On The Subject Of Bailing

A few thoughts about why I skipped the only concert I had a ticket for last week

In the footer of last Tuesday’s Singles In Your Area post, I mentioned that I’d be reviewing Fontaines D.C. and, well, the concert was on last Wednesday night, and there is no review on my page.

That’s because I didn’t go.

I had a ticket. I had intentions of going as recently as last weekend; go back another week and I was veritably fizzing with excitement about it.

In fact, go back a couple of months, and I was telling people about the string of shows I was going to buy tickets to see last week: Slipknot on Tuesday, Fontaines D.C. on Wednesday, Elemeno P & Dartz on Thursday, and Shihad on Friday. Budget constraints put an end to that plan but I still made a point of getting a ticket for Fontaines D.C. And then life happened.

I’m not going to get into details; this isn’t an agony aunt column. A situation popped up in my personal life which caused some introspection. Then we had a family birthday. Another situation kicked off in my personal life. The kids came to stay for three nights. And at the same time, my day job was getting busier and busier, and I started to feel overwhelmed. All normal stuff, really.

By Sunday I was starting to feel it.

On Monday, I went from dropping off the kids then back to work then off to my weekly Dungeons & Dragons session. The next day, I was with the kids again in the evening for sports photos, then off to attend my fortnightly Toastmasters meeting, arriving late, adding to the stress. By the time I got home from all of that, I was completely peopled out and already thinking about staying home.

I had two of my kids again Wednesday while also trying to catch up on work, and by the time I dropped them home in the evening I was completely and utterly wrecked. I wanted to curl up in a ball and cry; I settled for a few sobs on the drive home. I wanted to lie on my bed in the dark. I didn’t want anybody near me or talking to me or touching me or making noise in my vicinity.

As you can imagine, I wanted no part of a rock show. So I requested a refund from Ticketmaster and was quickly denied. I found that their resale channel was also not available. (Incidentally, a couple of days later, they emailed me to ask for a rating on their service and you can imagine how the message I sent back went.) I tried to give the ticket away at work and on Facebook but there was no interest. Eventually, the ticket went to waste.

Meanwhile, I went to see Mickey 17. I was the only person in the cinema.

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I don’t know if I’ve talked much here about my mental health challenges.

In addition to low mood (depression) and very occasional social anxiety, both of which I take care of with meditation/mindfulness and a daily dose of meds, when things get hard I find myself reverting back to a mental state known as experiential avoidance. Its basically the term for being a World Champion Bottle-Upperer and it is something I’ve worked really hard to stop doing.

This is a video I share with people when they inevitably say “everyone does that”.

I was first diagnosed back in 2017 and, honestly, I’ve become pretty good at managing my mood and avoiding avoidance.

However, this is the first time its had a tangible negative effect in that I skipped a concert I was previously quite excited about going to see. I don’t regret the decision. But it is the first time that I haven’t managed to push through when the alternative is straight up wasting $100 plus fees.

And now I’m left to wonder how worried I should be about that; this marks a change in my mental health management and, if experience has taught me anything, its that those kind of things shouldn’t be ignored. Or is it just a concert and I’m overthinking it and people - ordinary people - decide they just aren’t in the mood for something loud and crowded and give it a miss, and thats a thing that happens all the time. Just not to me.

What do you think? Have you ever skipped a concert - or a show, or an event, or anything really - that you paid for just because you didn’t feel like going?

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Mickey 17?

Honestly, I thought it was pretty bloody good. I’m a fan of both Bong Joon Ho and of Edward Ashton’s novels on which it was based so was bound to enjoy it.

I will say that if you’re expecting another film like Bong Joon Ho’s Oscar winning Parasite, you’ll inevitably be disappointed. This felt like it landed somewhere between Okja and Snowpiercer in tone; I like both of those films a lot, but Parasite they are absolutely not.

I also thought Mark Ruffalo hammed it up a bit too much; he plays the leader of a white Christian nationalist cult who wear red hats, leading them on their way to a pure, white planet - BJH says there wasn’t meant to be any allusion to Trump specifically but, come on. We can all see it.

That said, I thought the story was well told, the visuals were fantastic, and Robert Pattinson is absolutely phenomenal playing multiple versions of Mickey, the best I’ve ever seen him in film. The question now is whether he gets nominated for Best Actor, or whether one character gets nominated for Best Actor and the other gets nominated for Best Supporting Actor.

Aside from that, I’ve been trying to keep up with Severance S2 and the new Daredevil: Born Again series - but I keep getting waylaid by blacksmithing new items and riding my horse in Kingdom Come Deliverance 2.

What have you been watching or reading or playing recently?

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Thanks for reading today, e hoa.
I’ll be back with Singles In Your Area tomorrow.
Chris xo