Grateful Dead

I was about to go into my first year in college after graduating high school. I was a techno and industrial DJ since 14. My buddy got me into jazz and jam band music after growing up loving punk and industrial music like Psychic TV, Iggy Pop, Bauhaus Siouxsie etc.. But I was a 14 year old kid DJing industrial and techno. And made a bit of a name doing it. My buddy I worked with in a video store was managing an up and coming jam band from Oklahoma, and convinced me to go on tour with them, offering me the opportunity to be the warm up DJ at shows. I packed my records and eventually played my records in Dallas, Kansas City, Boulder and Denver. These happened to be Phish shows. A couple months later I was camping in the desert with a massive radar on the hill above us in Nevada, because Lake Meed was full. This was the first day before my first of 3 days at Sam Boyd in 1993. Rolling into the long road leading to the parking lot in our shitty VW Fox covered in stickers feels like a childhood memory now, right before you learned Santa was not real. We arrived in the parking lot the day before the first show. I hadn't yet been to burning man, which happened 10 years later, and I later tried my best to reconcile the two experiences with those burners who never experienced the Grateful Dead parking lot for these week long shows. Futile to this day. For 5 days we never returned to our campsite up in the hills. In most part to the long strip of acid we all purchased from a short, grizzled, leather wearing biker man as soon as we arrived. I think it was 15 dollars but it looked like 15 inches of tabs which we ate that day. Wildly enough I remember so many documentary worthy vignettes that took place along the next three days of non-stop psychedelia, and had my 8mm camera documenting the ebbs along the way. Between not eating the kind burritos being sold in camps, playing my didgeridoo in multiple camp jams in the evenings, and being hollered at by "hippy girls" that were prolly 2 years older than me for stealing their souls with my camera, the show had some magical moments, including the moment when it rained during looks like rain and the now clearly synchronized Fire on the Mountain as the sun set over the Vegas mountains. Then I stood still and received 3rd degree sunburns while tripping balls without realizing the damage for 3 days. On a positive note, I was pulled over by 5 police cars while driving home over the hoover damn, still tripping balls, and somehow managed to talk my way out of it over an hour long experience with multiple police questioning us and searching the car for drugs we had long taken and were gone.. Clearly pulled over driving my friend's VW covered in Dead stickers, and clearly exploited white privilege by talking my way out of being arrested while tripping. We made it back to OK safe and in my bed at my parent's house. Im unclear what the moral of the story is here, but in the spirit of the Dead, Goth and Techno music, I kept my mind open, put myself in uncomfortable situations, and created a life experience that I built on and makes me happy to this day.