“We are living in the age in which the pursuit of all values other than money, success, fame, glamour, has either been discredited or destroyed.”
-- Michael Alig in “Party Monster”

****AUTHOR'S NOTE: This essay was originally penned in April 2015 as a response to Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary as part of a graduate-level literature course focusing on non-American, non-English writers.  It then evolved to be part of my thesis, and has since both grown and been edited down.  The references to the book's title character, Emma Bovary, have been removed, but her tendency towards materialism and the corruption of a fabulous lifestyle should remain an undertone when reading this piece.  I am now almost thirty-one years old and thus did not succumb to 'The Club' as minor anxieties that are voiced in this piece feared I would.  Onward!

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I’ll be twenty-eight years old come summer. Having come this far in my life I’ve already passed some of the milestones American culture sees as important rites of passage: I got my driver’s license at sixteen, I registered to vote and was able to buy tobacco at eighteen, and bought my first legal drink at twenty-one. Even reaching twenty-five had its perks, as I was finally able to rent a car without the outrageous insurance hikes which previously made it almost impossible to do so as a poorly financed student. However turning twenty-eight means something different altogether: it means I’ve survived a curse.

I can’t accurately explain the science behind the phenomenon that is known as ‘The 27 Club,’ because, well, there hasn’t been any real scientific assessment dedicated to exploring this strange pattern that has governed popularized tragedy. Seeing such a wide array of dedicated and groundbreaking artists perish at this young age has definitely garnered some attention over the years, and while culturally it seems pertinent to lump them all together in one group based on the fact that they all died at the same age, what’s important to note is that most died for basically the same reason: they were all bewitched by the culture of excess.

Generally speaking, The 27 Club is made up of notable persons who died at the age of twenty-seven. While the Club’s members embody several different kinds of celebrity, the most memorable ones are artists who died in the past several decades, most of them being musicians who partied a little too hard. Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Brian Jones...these were all musicians who were legends of their own time, struck down in their prime by habits formed in the tradition of excess, as they were all corrupted by the gleaming promises of a fabulous lifestyle. , For some, the pressure of maintaining such ways of life becomes too much to handle, leading to superfluous abuse of substances, which become readily available once someone achieves certain financial and influential status. And then one night, someone goes a little too far at a party and it’s curtains for them.

This isn’t to say that only people who are twenty-seven are vulnerable to such a tragic end: Bradley Nowell, the lead singer of Sublime, just barely missed making it into the Club (by one year) after overdosing on heroin in 1996. And who can forget Marilyn Monroe? Or Judy Garland, for that matter? Both were much older when they passed on—thirty-six and forty-seven, respectively—but both were also victims of the pressures of Hollywood life.

So what is this obsession with fame and fortune? What drives people to achieve notoriety? And when does it get to be too much?

In William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in particular a section of that collection called “Proverbs of Hell,” he writes: “The road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” “Proverbs of Hell” was written to satirize the proverbs that we have been taught over the years, sentiments like “practice makes perfect,” “a rolling stone gathers no moss,” and “curiosity killed the cat,” that sort of thing. In the case of this one quote in particular, there are those that derive twisted truth from its comical nature.

I first heard the quote some years ago, used as a beacon of incontrovertible advice from one character to another in the film Party Monster, a dramatized account of the early days of the late-‘80s/early-‘90s club land subculture in New York City, focused on the tumultuous—and eventually disastrous—relationship between old pro James St. James (“the Original!”) and his fateful protégé-turned-Club Kid King, the naively insatiable Michael Alig. Party Monster—as well as the book that originally told their story, Disco Bloodbath (penned by St. James)—tells the tale of the extravagance of late ‘80s/early ‘90s club kid culture in New York City, in which the seemingly benign ideals of pageantry, fantasy, and enjoyment put forth by St. James in the movement’s sapling days are in turn warped and exaggerated at the hands of Michael Alig.

