One of the reasons my wife and I have attended the folk festival the last four years–outside of the amazing music, mind blowing environment and great food and drink–is to escape. It’s our chance to get back to being human, let go of the stresses of daily life and embrace fellow folk music lovers with love, peace, understanding and respect. An opportunity to get away from the small minded selfishness and pettiness one typically encounters out in the real world and remember that life is about more than what we own or who we pretend to be.
My wife is 8 months pregnant. Due to that, we were unable to play the tarp game this year, staying up to 3:30 in the morning for a lottery number, etc. So reading the “rules”, we saw that we could actually sit on any tarp that was unused, giving it up obviously if the owner of said tarp showed up and wanted us to move on. And let me tell you, there were a LOT of tarps that went unused. And there were also a lot of instances of tarp abuse. On Sunday, we sat next to two ladies that had a 12’X12’ tarp AND a blanket spread out, just for the two of them. Why? And when we squeezed in between them and the three empty tarps they bordered, one of the ladies became very aggressive and angry. Why? Small minded selfishness and pettiness. Primal, territorial, emotional and juvenile feelings. Some twisted sense of self-entitlement and lack of perspective on what’s really important in life – and a loss of insight into what really doesn’t matter at all.
Mind you, this was with an obviously pregnant wife. And this was not the exception. In fact, the exception was acceptance and openness, which did happen – once. Other than that, we were consistently confronted with pseudo-hippie peace aggressors who were more concerned with their ability to lay spread eagle in the middle of their tarp and have room for two coolers and board games than their fellow man/woman.
Of course, I’m not the type to let some douche in tie dye tell me where to sit. But to see the anger and passive aggressive behavior on display was truly disappointing. We will continue to attend the folks festival, and we will continue to not play along with your silly tarp games. And, I’m sure, we will continue to piss off many of you sad, pathetic, small-minded tarp nazis. But at the end of the day, we get a good night’s sleep, we feel good about who we are and the choices we make, and we won’t have to live with the negative karma that gets invited into your life by acting like a spoiled 4-year-old just because someone wants to share you piece of blue plastic for a set or two. :cheers
First off, Congrats on the baby! Great thing that. If this is your first you are about to start having very different festival experiences. Our 7 year old has been to 8 RockyGrasses and 7 FolksFests, the 5 year old has been to 6 of each. You will definietly have to lower your expectations for how much music you will get to see but it is still a huge amount of fun.
Hmmm, I went and sat on empty tarps quite a few times over the course of the weekend. Didn’t have any negative experiences at all. I didn’t take anything with me other than a kid or two so it was pretty obvious we were just passing through for awhile though. Maybe people thought you were trying to find a place for the whole day if you had chairs and backpacks and such and after they did put a lot of effort to get a nice spot found it off-putting. I’m not saying you did that but I can imagine that if it appeared someone was moving onto my tarp for the whole day with lots of stuff I might not react with a lot of happiness although I probably would have just said something like “Ya’ll can hang out for now but my family is going to get here in an hour or so and then we are going to need the room.” When I’ve blown off getting a number I’ve found it best to find myself a home base even if it isn’t a good spot and then go up front on an empty tarp every once and awhile. Once it gets down to the last couple acts it fills up up front and I leave the good seats to those that worked for them. I feel pretty good about that because I had good seats with no effort for almost the whole day.
Anyway at RG this year we did have a nice shady spot in the trees and ended up making some new friends that were looking to get out of the sun for awhile. They ended up spending most of the day on our tarp. One of those folks took second in the fiddle contest and was a member of the winning band (23 string band - rockin’!!) so that was fun for us.
Sorry you ran into an unpleasant person but hope you managed to not dwell on it and still had a good time.
It is our first, thanks for the kind words. Yeah, this entire weekend we were scouting on how it would be different next year. Less music, fewer beers but hopefully it will be infinitely more fun on a different level – we’re really excited by the prospect of life with our new little girl, folks fest included. You might have seen my wife walking around with the henna design on her belly…
Anyway, you make some great points and I appreciate your reply. We definitely didn’t dwell on the negativity, but it obviously bothered me and I did feel the need to vent a bit with the hope that some people out there might (even in the smallest way) modify their behavior or attitude next year if they understood the other side of the tarp dilemma. We’ve made friends sharing our tarp in the past as well, and I guess that’s what I was hoping would happen for us this year. Unfortunately, with the one exception I mentioned, that was not the case.
OK let me step in and say this. It is in stink :lol ual if you are a newbie to hoard and protect . They don’t know… :flower :rolleyes :flower
It is up to you, us to teach them we will not steal their spot. Move their Lawn Chair( but yeah we do sit in them, but we give em back) or rifel through their cooler
At first all this love is unreal to the untrained fest goer. :rolleyes
It is sad that this is a sign of our times .
But love, peace and understanding will guide us, Next year, run, tarp up, share, smile and teach your neighbor to feel safe. Those two ladies show them your new baby and ask if they would like to sit on your tarp.
We all owe it to each other to, give up the power, close our eyes, feel the sun and music and the love and brotherhood we all share for 4 or more days. I would like to think this Hippie culture has not died. SSSSSSSSSSSShucks I feel old. :hug :vibes
