I Don't Think You DO Realize.

Well, Blogger.com, last we chatted I was racing off the internet to meet up with my friend and see The Flaming Lips (!) at the Del Mar Racetracks. The website said they were playing at 2pm. We thought this was kind of a bizarre time of day (keyword 'day') for a band of such magnitude to play, but it was half past one when we hit the road so we weren't about to stop and ask questions. We got there, and everyone was dressed up in their big hats and their modern interpretations of Summer dresses, drinking microbrew and watching horses trot around. We ventured to the infield, and saw the stage where the Lips would be playing... aside from a few grungy kids, no one else was around. At first, we were stoked because we were basically touching the stage, but when 2:45 rolled around we wondered where the heck the Lips and the fans were.

According to the racetrack staff, the Flaming Lips were performing at 7:30. Okay... cool, website, cool. Now we're stuck here to watch horses and be around smelly people for five hours. We decided to find out if there was a way we could leave and come back, and lo, they stamped our hands with little neon paint symbol things and let us go.

For the first time in either of our lives, we explored Del Mar. Pretty place! Everything was so breathtaking... but then again, it could've just been the lack of dirt and horse shit, as per the racetracks. We drove along and discovered a little cluster of tents, so we checked that out. It was a little street fair sort of thing. We looked around at the jewelry and the handmade peasant skirts and the shirts with cheesy phrases on them, then started getting hungry. We walked down further and saw a fruit stand tent. All of a sudden, my friend said hello to the man running the stand and began talking to him... apparently she knows him from the Farmer's Market! The exclamation point is relevant because he gave us all kinds of fruit, FREE. Yes! We were so stoked. He gave us big bags of grapes, apples, two containers of Tiboulie (some sort of parsley-onion salad dip thing... it's pretty good), and an entire half gallon of apple juice. Only, this apple juice was literally just apples squeezed into a juice... so it tasted like apples, not like apple juice. Om nom nom! It was so much food... he said we should share it with whoever wanted some. We thanked him and took our harvest to a little cul de sac overlooking the ocean... snapped a photo of it with my cell:


Thomas Kinkade, eat your heart out.

We ate delicious organic fruit, sipped juice, fed an adorable squirrel (videos coming soon), and wound up talking to a lot of people! A lot of people stopped by that little cul de sac, and as instructed, we shared our food with them. We met a bus driver, a couple with four dogs, a dude who was there for like 45 seconds... it felt good to interact with the community of Del Mar. Ah yes, everything was going great... until a HUGE spider fell out of the bag of grapes we were eating.

I just tried to find a picture of it to post but scared the crap out of myself browsing through all the different pictures of spiders.


Ahh... much better.

It was about one inch long, but this baby had GIRTH... by far the fattest spider I have ever seen not in captivity. It was really hairy, gray with brown and orange, and had a massive abdomen and stubby little legs. Now, for a morbidly obese spider with its gut dragging and its legs barely able to touch the ground, this little mofo could move. He was scurrying all over the place. We freaked the heck out because when we had been eating the grapes earlier, we had removed from them what appeared to be a large, sticky cotton ball... just remember folks, that is NOT a large, sticky cotton ball. We were fascinated by the creature at any rate, so we used an empty tub of Tiboulie to catch and confine him. We named him Kurt! ...Because he was very curt.

By that point it was about time to head back to the racetracks to go see THE FLAMING LIPS! So we took our food and our new pet spider and turned tail. Back at the tracks, a considerably larger amount of people were standing in front of the stage... all clearly Lips fans... it's "psychedelic rock" or whatever, so, plenty of bizaroos out there. Smokin' the weed. The whole concert smelled like weed. And as the lead singer so wisely noted during the second half of the show, "All the weed must be smoked by now, because before I could smell weed and now all I smell is horse shit."

My friend and I stood around for the LONGEST time waiting for the Lips to come out. We stood waiting for maybe an hour to an hour and a half. The opening band came on around 7:15; they were okay but nothing too special. After that we waited some more... until 8:45... the moment of truth! A HUGE screen lit up... it was a naked woman dancing, but all the colors were saturated and neon so you couldn't make out the details of her body too well. After dancing for a while the image of the woman lied down facing the audience like she was about to give birth, and her vagina was a ray of light. The ray of light got bigger and it was just a swirl of light and color (it was times like these I wish I had a drug problem)... and suddenly, a door opened in the screen and the band members came OUT OF HER VAGINA. It was one of the more spectacular things I've ever seen. And when you thought the opening couldn't get better, the lead singer came out in a giant plastic ball and rolled around in the audience!


Sir, your life rules.

And giant balloons filled with confetti were suddenly flying all over the place, and groups of people came out onto the stage dressed as she-yetis and he-yetis. What I wouldn't have given to be one of those lucky bastards partying on stage in yeti costumes (or I guess as they're called, "furries")!

In short, the Flaming Lips blew my mind. The music was, of course, spectacular, the entire band was so down to earth and obviously having a blast performing, the lights and the colors and the onstage antics... loved every second of it.

Now, I don't want to sound cheesy, but "Do You Realize??" is hands down the most beautiful song I know of out there, and if you disagree I will hit you in the jaw. It was the last song they sang, and it was so... (shut up) powerful, beautiful, meaningful... you're not allowed to laugh at me, but yeah, my eyes welled up. I felt like I couldn't take it in ENOUGH. My whole being was wrapped up in this song and I just wanted to be in it more and more. The sensation was overwhelming.

I can't find the music video anywhere on YouTube (it's a great video, B-T-Dubs), and all the live performance footage of it sucks because there's a bunch of kids on LSD singing along poorly in all of them, so you're either going to have to take my word for it or go find that shit on Myspace or something, because it's amazing, and maybe it's cliche, but I would like it to be played at my funeral.

"Whoah J-Mil... buzz kill."

So... that was my day two days ago. Yesterday I hung out with my friends and taught them how to play Scrabble. They in turn showed me "Dawn of the Dead," which was gory and made me a little queasy. But hey, I finally saw it. It needed to be done. I left irritated and went home to write.

I haven't been able to do much today. There are construction people sealing and painting the driveway and patio, so my house has had a sort of "Nobody gets in, nobody gets out" policy today. I had plenty of time to be suicidally bored, and then make a neat little cartoon drawing. I was going to post a picture of it here, but my camera died on me literally just now. It's a Nikon Coolpix, and I guess the deal on those things is they all get "Lens Error"s after a year. I've owned mine for a little over a year and I've been getting that error message for about half the time I've owned it. Usually, tapping the lens a couple times fixes it, but this time it's royally stuck. I gave it to my dad to have a look at it, and he pushed the lens in more which only exacerbates the problem... so... I don't think I have a camera anymore. Crap. I have pictures to post and more to take! The memory card is just sitting here... MOCKING me.