In the beginning of the film, Alig arrives in New York City from the Midwest with dreams of fame and fortune and to find his niche: “I wanted to create my own world. A world full of color where everyone could play. One big party that never ends.” Alig seeks counsel with the already infamous James St. James—an active member of the club scene—shortly after moving to New York, in an effort to learn exactly what one ‘does’ as a club kid. “I don't do. I just am,” St. James replies, and offers the Blake quote as a sort of all-encompassing mantra (along with ‘Don’t dream it, be it,’ the “moral” of The Rocky Horror Picture Show), not knowing how far the wannabe outsider would take it.

Alig ultimately turns the club kids scene on its head by teaming up with club promoter Peter Gatien of Club Limelight, which becomes the new epicenter for the entire movement. This partnership brings national attention to the phenomenon—as well as some unwanted attention from the FBI—while also introducing a dangerous, drug-addled element to the entire infrastructure of the subculture. Eventually Alig becomes hooked on the sorts of drugs he pledged he would never partake in (namely crack and heroin, although this movement also popularized the use of ecstasy), and ends up murdering a drug-dealing housemate—to whom he owes several thousand dollars. With the aide of his friends, he then dismembers the body, packs the parts into boxes, and then dumps the packages into the East River. Alig is eventually arrested while on a cross-country rehabilitation endeavor, having been ratted out by St. James himself. Alig was held in federal prison until his recent release, having served nearly twenty years for manslaughter.

Macaulay Culkin as Alig in "Party Monster" (Killer Films / World of Wonder)

In a scene about halfway through the film, Alig—portrayed by Macaulay Culkin—is seen partying in an empty subway tunnel and appears on a nightly news report (the dramatized scene was spliced with actual footage of such a party). Doused in glittery makeup and exaggerated fake eyelashes—and clearly in a very altered state—Alig grabs the microphone from the reporter and repeats the Blake quote once spoken to him as a pillar of advice, replacing the word ‘wisdom’ with the word ‘fabulousness.’ To some, this change of one noun to another may seem pretty farfetched, but for those people, the two terms were hardly distinguishable.

While the spontaneous nature of the Club Kid Movement of the 80s and 90s eventually died out, the underground rave scene almost immediately replaced it. Rave culture is a fascinating subject, as it has roots in several branches of modern thought, including—but not limited to—ethnomusicology, tribalism, neuroscience, and, above all, art. While raves can be traced back to several places of origin—namely the UK, Detroit, and Chicago, as those are the ‘birthplaces’ of the most popular genres of electronic music—they rather swiftly became a global phenomenon. Their popularity saw its peak in the 1990s and early 2000s, and raves were often held in secret locations that were only known to few, up until a few days—sometimes only a few hours—before the event actually took place. Unlike the Club Kids’ random gatherings, rave parties were meticulously organized. Often at a rave one would find medical staff, safety liaisons, and even juice bars for replenishing nutrients lost on the often drug-addled dance floor.

I have only been to a handful of proper raves in my life—all of which took place while I was living in New York—and the setup was always new and exciting. First there was the random abandoned bar in Queens, then the party underneath the Washington Bridge (originally it was to be held in an old airplane hangar in the Bronx, but it had rained so much the week before that it was flooded), and then there was Minimoo, a semi-annual event whose location always changed. When I went to Minimoo, it took place in a gorgeous empty SoHo penthouse, with beautifully finished hardwood floors and massive floor to ceiling windows. There was even a daytime one I attended on a steamboat that circled Manhattan (on my birthday, no less), offering three floors with three different DJs, several bars, a café, and a deck on the bow where those weary of the dimly lit dance floors could catch a few rays and bask in the warm August breeze.

When attending a rave, you always feel a very strong sense of community and togetherness, even if you don’t really know anyone else there. Everybody has got everybody else’s back, thanks to ‘PLUR’: Peace. Love. Unity. Respect. That is the mantra shared by all ravers, and it shows. Not feeling well? You will have at least three people—often strangers—getting you water, rubbing your back, helping you through an anxiety attack, etc. If it’s your first time at a rave, you will have people flocking to you, making sure that you’re enjoying yourself. The sense of harmony one feels at a rave is unparalleled.

