Religious dongs: Is there any party they can't not enjoy?

I'm thinking, "No."

I had a blast last night. The U2 show was...stunning. Total eye candy, and I lost all track of time as well as spatial orientation. Just lifted up and thrown down a few hours later, dazed but better for the journey. The spectacle was enormous. The crowd was huge, about 65,000 people. They hit most of the songs that I wanted to hear, so I have no real complaints.

I like this last blurry one, because it kind of summarizes the craziness for me.

Now, my former office wife, the one who said that the opening band, Muse, made her want to "drive really fast, kill someone and fuck, all at once" (sweetie, if you do the other two together, someone's going to get killed), reported that she was 3 feet away from Adam Clayton. I can now report that if I were three feet farther away, I would technically no longer be at the concert.

My seats were a little bit of a disappointment, but I did get the full effect of the light show, which was nothing to sniff at. And there were points where the band seemed to reach out to the boonies where I was (top deck, off at an angle, about 2 o'clock facing out from the stage, about as far out as you could go). The music was a little distorted by the time it reached us, but they had the courtesy to delay the video so that it synched up with the audio we eventually heard. I will say that the political activism toward the end was pretty tiresome, utterly masturbatory and ultimately extended no farther than the inner walls of the Dome against which I was pressed. I can't believe that such protests have the slightest effect on the Burmese authorities holding Yoko Ono captive. (Ok, maybe it was Aung San Suu Kyi.)

After the show, I was pretty much in a daze, wonder what the hell had happened to me for that hour or two, and sort of stunned that I did not remember more, honestly. I had passed through a mirror-ball time tunnel.

Then I saw the sign:

"Bono is the devil."

It was carefully scrawled on the back of a piece of torn cardboard with a sharpie. I could only wonder what possessed someone to take time out of their day to come down and make an ineffectual statement to a crowd that would at best have been indifferent.

Anyway, there was no time to ponder the sign, as the crowd pushed us along to the rail station. Just inside the entrance, there was the strangest preaching that I had ever encountered. I want you to think back to the last time you shuffling off of an airplane. The attendant didn't care that you were leaving, only mumbled, "Goodbyenowgoodbyethanksbuhbyethankyoubiebiethanksbyemmhmthankyou..." in a tone that they had repeated the word "goodbye" so many times that it really was a vocal reflex, a remnant of a phrase that once had meaning. Well, there were two people sitting off to the side gently haranguing the crowd in a similar tone: "Youreasinnerblasphemerwhoreofbabylonfornicatorandyoureapervertsbuhbyedoomedtohelleternal..."

This blanket condemnation of, well, absolutely everyone was just so strange that I actually laughed at them to their face. But it got me thinking, I had received a card earlier in the evening as I entered the stadium, which I had not yet looked at. When I got home I fished it out of my pocket and on the front....


This argument (click to embiggen) seemed familiar to me. So I typed in the link to OneHeartbeartAway.org. It's the site for Mark Cahill's book. You remember Mark, right? Sloth from The Goonies? I've written about him before. He has (or at least had) this "are you saved" test that is completely rigged so that you can not escape the conclusion that you are going to hell. I would have thought that I would have noticed being harassed by a man-ape, so I assume that I did not come into contact with Cahill himself. But I think I detected his spray.

HJ