Birthday Present
As I left my apartment this morning, I put my weekly lunch materials — diet iced tea, cold cuts, cheddar cheese, jalapeño wraps, peanut-butter crackers, and raspberry fruit bars — into a reusable shopping bag I got a few years ago. I got it at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Boston during an event with Emily Haines. That had been my second time seeing Haines perform, and my second time ponying up for a VIP experience.
There had been a podcast I’d listened to at some point in 2015 that had detailed an investigator’s attendance at a VIP event with Britney Spears in order to be able to ask her a question. The strangeness of the description of the event — of paying money to be part of an assembly line in order to claim that one had a “personal” experience with a celebrity — was compellingly absurd. So when an offer from Ticketmaster came to upgrade my ordinary Metric tickets to a VIP experience, I felt like I owed it to the spirit of random adventure to do so, even though I had no idea what that entailed. Because while I’d been listening to the band since discovering “Poster of a Girl” via an mp3 blog aggregator (ah, a younger internet…), they hadn’t been a band I could claim I “knew” with any real strength. In fact, an illness had kept me from attending a previous concert I’d hoped would help establish that expertise. However, found myself enamored of the essential stupidity of going to an intimate meet-and-greet session with a band I basically didn’t know.
And, well, it was brilliant. The band were welcoming and heartfelt, and we unexpectedly got to go up on stage and sing along with a song, and I felt alive and thrilled, and the whole show ranks somewhere in the top five concerts I’ve ever attended. And I decided that, as a result of how thrilling the whole experience had been, that I was going to unironically take advantage of any and every VIP opportunity that Metric provided thereafter, to chase that dragon and try to recapture that thrill.
Haines’ appearance at the Boston ICA was the next available opportunity, and since VIP access always comes with attendant merch, I left that show with the memory of breathlessly close seats and the aforementioned canvas bag that warned me that, “All the things I own, they own me.” I’ve had this bag in high rotation since I moved into a new apartment at the beginning of the summer, as I’d recently shouldered the weight of shifting my possessions across town, and of finding volunteers during Covid to huff and puff in proximity to each other while humping those possessions up and down stairs. Packing, moving, and unpacking had put a serious physical strain on me, and while I had returned to a degree of equilibrium, anxiety over maintaining work to maintain rent to not have to endure that physical gauntlet again any time soon remained. As I grew accustomed to my new digs, I wanted to remind myself not to get too comfortable, too entrenched, as my possessions were a future labor that would have their reckoning.
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