A Springsteen concert is akin to a religious experience — but I don’t mean emotionally, I mean literally. It’s like going to church. He works the crowd like a Fundamentalist preacher, the congregation raises their hands in the air in supplication, there are call-and-answer periods with required responses from the congregation… It’s the Church of Bruce. And, hey, I’m a believer.

So it was a pretty good show. Not a great one, but the old joke about pizza and sex applies to Springsteen concerts too: even when it’s bad, it’s still pretty good. Which is not to to say the show was bad at all, it just wasn’t as good as others I’ve seen. He’s touring to support a new album (The Rising) and I’m a bad fan — I don’t have it, I’m not familiar with the songs on it — so he did some material I didn’t know (and didn’t like all that much), and most of the old stuff he played wasn’t my favorite old stuff. No Jungleland, no Racing in the Streets, no Thunder Road … but we got Darkness on the Edge of Town, we got Rosalita, we got Born to Run. Pizza. Sex. Springsteen.

As he was getting into his standard two and three encores, my fellow L.A. crowd members began to horrify me: they started leaving. This was Dodger Stadium, where leaving in the 7th inning is standard, but leaving early from Bruce??? I was aghast. Look, if you’re going to be that worried about getting stuck in traffic or being out late, maybe you should just stay home. It’s a concert — it’s going to go late, there’s going to be traffic. Accept it. Fucking amateurs… But it was comical to watch all the early-leavers spin around and sprint back to their seats (or try to talk their way back in if they’d already left) when he started playing Born to Run.

By the end of the night my hands hurt from clapping and my voice was raspy from cheering. Beth and I had a good time.

And the raspy voice came in handy this morning when I called in sick to work. Heh.

Yes, my wife is very cool. She went out and bought these for us a few weeks ago:

Springsteen at Dodger Stadium on a warm summer night. How cool is that?

I’m losing track of how many times I’ve seen Springsteen in concert. I think this will be #6. My Bruce history:

1. On my birthday at L.A.’s Sports Arena on the Born In The USA tour. Up ’til this point, I had always mocked Springsteen and his fans. I just didn’t get it. But my college newspaper buddy Derek and I used to go to his apartment after class, get drunk, watch Jeopardy, and he’d play Born In The USA over and over and over and over again until I knew every word and liked some of the songs. So when Derek found out it was my birthday and we weren’t doing anything about it, he suggested we go to the Sports Arena, where Springsteen was playing that night, and try to get will-call tickets. We did, we got great seats, and I walked out a to-the-bone Springsteen fan.

2. A few nights later, same venue.

3. A year later, L.A. Coliseum, still the Born In The USA tour, now gone stadium-sized. I took the aerobics instructor I was dating at the time, we rode my motorcycle to the show. She did not appreciate the wonderfulness that was Bruce. I stopped dating her soon after.

4. A few years later, again the L.A. Sports Arena, again will-call tickets, on the Tunnel Of Love tour.

4a. Sigh… The show I missed. During the dotcom era I was working for drkoop.com and they announced an internal essay contest for two tickets to see Springsteen when he came to Austin on the E Street Band’s reunion tour in 2000. I wrote a funny yet moving entry about why I should win the tickets and whoever read it agreed that, yes, I should win the tickets. They were going to fly me and Beth to Austin, put us up in a hotel, chauffer us to the concert, and then fly us home again. It was going to be sweet. And then I got hit by a car. After that, I was in so much pain there was no way I could sit in an airline seat for three hours (it still hurts to sit in those seats for too long), so I told them to give my tickets to someone else. (If you follow the link to the roadkill story, let me warn you against following the “next” link at the bottom of that page — it will lead you to a picture of my naked ass. You don’t want to see my naked ass.)

5. A few months later, same tour, L.A.’s Staples Center. Beth claims she surprised me with the tickets for my birthday and I didn’t feel much like going — I thought maybe he was too old, we were too old, that the old magic would be gone, but that I loved every minute when we got there. This sounds insane to me, but Beth’s memory is better than mine so I’ll grudgingly stipulate that maybe I had a brain cloud or something that day.

6. A few days later, again at Staples, again will-call tickets. We had brunch nearby that morning and decided on a whim to see if we could get seats. We did, good ones. Seriously, will-call tickets are the way to go. I’ve gotten great seats every time — and only paid face value.

7. A few months later I was in NYC working for PaineWebber when I realized Springsteen was playing Madison Square Garden. Bruce in New York. His home town. I had to go. Our team had some big teambuilding exercise going that night where attendance was mandatory. I asked my boss if I could be excused to go to the concert and suggested he should say yes since I was going either way. He said yes. (Although it’s my then [and now] coworker Gavin‘s memory that I got in trouble for going.) This was one of the best of his shows that I’ve seen. High point: hearing them do 41 Shots and feeling the surge of anger and sadness rush through the crowd.

Okay, I’m wrong. Tomorrow will be #8. I can’t wait.

We had an evening out at the Hollywood Bowl last night, where Beth’s dad has a box down toward the front. Last night’s production was To Ella With Love, a tribute to Ella Fitzgerald with a group of current jazz singers singing some of her greatest hits. All told, it was a nice evening. The music was good, Beth’s sister packed a nice dinner for us, Beth’s rarely-seen other sister showed up and was on good behavior, Beth’s dad was in a good mood, and Zoe was really well-behaved considering that she’s no jazz fan and was annoyed that the scatting was waking her up.

