Why Can’t Real Life Be Festival Life? Everyday is Festival Day!

I attend a lot of indie rock shows in San Francisco, recently I’ve expanded my horizon and have started attending more music festivals. In the last 2 months, I’ve been to Upstream, BottleRock, Phono Del Sol, ID10T, High Sierra and will attend Northern Nights and Outside Lands in the near future. What I’ve recently decided is that I want every day to be festival day.

There are bits I would steal from every festival I have attended. However, High Sierra, the most recent festival I attended, is almost perfect the way it is. They have been hosting the festival for 27 years, so they’ve had some practice. I want every day of my life to be like High Sierra.

What would that look like you ask? Let me tell you. People would be happy all the time, it may be chemically enhanced, but I’m ok with that. Fashion trends would be very interesting, you might say fashion forward. This might also be due to chemicals, but I’m ok with it. My chemicals of choice would be caffeine and whiskey.

When every day is festival day, there would be parades every afternoon. If you forgot to bring props it’s ok, the prop team will have costumes ready for you. Speaking of costumes, somebody will always be ready to dress you up. There is always a camp ready to fix your outfit, in addition, there are multiple spots where you can pick up fresh costume pieces or drop off your extra pieces. Like I said before, we’d always be very fashion forward.

Sometimes it would get hot in our festival world, but the swimming pool is open every day at 1PM. This will be a great way to bring our body temperatures down to a reasonable human temperature. In this future festival world, everybody would smell like coconut and other amazing sunblock smells. You wouldn’t need perfume or cologne because you’d already smell like a piña colada! Speaking of pineapples, it would be socially acceptable for you to have a drink in your hand at all times.

If every day were festival day there would be an emphasis on music and we’d discover new music every day. Attendees might bring a blanket to sit on, but they’d be nice and move it if you needed to get by. They might even start a conversation with you and ask if you needed a drink. Speaking of drinking, we’d get hungry from time-to-time and there would be food trucks a short walk away. In fact, everything would be a short walk away. If every day were like High Sierra there would be 4 distinct “cities,” each city would specialize in a type of music, and we could easily walk to all of them.

I know what you’re thinking, on the downside we’d live in tents, but on the upside, we’d finally have yards. Also, secret buildings would have air conditioning, and when you found that building you’d hang out there when the days got too hot. Eventually, you’d discover that the building with air conditioning also had wine and beer tasting every day at 5PM. If you had the special festival cup and some tickets you could discover new adult beverages every day.

I’ve enjoyed telling you about this festival world, now I’d like to show you some pictures from High Sierra in Quincy, California. I think their model has a lot of things we can copy for when we make everyday festival day. For example they had music from Trey Anastasio Band, Ween, STS9, Gov’t Mule, Andrew Bird, Snarky Puppy, Galactic, Deer Tick, BoomBox, The Record Company, Ott & The All-Seeing I, Con Brio, The Brothers Comatose, Tank & The Bangas, Lebo & Friends, Gene Evaro Jr, and Sweet Crude. I think when every day is festival day we could go see these bands plus more every day.