Unfortunately, this culture has all but died out in the past several years. When I was living in New Orleans, I would often hear my older friends wax nostalgic about the “good ole days” of the State Palace, a combination movie theatre and music venue where many of the city’s raves took place in the 90s and early 2000s. The State Palace was ravaged by Hurricane Katrina and basically left to rot, and the New Orleans rave scene died with it. Now it sits on Canal Street like a tombstone, slowly deteriorating while the other more prominent theatres (like the Saenger and the Joy) enjoy renovations and facelifts to promote the commercial efforts of the city to make it a destination for touring musicals and high-end musicians once more.

In my opinion, rave culture was never really an exercise in excess. First and foremost it was about the music. Sure, drugs were consumed at these events, but in general they were consumed in a responsible manner. No one was really going anywhere, there were often safety/medical staff on site, and the overall goal wasn’t just to get “fucked up.” People who attended raves were there for the music, not the inebriation. Ravers took drugs to enhance their experience and to get energy for dancing, not to get completely obliterated. They wanted to remember their time there, and be coherent enough to actually enjoy it. Bonnaroo is unique amongst the larger festivals, as it carries the same sort of communal positivity as indoctrinated through PLUR that radiates throughout the weekend (and always has), making you feel like everyone there is on the same team. I have definitely witnessed some accounts in which excess—namely drugs and alcohol, which are especially detrimental when standing in the hot Tennessee summer sun for hours on end—has gotten the best of some people, but overall things seem to run pretty smoothly.

The overall environment of big festivals—especially Bonnaroo, where everyone stays on site for the entirety of the event—is very open and free, and while there are some law enforcement agents peppered throughout the festival’s vast 700 acres, they’re mostly there to aid the 80,000 attendees in emergencies—should the need arise—instead of patrolling the grounds looking for lawbreakers. This creates a sort of bubble that envelops the entire festival, making consumption of drugs basically fair game. While some people do get busted occasionally (mostly trying to bring drugs past security into the event), it’s rare that I’ve seen someone go completely overboard, endangering their own life (or possibly the lives of others).

This is the physical manifestation of how one often feels after a multi-day event - during which excess is embraced.

I’m not going to deny that at festivals— namely Bonnaroo— I have taken part in my share of behavior that could be viewed as excessive. In my earlier, less experienced years, I would often seek out various substances the first chance I got. I was a huge fan of LSD during my first several years at Bonnaroo. LSD isn’t something I can handle anymore, but back then, once I became accustomed to the layout and the atmosphere in general, I found that it was one of my favorite drugs to take, especially with friends of mine that had either never tripped before or those I had never shared a trip with. It was cheap, easy to find, and lasted a long time, so there wasn’t any worry of having to re- dose, or even replenish our supply. Plus it gave us the giggles—which is the best part— without having to deal with eating nasty mushrooms that taste like cardboard dipped into a long-forgotten Port-a-Potty. I did like mushrooms as well though (still do), but my preferred method of consuming mushrooms is within chocolates, a love my friend Pookie and I have shared on multiple occasions at Bonnaroo. In 2007 we stayed up all night the very first night we arrived and wandered around the grounds, giggling, and then farting, and then giggling again at the sound of our farts. Perhaps my favorite memory of Pookie on mushrooms was when she started running through the mostly stationary crowd by the main stage, arms outstretched like an airplane, before suddenly stopping on a tiny sandy spot in the grass and yelled, “BEACH!” She then turned her gaze to the little boy standing directly to her right, who looked back up at her with big blue eyes, and she said, in a tone that was so dead serious, “...MY beach,” causing the little boy to cower against the legs of his mother. I briskly grabbed her wrist and directed her away from the child before things escalated, and her eyes never left his, until a stray burst of bubbles crossed her sightline, causing her to take off again, like a slow cat chasing a butterfly that had already flown out of sight.

LSD, like mushrooms, brings out a very interesting side of anyone who ingests it. Usually people just laugh at each other, like when I first tripped with BonnaMom on the last night of ‘Roo 2010, watching her dart between the sparse tents belonging to the few remaining people in our camp, snickering uncontrollably as she threw bagels into the air (because “Bonnaroo made [her] feel free!”) and tried to find a place to pee away from the blinding glare of the floodlights humming along the perimeter of the campgrounds. Either that, or they stare at and find beauty in otherwise boring and meaningless objects like twist-ties and empty jars of peanut butter. Some people get deep, and start pontificating about the state of the universe and how tiny and insignificant we are— which is fine, but there’s a time and a place for that, like a starlit night in the woods. At a music festival, it’s a major buzzkill.