And, yeah, that scatting… That’s one thing I can do without. The musical equivalent of speaking in tongues, it’s just grating to me. A little is okay, but too much is way too much.

Skittlee-boo-bap-doobaow-doobaow-doobaow-zeeeeeeeUMP!

Just stop, okay? Scat, scat!

We bought a tent on sale from Big 5 a few months ago, I have no idea why — I think I had malaria and was suffering from a fever of 108 and had this vision of a family outing in the mountains, sitting around a campfire and roasting marshmallows, pointing out constellations in the night sky to Zoe, cooking a hearty breakfast in the morning over an open fire… Camping, in other words. But I forgot that Beth doesn’t do camping. To Beth, camping is staying in a hotel that doesn’t feature round-the-clock room service. To Beth, the Great Outdoors is just that: Great. Outdoors.

So we have this tent we’re not using. Well, for Zoe, this is just WRONG. We have to go camping! Now! And if all the campsites in the area are completely booked through November, well we just have to go camping now anyway!

So tonight Zoe and I are going camping. In the back yard. We’ll be eating donuts in the tent later, and then I’ll tell her a ghost story (“…but not too scary of a ghost story, okay, Daddy?”) and then we’ll bed down for the night under the stars of suburbia. She’s so excited she can hardly stand it. I’m… Well, resigned is a good word for it.

Somehow it just doesn’t feel like camping when you have to make sure the sprinklers are turned off before you set up the tent.

Several entries back I listed one of the reasons I love my knife-fighting wife, and I used the title of a Little Feat song as the entry title. Here, now, the lyrics to that song, every word of which rings true:

That’s Her, She’s Mine
by Paul Barrere, Bill Payne, Sam Clayton

Hey, that’s her, and she’s mine
Look don’t touch ’cause lookin’ I don’t mind
See that girl lookin’ so fine?
Ya that’s her, and she’s mine

I arrived home yesterday afternoon to find that I couldn’t really arrive home — the police had set up a perimeter that happened to include my house.

From a mile or so away I could see a police helicopter circling. That’s not at all unusual in LA so I really didn’t even notice. What I did notice was when I got to two blocks away the police had blocked off the major street right at the smaller one leading to my house. I used a sneaky shortcut down an even smaller street to get around them and got to the intersection my house is at — but could go no further.

There are three streets that intersect at my house in a “K” configuration with my and my neighbor’s houses right in the crook of the K; the police had cut off entry (and exit) to the top right leg by blocking off the vertical leg right at the intersection. They were apparently searching for an armed robbery suspect and he was somewhere in the neighborhood. The end result was that I could get to within 25 yards of my house — in fact I ended up sitting on the curb right across the street — but I couldn’t actually get to it. Turns out Beth and Zoe were in a similar predicament, cut off from home on the other side of the roadblock.

About 15 minutes later they tightened their cordon up a bit, which allowed Beth and I to get home. Home sweet home — or was it? Now we had to deal with a helicopter circling overhead, police cars roaring back and forth, looky-loos — both on foot and in cars — streaming by out front, the dogs going bananas over all of it, Zoe was getting scared… So we did the only sensible thing: we went out to dinner.

Things were just winding down when we got home. The police had caught their guy half a block away and were slowly pulling out. The helicopter kept circling for a little while, police cars kept roaring by for a little while, looky-loos kept wandering around for a little while … but after another little while everything was back to normal.

Well, almost everything. We were left with a souvenir: a 5-inch strip of police tape was left tied to a tree out front, a remnant of the roadblock that had kept me out in the first place. I’m thinking we should frame it.

Or … maybe not.

My father-in-law is blissfully unaware of how offbeat and intrusive he and his requests can be sometimes. His interests are assumed to be yours and of course you want to drop everything to follow up on them. He’s a very generous guy who means well, but sometimes… Oy.

The latest installment:

Over dim sum last weekend he mentioned in passing that he’d watched an interview with a bioethicist on Charlie Rose and asked if any of us had seen it. None of us had. “Oh, that’s too bad,” he said, “It was very interesting. I wish you had seen it.” And he proceeded to tell us just what it was about it that had impressed him so. End of conversation. Or was it…?

In today’s email comes the following, cc’d to me and everyone else who was there:

on july 1, charlie rose had Bioethicist, Author Leon Kass on his show.

try it, i think that it is worth trying to understand the discussion.

So now I have a choice: Spend however long it takes to download this thing, watch it, take notes, write up my talking points, and then call him so we can discuss this issue I have zero interest in… or just don’t and be made to feel guilty for it.

Guilt is leading right now.

Reason #37 why I love my wife:

She had her lipoma “procedure” done the other day and is now sporting a stitched-up slash on her forearm. When people ask her what happened, I love her answer:

“Knife fight.”

This will be of interest to no one but myself, but I’m posting it because it’ll be of interest to myself next year.

Assuming Valley College doesn’t do a show again, the hot ticket for fireworks viewing is CBS’s Radford Studio show. Stake out a spot on Colfax at the NW end of the bridge over the wash, bring chairs, get there around 8:15, park in the bus stop, show starts at about 8:50.

Leaving this note for myself here assumes, of course, that the internet will be around next year. And that I’ll be around to read the note. And that I’ll have a computer. And an internet connection. And etc.

All these things are much more likely than the chance that I’ll actually remember this on my own.

It was eight years ago today that Beth and I were married. In those eight years my life has changed in ways I never thought possible and I have grown in ways I never thought necessary. I’m living the dream I never knew I had.

Thanks for marrying me, honey. I love you very much.