Ah man, post concert blues are hitting me kinda hard today (in my experience most people call it ” post concert depression”, but I feel like that might be a bit insensitive to people who actually suffer from depression. I do not. I just have crippling anxiety, but it’s whatevs, I’m getting a little off point here. 😉). So what better way to remedy that, than by reliving the night?! Haha I feel like that might be a bit counter productive, but I’m gonna do it anyway!

So, let’s talk a little bit about last Friday, shall we? Obviously we’re going to get to the Green Day stuff, but there are a few thing I want to mention because we get there.

Alrighty! Lets start off with the reason why I didn’t do a long run last week; I’m a huge fucking klutz! But I think you might be aware of that by this point. I’m really really good at getting myself hurt and that’s exactly what I did on Friday. And it turns out I actually hurt myself twice and didn’t realize it until Sunday, but we’ll get there. First first lets talk about how I basically flayed part of my left pointer finger…

Friday is trash day in my neighborhood, so Friday morning I went to put my trash can and recycle bins out on the street, no big deal, right? Well apparently not haha! So, we have this pretty big pane of glass in our garage. The people who lived in this house before us left it and we’re not entirely sure what to do with it, so it’s just been propped up against the wall, behind the recycling bins. I guess it somehow got knocked over and was resting on one of the recycle bins and I didn’t notice (surprise surprise) and when I moved the bin the glass fell and my first instinct was to catch it. Of course once it did broke into 3 or 4 smaller pieces and one of those pieces sliced my finger. It wasn’t bad enough to need medical attention (I think 😉 ), but I couldn’t get it to stop bleeding for a while and it seemed to get worse whenever I let my arm hang down for too long. So yeah, I figured running with a bleeding finger was probably a bad idea…And I guess I hurt my calf during the concert because I was an idiot and wore a pair of shoes tennis shoes that always make my feet hurt and obviously I was on them for a while. Bad idea on my part.

Anyways, so after I finally got the trash and recycle bins on the street, I took my parents dog Niko for a walk. He was at my house because my brother drove from Illinois (where he’s currently staying with my grandma) to Kansas on Thursday for the concert, and I guess he’s currently taking care of Niko for my parents. So yeah, I walked him, then Lily, then I showered, and then my brother and I began our long wait for Luke to get home from work.

We passed time by watching Family Guy for a while, then I straightened my hair, put on a bunch of eyeliner, got dressed, and then had to wait for two more hours haha. So I spend that two hours watching for any Green Day updates on twitter, and kinda sorta stalking the band on Instagram. Haha they tend to do a lot of posting before shows, so I wanted to see it if they did. 😉 During my internet time wasting I found a post on twitter that said that the Westboro Baptist Church was going to be across the street from the Sprint Center to protest Green Day! Haha I think I may have gotten a little too excited about that, but I was kind of interested in seeing these people in real life. I mean, I’ve seen plenty of new stories about them, but that’s just not the same.

Anyways, Luke finally got home around 4 pm, showered, ate a snack, and then we all watched one last episode of Family Guy haha. Then around 5 pm we all  loaded into the car, were I checked the tickets about 8 million times to make sure I actually had them in the envelope haha.

On the way there we got caught in a bunch of traffic. Haha I was getting worried that we were going to end up sitting on the highway at a complete standstill, end up running late, and missing the Westboro Baptist Church. I told you I was excited about seeing them!! And my brother and Luke were too! It’s not often you get to see that much hate and bigotry in person. Well I mean, it’s not often that I do, but anyway…Luckily the traffic kept moving (slowly at times, but it was better than just sitting there) and we ended up in making it into Kansas City around 6:10 pm. We drove past a few parking garages looking for something cheaper than a $20 parking fee, but it would appear that all the parking garages charge the same amount depending on the event, so we ended up having to pay the $20. That kinda sucked, but oh well. The parking garage we ended up at was right across the street from the Sprint Center, so that ended up being very convenient! While walking out of the parking garage some guy tried to sell us some pretty shitty quality Green Day t-shirts. Haha he said they were the exact same as they were going to be at the merch stands but for half the price. But they looked like shit and they weren’t even the right color! They we had a lot of pink on them, but that was very wrong. They were supposed to look like this, but with the tour dates/cities on the back;

Ah man, that was pretty amusing. Anyways, we made our way out of the parking garage, crossed the street, and that’s where we saw them; the Westboro Baptist Chruch!! Haha oh man, they has some pretty hateful signs, were playing poorly parodied songs, and were singing and dancing and laughing at us laughing at them. Oh man, so many people were taking pictures and videos and openly mocking them. I mean, that probably wasn’t the best response to these people, but I mean, it’s hard not to laugh and make fun of people openly spreading hate like that. And it’s not like they were open for any kind of civil conversation. I’m pretty sure a few people tried, but they just got shut down.

So we watched them for a little bit, took our own photos (obviously 😉 ), witnessed the radio station who had a stand set up there raise the volume on their own music to drowned out the Westboro Baptist Church people (that was pretty great 😂). Then we lined up to get into the venue and walk through the metal detector. Haha I had to warn both my brother and Luke not to bring any pocket knifes as they are specifically banned from the Sprint Center. I mean, I also tend to carry a pocket knife, but they sent me an email stating that, so I figured I should warn them as well.

Once we got into the lobby I handed Luke and Noah their tickets, told them to hang on them for dear life, and then we debated whether or not we wanted to stand in the long ass line to get t-shirts. While we were debating it, we kinda drifted into the line and we just ended up waiting haha. But the people working there were totally on to of things and were working very quickly so we actually didn’t spend too much time waiting in line. They had some pretty nifty stuff, but it was also pretty expensive! Haha if we had an unlimited amount of money I would have ended up with a super awesome Green Day blanket ($60), a drunk bunny plush ($35), a Green Day hoodie ($60), several different t-shirts (all of which ranged from $30-40), and Revolution Radio on vinyl. Obviously we didn’t have an unlimited ammoount of money, but Luke was kind enough to get my brother and I t-shirts. Noah got one like the one I posted above (the RevRad album cover) but with the tour dates/city on the back, and I got a pretty freaking awesome baseball T, with the American flag made out of barbed wire on it. It’s pretty freaking awesome!! Luke didn’t get one because while he likes Green Day, they aren’t his typical kind of music and he doesn’t really like wearing band T’s anyway (but I bet if he found a shirt with Corey Taylor’s face on it he’d totally wear it! 😉 ).

After we got our T-shirts we got scanned into the actual venue, found a food stand, got some crazy over priced pretzels and a bottle of water. Except they took the bottle of water and poured it into a plastic cup. That was really weird…I’ve been to plenty of concerts and usually they open the bottle for you and keep the cap. Whatever. Once we had our snacks (which I ended up sharing with my brother because he didn’t get anything and it was a pretty big pretzel haha), we found our seats and settled in for the next 45 is minutes before the opening band to come on.

We spent most of that time talking, listening to the kick ass music they were playing on the speakers, and people watching. I also spent some time checking the band’s social media accounts because I’m crazy fangirl. Mike Dirnt Ended up posting something on his Instagram story, so that was pretty neat. 🙂

 

So yeah, this is ending up to be a lot longer than I had originally thought, so I’m gonna wrap this up right here for now. Tomorrow I’ll talk about the actual Green Day stuff that went down on Friday, so there’s that to look forward to!

Have a great week everyone!! 🙂

~Ashley