Sometimes, LSD has the potential to awaken a beast that has been hiding deep inside someone, a dormant facet of the psyche that has never been tapped into. Some people just go absolutely nuts. My second year on the Farm (which is what the “locals” call Bonnaroo), I brought along four friends who had never been before: my best friend Pookie, another friend from high school named Beth (who graduated two years ahead of me), my childhood friend Kurt, and a girl I had met at my short stint at Fordham named Mary.

The first thing I did the very first morning we were there—which was the first hot and sunny Bonnaroo morning I had ever experienced (and man, was it hot!)—I immediately went on the hunt down Shakedown for some doses. I had barely walked 100 yards from our prime location right at the top of the street when I was approached by a very slender shirtless man, who was very slyly advertising his product by gently shaking a box of Domino sugar cubes at his side. I caught his eye and he motioned towards a narrow “inlet” between some bathrooms and some (very unfortunately placed) tents. I asked for five, and without even flinching he produced five sugar cubes from his box, snatched a rubber-handled vial/dropper combo from his back pocket, and delicately placed one perfectly measured drop on each of the cubes. Then in one swift motion he replaced the bottle in his pocket, pulled out a napkin and a piece of foil, laid the foil on my hand and then used the napkin to gently grasp and place each individual sugar cube onto the foil, which he then wrapped it up like a tiny little gift. I paid and thanked him, and then nodded a silent farewell. I don’t think he made a single sound the whole time, and the whole process took maybe two or three minutes, tops.

Apparently a lot can happen in two or three minutes. When I returned to the cars, a lot had transpired. Mary had locked Beth’s keys in her trunk, which was a huge bummer because my car had endured some mechanical issues on the way in and was no longer functioning, meaning our one source of relief from the stifling heat—Beth’s A/C—was no longer accessible. This all happened because Beth had asked Mary to get something out of her car while she ran down to the opposite side of our street, where someone was selling Bloody Marys. Beth had returned not with Bloody Marys, but instead with an entire bottle of Smirnoff that she had paid the guy $20 for, and as I approached our improvised campsite, Beth was swinging the bottle through the air wildly as she berated Mary, exaggerating her already animated gestures.

Beth quickly stormed towards my car, clearly already tipsy, where Kurt was already half-asleep in the back of the van. I decided it was time to try and play peacekeeper, and so I held out the shiny little package, unwrapped it and presented the acid-drenched sugar cubes to my companions, first to Pookie and Mary. Pookie shook her head and I shot her an inquisitive look—as if to say, really? —and she shrugged in my direction. I shrugged back, deciding not to push it, and swung my hand over to Mary, who happily took a cube, squinting her eyes with a smile as she placed it on her tongue and emitted a cheery, “Mmmmm!”

The beast within is awakened...not my proudest moment, but excess rarely coincides with dignity. (2009).

Beth and Kurt were already visibly inebriated, as Beth had abandoned her fleeting state of anger and reclined in the front passenger seat of my minivan while Kurt was sprawled across the mattress in the back of the van. I simply said, “Open,” and like machinery, both Beth and Kurt opened their mouths, and I delicately placed a sugar cube on each of their tongues. They closed their mouths, swallowed the sugar, and went back to sleep. I turned back to the other two (conscious) people in our party, looked down at the two remaining cubes, and dumped them both into my mouth. As the saccharine taste slid down my throat I clapped my hands and pointed in the direction of Centeroo, as if that first chemical jolt had already made its way from my taste buds up to my brain and down my arms to my hands. Mary decided to come with me while Pookie opted to stay behind and look after the other two.

