of the song would start and the crowd would start bopping.  Some guy that had to be at least 55 pushed up next to us, and I am not sure if he was on Ecstasy for the first time, was one of Jerry’s kids on the loose,  or…well who knows, but he was going berserk with fist pumps and jumping, and it was so off-beat it was comical.  Picture a song that has tempo switch, that is suddenly just acoustic guitar strumming and slower lyrics, and this guy is jumping, off-beat, and grimacing his face like he just did something pleasurable, while doing ¾ arm length fist pumps.  I was distracted for half the show marveling at him trying to figure out how he existed.

LCD Soundsystem had a large crowd waiting patiently an hour before they came on stage.  Much like Silversun Pickups, LCD has a big contingent of fans.  They took the stage and did not disappoint.  People were going BERSERK over the show!  I can’t say I blamed them, or noticed all that much, I was jumping around like a fool the whole time myself.  An LCD song starts slowly and continues to build, the tempo speeding up a half beat, the volume inching up, and before you know it at the end of every song you are screaming and bopping around.  The crowd becomes one big tidal wave of sounds and screams.  One song they played consisted of increasingly fast and loud rhythms, and the singer would scream “yeah yeah yeah” on the same cycle.  That was it, a faster rhythm and beat, while he would scream “yeah yeah yeah”.  Sounds dumb, but if you were there, you loved it.  I think that is the problem with writing about a music show.   A concert is a visceral experience, you feel and see and hear.  Why was I excited about “yeah yeah yeah” being repeated over and over?  I have no idea, but I loved it.

Pearl Jam was the closing act.  I had high hopes.  I had seen them once before and they had blown my doors off.  This time, not so much, there were some decent moments but the show was kind of like eating Chinese food at 10pm.  You are excited for it to arrive, you wolf it down, it seems to taste good, but you could’ve sworn it tasted better last time, and you are hungry again at midnight.  Part of the trouble with a Pearl Jam show is the wide library of songs they have.  There is no way they can play all of them.  But they were closing out their set with Rearview Mirror, my favorite song of theirs.  However, they decided to freestyle it a little bit, right at the best point in the song 2/3rds of the way in.  I don’t understand this.  A song becomes popular because people like that version of the song.  Why do I want to have to interpret the song in an entirely new fashion, live at a show?  So that was not a high point for me.  Also, for the encore, they did an anti-war song and had a veteran onstage.  That was a nice gesture, but the song wasn’t any good, and the veteran onstage rattled off a bunch of websites to go look at.  I wish they would’ve shown the websites on the video monitors, because they were long and confusing, and I would’ve went to the sites but I had no idea what the guy was saying.  It was still sweet that they honored the veterans though.  The last song they invited about 15 people on stage from other bands.  Ugh.  I am not a fan of a mob of musicians jamming out to the same tune.  It just bores me to tears.  So we were able to beat the rush of people and scoot out of there.

Observations while trapped on a SouthWorst flight

I now understand why Southwest is unaffectionately known as Southworst.  Because flying on Southworst has become an uninvited test in keeping equanimity.  Equanimity is the ability to remain unaffected by your surroundings, and to instead keep a serene inner peace.  And I need to keep remembering that I choose my reaction to my surroundings, and am not the victim of them, because this flight is beyond sucking  Maybe it is because I am sitting in my middle seat with my elbows pinned to my sides.  Perhaps the reason is my shirt sticking to my body due to the humid conditions, even though I am in t-shirt and shorts it is still miserably hot.  No, it could be that although the flight is finally in the air, we were once again delayed on a southworst flight, this time by an hour and a half. Wait, the dry, stale, 5 year old ritz crackers with congealed cheese they gave me as a snack really hit the spot.  The babies crying in every direction is really making it a lot of fun also.  I especially like when the kid directly in front of me turns around, makes eye contact, and lets out a blood curdling scream, thereby causing a domino effect of the kid to the left crying, and then the kid in the back simultaneously crying and kicking the back of Mark’s seat. His well meaning mom cranks up the teletubbies over the din to try and appease her baby Satan, blasting it at a level that allows me to hear it over my iPod that is stuck in my ears..  Just when I start to get slightly frazzled from all this mess, I see Mark just about to burst into tears from his seat getting kicked and I die laughing.

This got me thinking about how my focus determined my mood.  When I keep this in my awareness, it helps me cope with crappy situations.  I was getting fully agitated with the flight, and then Mark’s sour puss made me laugh and total forget about how bad our conditions were.  In fact, I have to admit sometimes it was pretty fun to have Mark’s seat get kicked.  Fun for one, but still cracked me up until I started to feel bad when Mark almost lost it on the young mom in back of us for not controlling baby Satan.

Having total accountability about how you feel isn’t such great news though.  When I am angry or upset about events around me, I get doubly upset because I know that I have made that choice.  So I am wasting my time and mood every moment I am unhappy when I can just choose less irritable thoughts and think my way out of the mood.  At the Abraham-Hicks workshop I attended earlier in the summer, the phrase “managing your gap” was repeated often.  If your current mood and emotion is not joy, you have chosen thoughts that have led to a gap between how you could feel and your present mood.

I’m not going to pretend that I magically let bad life events, perceived or actually happening to me, wash over every time.  But it was eye-opening to go from “I f***ing hate Southworst” to laughing and feeling energized enough to write this blog entry all because of a switch in perspective that led to a shift in thought, which then begat a shift in mood, and now I am fine.  Now if only I could teach this trick to baby Satan in back of me before he makes Mark sky-dive off this flight without a chute.

