Bonnaroo 2005. This Time It's Personal.

THURSDAY:

Randomness or coincidence… or does it even matter? Make my first flight after leaving the checklist with my wife.

• Change plant litter
• water cat
• return the kid and give the movie lots of love

Who the heck designed Washington D.C.’s Reagan airport? Make a note to exterminate said engineer. During a layover I sat between the ranting, homophobic, hippy-hating redneck from hell and Phish keyboardist Page McConnell. After an amusing 30-minute Abbot & Costello remake, turns out Page isn’t on his way to Tennessee for Bonnaroo, but headed to a family reunion in West Virginia. His plane leaves first. As soon as he splits, the redneck starts in on all the “hippy and fag juice” invading Tennessee.

Rather than subject myself to any more bigotry, I decide to silence the Rebel Rube by showing him a picture of “my partner and our adopted Russian baby,” which is really a picture of my son with The Roots’ ?uestlove during an interview at the Ritz last summer (see above photo). The Rube can’t speak, and starts to shake with fury. I board my flight before Civil War II breaks out in our nation’s capital. Ah, the melting pot.

I Find the best radio station south of the Mason Dixon, east of the mighty Mississippi. 91.1 FM out of Nashville. Blaring Gomez’s “Tijauana Lady” into Emmy Lou Harris’s “Luxury Liner,” I try to navigate “backway” directions, which actually include, “take a right at the large oak by the old brick ranch house.” I let the Oldsmobile Alero gallop over the Kelly green curves of Murfreesboro, Tenn. Splitting the landscape with jersey cows and cacophonous cicadas, I spy a rainbow illuminating a solitary grain silo. The idyllic rural splendor is abruptly marred by the flashing blue lights of Patrolman J. House. After one of Woodbury County’s finest offers some better directions and a polite citation which severely dents my libation budget, I slowly pass into Coffee County on 55 west. I’m greeted with nothing but empty asphalt, cavorting fireflies and a massive hand-painted bolt of cloth tied to a fence welcoming the road-weary with the satiric question, “Ain’t Life Grand?”

After the Southern Hospitality of the redneck and Patrolman House, I hope the weekend will hold a truer answer.