Mary and I had a wonderful afternoon seeing Bright Eyes and playing with the grass (though she did yell at me and called me “the Bush administration” at one point when I dug my hand into the dirt and pulled out a big clump). On our way back to camp we got a somewhat frantic call from Pookie who was still back at camp. Apparently Beth and Kurt had woken up tripping—having forgotten they had taken the acid— completely trashed the minivan, and ran off towards Centeroo. Pookie was bewildered but ultimately amused, and when I relayed the story to Mary, she looked as if she might be having an aneurism as she crumpled to the ground in a fit of wild, howling laughter.

Not five seconds later, my phone rang. Sure enough, it was Kurt. I answered with a cautiously optimistic “Hello?”

“COREY BELL! TEeeHeeHEEhhEEE...HELP US!! AhHAhahaAHA...THE MAN IN THE STRAW HAT...HE’S AFTER US!! AHAHAHAHA!!!”

I mean, I thought I was messed up, but this kid was on a whole other level. “...Wait, what the hell...?” I managed, trying to ignore my skin melting “COREY!” Beth had grabbed the phone from Kurt, but I heard him still cackling in the background. “Giant three in the sky!” She screamed. “Come!!! NOW!!” Click.

I paused for a moment while I looked down at my phone, trying to piece together the extremely random information I had just received, and then my eyes shot towards the campground. I grabbed Mary by the arm and pulled her to her feet.

“I know where they are!” I shouted, and started running towards the archway that led out to Shakedown Street.

After a brisk ten minute jaunt down Shakedown, I saw them. There they were, Beth splashing her face in a sink trailer while Kurt rolled around on the ground tangled in a fit of uncontrollable mirth. Next to him a man in a straw hat was squatting down, trying to get Kurt to compose himself. In his left hand was the Bible, and looming a dozen few yards above our heads was what had guided me to them: the giant three in the sky, the green balloon for Pod #3.

I shook my head and approached the man in the hat, tapping him on the shoulder. He squinted as he looked in my direction, and taking the still howling Kurt by the arm I simply said, “I’ll take it from here,” helping Kurt hobble down the road back to camp, his boisterous laugh bouncing off every flat surface we passed. As I helped him back into my car, the only thing that crossed my mind was, Damn, I’m real glad we don’t really have to go anywhere tonight.

At Bonnaroo, a situation like the one my friends found themselves lost in is fairly easy to remedy: some water, some beer, some food and some sleep. Even when I had my first bad trip on acid (which also turned out to be my last acid trip ever) during Radiohead’s Bonnaroo 2012 headlining set⁸, I felt some comfort knowing that I had somewhere I could rest my weary head until the psychosis faded away. At some of the other big multi-genre festivals however, not everyone has the luxury of staying overnight, and so a simple fit of laughter can turn into something more hazardous, especially if anyone suspects the subject in question might be trying to drive home. This doesn’t stop the majority of people from doing an enormous amount of drugs, as the shorter days tend to promote a feeling of urgency due to their temporal constraints.

⁸ This only happened because I foolishly handled the LSD we had bought earlier that day in haste, with my bare hands. Acid is very easily absorbed into any porous substance that it touches—including human fingers—so when I thought I was only taking the two hits I placed on my tongue, in reality it was more like five or six as my sweaty digits had taken on some of the LSD that the blotter tabs had been soaked in.

The same cannot be said of the much newer phenomenon of electronic music festivals, or ‘EDM festivals’ as they are commonly known. These events—which I view as rave culture’s bastard sons—started popping up in the mid-2000s, the guiding light being the Ultra Music Festival in Miami. Ultra was born out of a smaller party that took place during Miami’s Winter Music Conference, which has been held annually in Miami since 1985. The Conference celebrates the progress and innovation in regards to electronic music, and includes shows, symposiums, panels, and several parties. Ultra started as a one-time party, and has since exploded into a massive three-day event held every March, marking the end of WMC. Now that EDM is so incredibly popular— spawning over 100 different subgenres (techno, house, dubstep, trap, electro, big beat, deep house, acid house, drum and bass, jungle, etc. etc.)—as well as music festivals are in general these days, it was inevitable that EDM and festival culture would merge, creating a whole new beast: a beast that has claimed many young lives in the name of excess, thanks to misplaced trust, unabashed hubris and a false sense of security.