Wrigley Ticket Scalping Attempt Gone Sour

Treating any negotiation situation as a game allows me to have fun with an otherwise tense situation.  The give and take, the strategies, the theorizing on the other side's motivations, all aspects of a good barter can be very enjoyable.  That is why I usually prefer to buy sporting event tickets the day of the game outside of the stadium, unless I am going to the Red Sox and get to sit in my uncle's amazing seats.  Back in college I would routinely scalp tickets to Red Sox games both as a buyer and a seller.  It added to the experience of the game.  However, yesterday selling Cubs tickets turned into a heated tense argument that got me researching the Chicago scalping rules.

I found myself opening 10 days worth of mail wednesday night.  One of the envelopes contained Cubs bleachers tickets for thursdays game.  I had completely forgot about purchasing them, there was no way I could blow off thursday afternoon for the game.  I posted the tickets on craigslist thursday morning and reached a sale price of $100 for 2 bleacher seats...a steal for the buyer in my opinion, but I did not want to trek up to Wrigley on lunch hour to get rid of the tickets.

I am walking up to the meeting point when I receive a text from a number not in my phone.  "Sorry found cheaper tix".  Unreal, someone that I had just made a sale with, not only has the audacity to back out of the deal, but does it via text!  How weak is that?  Visions of a leisurely lunch quickly fall by the wayside and I hop on the el train up to Wrigley.

I got off the train and knew I was in a predicament.  I have never seen so many tickets for sale, it seemed like there were no buyers, a lot of sellers, and the sun was scorching.  The legal scalpers outside the el stop offered me $20 for my tickets.  Uhoh.  I decide to roam around looking for a better price, I would rather eat the tickets then sell them to a scalper for $20.  Some shady dude offers me $30 a piece for the tickets.  I had paid $40 for the tickets, expected to get $60 each, but was now holding out for $50 each, so I told him I'd pass.  I keep walking back and forth the el area, careful to avoid the legalized scalpers, who are ornery bastards.  The key is to wait just after them, when people have walked away disgusted by their prices, and then you seem like a nice innocent boy from Maine just trying to sell your tickets at a fair number.  That ploy wasn't working either, people were consistently looking to pay $10 a ticket.  A few of them said "$50?  I just want to get into the game, I'll give you $10."  What the hell does that even mean when they say "I just want to get in the game".  Perhaps it was the intense heat, but I was getting agitated and it had only been 15 minutes, my back was sweaty, I was faced with eating the tickets, things were not looking good.

Some guy had been lurking around the whole time.  He finally said that he would take the tickets and started walking back to the legalized scalpers.  I stopped and said "I'm not selling them if you keep walking away from me."  He told me it was only legal at their area.  Oh boy, here we go.  For those of you that have never been to a game at Wrigley, right when you get off the train there is a scalper's row of legalized ticket brokers.  They are mean, angry, loud jerks.  One of them stands out as the king jerk of them all, he is a very tall, very large guy with a monstrous sized head.  He has to be on juice, his noggin rivals Barry bond's.  He gets a big smirk when he sees me.  I tell him $60, just like I had told his crony/gopher that had been stalking me.  There are a bunch of people hovered around him, some work for the guy, others are debating on his obscene prices.  Most likely he has already sold my bleacher tix to them for $100 and is now trying to screw me down as far as he can.

"Hey, I'll take the bleacher tickets." he tells me, very proud of himself.  "That's great, $60," I tell him.  His half-smile fades, he is pissed.  "I'm not giving you $60," he tells me.  "Your pal said you'd buy them, if you won't pay $60 that's fine." I say.  Some bystander chimes in he will pay $60 for 2 bleachers.  I turn to sell him the tickets.  I can literally feel the scalper's anger, he holds a fist up to my face, uhoh, this guy is huge and all the other scalpers have crowded around.  He opens up his fist to reveal a cop's badge. 

"If you sell that ticket, I am arresting both of you right now."  Could this guy be a cop?  I smell bullshit, but I am still a little nervous, the intensity, the sheer seething anger of this guy and how much he hates me is just oozing out of him.  I am determined to get $60 even if it costs me $6000 in dental however.  We are staring each other down as he dangles the badge in my face.  I am scanning it, like I am somehow a counterfeit badge expert.  I protest that I am selling the ticket under face value so it isn't scalping.  He tells me that if I sell the ticket for $1 even, he is throwing us both in jail.  I look at the guy I am trying to sell the ticket to, he gets a big smile on his face.  "How about we go to the game together?" he says.  I smile, but I am still not thrilled with this resolution, because I have to buy cubs scalped tickets a lot, and big angry ticket head guy is the key man in the operation, I don't want to get blackballed.

"Listen, I know you guys have a monopoly here.  I'll sell you the tickets for $60 right now, or I'm taking off with this guy and you do what you gotta do." I tell the big headed guy.  He is looking very hot and sweaty, my potential buyer is dismayed that I might not sell him the tickets, I am wondering if I am going to get dragged in the alley by some of big head's cronies.  I decide it will be hilarious if I get arrested for selling a ticket under face value and plus I'm not budging on my price no matter how much my impending head butt is going to hurt.  Big Head makes a painful grimace like he is passing a kidney stone, hangs his head, rips off 3 twenty dollar bills and rips the tickets out of my hand without looking up.  I have never felt better losing twenty bucks!