EDM festivals take many forms; most are regular festivals held in parks or fairgrounds and the like. However, some organizers are keen to this millennial yearning of being constantly fascinated, so some people have gotten creative. There’s Electric Forest, which is held in the middle of the woods in Michigan; there’s also the Electric Daisy Carnival, which is an actual carnival held in different cities across the country (the most notable seems to be the Las Vegas event) and is one of the largest music festivals in the world. Perhaps the most interesting is Holy Ship, which is an EDM festival that takes place on a cruise ship that sails from Miami and stops at private (cruise-line owned) islands for daily beach parties featuring some of the most renowned DJs in the world.

I’ve only been to three proper EDM festivals in my life, though perhaps it might have been four, if you count the Moogfest (2012) that existed before it transformed into Mountain Oasis shortly before the festival caved in 2014 (which I’m not sure I would, as the lineup was far more eclectic than any EDM fest lineup I have seen in recent years—I hardly think Primus is considered EDM). One of the three “true” EDM festivals I attended was last year’s HARD Summer Music Festival in SoCal, as seeing The Chemical Brothers on the lineup was enough to sell me. The other two are festivals I have already mentioned in this article, and while one resembled paradise, the other was easily one of the most frustrating events I had ever been to.

Give up? If you had guessed paradise resided in sunny Miami, you’re right!

...But only briefly, because the paradise I was referring to was the one and only Holy Ship, which takes place aboard the luxurious MSC Divina, which leaves from Miami to take its gleeful passengers across the sea to private sandy beaches where they can sip cocktails and dance till dawn (well, not on the beach), all while enjoying a 24- hour self-serve buffet, pools, a waterslide, cushy staterooms, and a plethora of dance floors featuring some of the best DJs in the world.

These sorts of displays are often found at EDM events to 'enhance' the experience. (Orbital, Moogfest 2012)

I actually had the (rather pricey) pleasure of attending the event twice, during its second and third installments. The first time I went was aboard the MSC Poesia, which actually left from Ft. Lauderdale (Miami’s next door neighbor) and randomly stopped in Nassau for a day before chugging along to the promised private beach party the following day, yet my second voyage was aboard the Divina, and that year we enjoyed TWO days at TWO private island beach parties, which was far more entertaining. Now Holy Ship offers two different voyages—one in January and the other in February—boasting similar (but not quite the same) lineups and itineraries.

Holy Ship feels much more tame than one would expect. The closed quarters allow the passengers to be more closely monitored, but not in a creepy way; it’s actually a bit more reassuring to know that everyone is one place. Plus the heightened security upon embarkation weeds out some of the more hubris-plagued attendees, and keeps things at a cool level of moderation and, dare I say, sophistication. This is nothing like the crazy elaborate events like Electric Daisy Carnival and TomorrowWorld, rather it’s rather quaint and much more relaxed. Sure, these people know how to party, but they do it right: easy, breezy, and drama-free—much like the sunny Caribbean itself (thought it is quite expensive).

As it turns out, the polar opposite of enjoyment finds its home in Miami as well, in the form of Ultra. I only went to Ultra once, back in 2011 (again beckoned by the promise of seeing The Chemical Brothers live), and it was an absolute nightmare. Since then the venue has reportedly moved to a larger space from the overstuffed Bicentennial Park where it was held when I attended the event. The lineup was absolutely insane: Chemical Brothers, Duran Duran, Röyksopp, MSTRKRFT, and Moby, just to name a few. However, no matter how ecstatic the lineup had made me, nothing could make up for the absolute nightmare every other aspect of the three-day festival turned into: the people were extremely rude, the park was way too small, there was virtually no food options and basically no beverages for sale under $8, and for some ungodly reason, the producers had centralized all of the bathrooms into the most crowded space in the park, where all paths from all the different stages converged, and arranged them—get this— into a fucking horseshoe, and not a very wide one at that. I must have stood in the same spot for twenty minutes just to even get close a bathroom, yet I barely moved a foot, and over the tops of the heads of the much younger attendees that made up most of the crowd, I could see tiny skinny little girls crowding into the port-a-potties in groups of three or four, most of them staying inside for upwards of ten minutes. I got so frustrated that I ended up walking straight back to the eastern edge of the park, pulled down my pants all the way, and peed right onto the sidewalk that ran along Biscayne Bay.

The culture of these large-scale events is a far departure from the rave culture of the 1990s, although many who are a part of it believe it to be some sort of modern equivalent. PLUR has been replaced with YOLO (meaning You Only Live Once), a sort of bizarrely rationalized excuse to engage in unbridled debauchery and excess. The music is still enticing and exciting (well, some of it is), but it seems that these festival- goers are becoming less and less interested in the music and less interested in the communal spirit that gave birth to these events they claim to love so dearly. They seem to only be interested in their own needs and desires, which can become problematic and dangerous.

Many of these people are young and rebellious, and only have a short window (usually these festivals shut down by 10 PM, midnight at the latest, while Bonnaroo has music going until 4 AM) to experiment with drugs in the hopes that they will somehow “transcend.” Often this time constraint mixed with youthful defiance of authority can spell disaster, especially for people who are inexperienced with responsible substance consumption and rehydration, and those who are stupid enough to buy drugs from strangers.

I apologize if that seems crass—I myself have made that mistake—but if you are going to do drugs, always know your source, never do them alone, and always ALWAYS know your limits. Drugs purchased from random people are often either too weak (which is just a waste of money), or their potency is masked, leading to accidental overdoses. This happens frequently with heroin—a drug whose potency grows exponentially as purity increases—as well as LSD (which has no physical indicators of strength, as it is often just paper, or liquid on a sugar cube) and MDMA. MDMA has a very distinct taste, but can often contain odorless toxic cutting agents employed by dealers to inexpensively expand their stash and thus their profits. These agents can seriously dehydrate you (which MDMA does a pretty good job of doing already), endangering your health. Mix that with some hot summer sun, constant exertion, and aggressive alcohol sales and it’s a recipe for catastrophe. Some of these chemicals have been known to cause allergic reactions, even anaphylactic shock.

Still it is this obsession with having to be constantly fascinated and entertained that seems to be the root of this excessive and irresponsible behavior. These festivals have become less about music and more about sensory overload. My generation and those ten years or so younger than me have been completely numbed by constant technological bombardment. Basically everybody is carrying around a computer in their pocket these days, which gives access to a digital universe that connects everyone to everyone else and holds the answers to any question being asked. Now that we have the world at our fingertips, everything just isn’t as interesting as it used to be. Instead of watching a meteor shower, we’d rather lie in bed watching Netflix. It’s no wonder that people attending EDM festivals engage in such excessive behavior: they’re compensating for the sensory numbness that permeates modern society and culture, so they end up brutalizing themselves in the process.

People die at festivals every year because of foolish behavior, which is often rooted in a notion that the world isn’t amazing or “entertaining” enough as it is. The original Electric Daisy Carnival in Los Angeles was placed under moratorium because a 16-year-old girl overdosed on ecstasy and died at the 2010 event. New York’s Electric Zoo Festival cancelled the final day of the event in 2013 due to two deaths that occurred. The mayor of Miami has tried to remove Ultra from the city on several occasions— though none have been successful—due to repeated deaths and medical emergencies related to the festival, including one incident at the 2014 event when a security guard was trampled by a crowd of gate crashers, sustaining a fractured skull and broken leg in the process. Still, people pump themselves full of chemicals until they reach a level where everything is peachy, until they end up face down in a pool of their own vomit while other festival goers mindlessly step over the unconscious kid on the ground because they HAVE to get another beer before Diplo starts. They seek out excess because they already feel like they have everything else. Lots of people can end up in the Club that way.

Something like this can turn real scary REALLY quick, if you know what I mean.

Surprisingly, HARD Summer Fest 2015 was not as insane as I thought it would have been. There was a part of me that was secretly dreading making my way down to Pomona, California to spend the weekend with a bunch of EDM kids, but it turned out to be one of the more relaxed festival environments I had ever found myself in. While security was unreasonably strict (no unsealed gum? Really dude?), the grounds at the Pomona Fairplex (most famously known for hosting the Los Angeles County Fair), were not too crowded, the beer lines were never long, and it wasn’t nearly as hot as expected, especially in the vast warehouse-style indoor venues. They even had rides there—and not just a dinky Ferris Wheel, I’m talking gyro swings too—and since the majority of the crowd was under the age of 25, a very small percentage of them even knew The Chemical Brothers existed, and so while they were twerking up against each other at Dillon Francis a few hundred yards away, my friends and I got treated to basically front row seats. Well, actually it was more like the front of the area where you could still drink beer, which was just as good (if not better), and thanks to some little square yellow pills a friend had brought in from Reseda, the visuals were looking more spectacular than ever. HARD Summer provided an atmosphere that was both liberating and enjoyable, and while I still knew the buzz kill kids were out there, just waiting to fuck up someone’s day in one way or another, I didn’t let it bother me. I just felt content; there was no need to go completely overboard that weekend.

It’s easy to turn to excess when you feel like you have nothing, too, and I can speak from experience. A classmate of mine recently said that a lot of Americans use drugs not to “feel good” but instead to “feel better,” a claim that I can personally relate to. During my first attempt at higher education at Fordham University in New York City ten years ago, I found myself in a very rough place. I was very unhappy at Fordham, realizing a few short weeks into the program that it wasn’t the right fit for me. I wasn’t actually planning on going to Fordham at all; I had been placed on the university’s wait- list and, not expecting to be eventually accepted, I enrolled at a different school. A few weeks before the school year was set to begin, I received my acceptance letter, and thinking it was a better school for what I was pursuing in those days (I was an actor then), I accepted. This turned out to be a huge mistake.

At first I was very happy with my decision. I was able to take some theatre classes, and the other classes I was supposed to take, as part of the Jesuit core curriculum didn’t seem so bad. Eventually I grew tired of getting up at the crack of dawn for classes I had no interest in—and had absolutely nothing to do with my major—and so I quickly fell behind as my disinterest grew. This turned into an inescapable, perpetual state of desperation, as I fell farther and farther behind in my studies. So I turned to drugs and alcohol to quell my fears.

Almost instantly my excessive substance use spiraled out of control. I was basically cutting all of my classes, I was getting no work done to make up for them, and after a rather ridiculous night of debauchery I passed out in the bathroom after throwing up, and security was called as I had locked the door behind me and my roommates were worried that something horrible had happened. This led to a full-on investigation of my behavior and my personal belongings, and after my tools of excess were discovered I was placed on disciplinary probation. My father ended up coming to the school just before Thanksgiving to talk with my advisor, and after their meeting in which my advisor’s concerns were expressed; my father took me out to lunch. It was on the way back to school from our lunch that I felt a great weight inside of me building, and I broke down. In the middle of Lincoln Center, I fell to my knees, sobbing, begging my father to take me home. I was withdrawn from the school that day. On the train back home, the weight was lifted, and I finally felt like myself again.

I turned to excess because I felt like there was no other way. Granted, I was young and stupid, but I didn’t realize that I had the support system I required until I actively asked for help. Many members of The 27 Club ended up driving away the people they loved when they needed them most, which ultimately led to their demise. Some, like Jimi Hendrix, may have just died because they slept the wrong way, and maybe could still be with us today. That’s a dangerous assumption to make though, because many who end up in the Club are often on the wrong path for a while beforehand. Since most became famous rather quickly, they were suddenly showered with riches, and since many already had drug or alcohol habits beforehand, they dove in too quickly and too hard to the bounties that were available to them. Even before I started listening to Amy Winehouse I knew she was doomed, but I also knew there was nothing I could do about it, which sucks.

I do enjoy having a good time and, yes, even dipping into what could be deemed “excessive” behavior from time to time (especially at festivals), but I have learned to take responsibility for my actions and to ask for help when I need it, so I doubt the Club will be making a new member out of me. And if that means that I won’t be reaching the Palace of Wisdom anytime soon, that’s fine with me. It’s too far down the road, and I can’t afford that down payment.

The Journey Continues Tomorrow ... Stay Tuned.