Where the Sign Came From: NEW ZEALAND

That's a picture of me sitting under a sign post in New Zealand.

I asked my friend Russ to take it.

He did a great job.

We were on a journey with two more great friends.

You never do it alone.

When I was a little boy my parents often brought me to this magical lake far away from the suburban sprawl and city lights, way north in upstate New York near the border of Canada, across the lake from Burlington, Vermont.  We spent many summers there with my grandparents, and I continue to visit with all-out enthusiasm any chance I get.  Usually in summer, but even in January with my super warm sleeping bag.  When I was growing up there was a map of an island on my grandparents’ bedroom door.  The island, or two islands I should say, was named New Zealand.

New Zealand is on the other side of the world.  It's really small.  Nobody talked about it that much.  My grandparents had lots of pictures of sheep and farm fields.  It looked boring.  I wasn't sure why they went there right before I was born.  Still, it seemed cool that someone I was related to had actually gone somewhere so far away, since my world was encapsulated in the state of New York, as fine a world as that may be.

Around that time I was best friends with a boy named Glenn.  We are still great friends, although time and distance have taken their toll on a consistent relationship.  Glenn taught me more about not only bending the rules to have more fun than anyone else, but about how that overlapped with developing and applying my brain’s intelligence and my heart’s passion.  If I wasn’t friends with Glenn, I probably would have accomplished about 10% of the adventures I’ve undertaken in my life.  Even if I had found some other way to summon up the courage to travel, I wouldn’t have done it in nearly as much fun style if Glenn hadn’t led the way.

I grew up at 224 Munsell Road, and Glenn lived one block away.  There were some summers where one of us would ride our bike to the other’s house practically every single day.  He introduced me to brilliant new media, like computer games, Bill Cosby, Monty Python, and The Simpsons (which I knew about on my own, but wasn’t allowed to watch, so going to his house helped).  He knew more about comedy than anyone else I’ve ever met.  He was funnier than anyone I’ve ever met, and consequently, he’s pissed off more people than most I know.  But not me.  People just didn’t get his brilliant wit and unparalleled acting energy.  He’s an actor now, and he’s always on.

One day in school the teacher ordered us to organize our desks into tables and then name our tables after a country.  Glenn and I were at a bigger table named Australia, but he, being endlessly innovative, imaginative and rebellious, insisted that we break away and form our own island and name it New Zealand, because New Zealand is even more different and obscure and strange than Australia, all off by itself in the Pacific Ocean at the bottom of the world.  We did, and I had a blast.  We might have even been separated by the teacher at some point for getting in too much trouble.  That same year I got into the first true trouble of my life by being sent to the principal’s office, and it was because I had been following Glenn’s lead by jumping back and forth between seats on the bus when it made sharp turns.  But later that same day we were told to go to the back of the room by the teacher, fearing that we were in even more trouble because she’d talked to the principal.  But instead a bunch of other good students were sent to the back with us, and we found out that we had all been selected to be in the advanced reading group.  Now I’m a writer.  Go figure.

I left Long Island a few years later with my family, but Glenn always came to visit each year, and when college started he ended up attending SUNY-Albany, which is only an hour from my parents’ home.  He stayed there during the summer, so we got to hang out a lot when I’d come home for break.  Thanks to visiting him in Albany, consistently ranked in the bottom 10 of the top 300 cities in America, I had plenty of practice walking through dangerous urban areas at 3 in the morning before I moved to New York City, which is actually safer than Albany based on crime rate statistics.  And Albany knows how to party.

When I was 19 I was introduced to a special plant that opens your imagination to new ways of being wowed by the world, so it only made sense to say yes to my first Phish adventure at the Saratoga Springs Performing Arts Center nearly a year later with Glenn and some other friends.


Phish is an extended improvisation band from Vermont.  They got their start in Burlington, right across the lake where I spent many a summer as a child.  I was aware of their reputation as a not-that-famous but somehow still super popular drug band, as shown by the local paper’s reports on drug OD’s by fans at their shows.  I felt pretty neutral about the whole thing back then, and never bothered to learn much more about them.  But during college I found this song “Stash” on the list of the Guitar magazine’s 100 greatest guitar solos, and I was very impressed.  Later that year I got the album Billy Breathes, which has one of my top five all-time favorite songs on it, “Prince Caspian”.  When I was a young kid hanging out at Lake Champlain, I read the C.S. Lewis novel of the same name and did my first ever book report about it.  I’m not a huge Phishead in the true sense of the word, and I only bring that up because although I love them, they’ve never been my favorite band and I’ve always listened to much more music than them or even extended improvisation, as opposed to the true fan who is constantly blaring every live recording he can get his hands on.  Plus I hate being stereotyped as a “dirty hippie” since I shower regularly, love an eclectic mix of music, keep my beard well-groomed and haven’t been to a Phish show in three years.  My Nirvana-shirt wearing Radiohead-listening friend would yell at me to turn down that damn hippie crap when I blared Phish or Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and then I’d go to Bonnaroo and be quietly enjoying Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged (“Come as You Are”) and get yelled at by hippies for playing sad music.  I’m not trying to join any group, so I don’t care, but like most humans, I hate being limited and therefore prejudged by a vague term. 

Even so, that 2004 show was probably one of the top five live shows I’ve ever seen in my life, partly because they were excellent musicians, partly because of the fun atmosphere outside in June, and mostly because the band themselves appeared to be having so much fun while they played.  At one point the singer/guitarist and the bassist bounced up and down on trampolines while playing and never missed a note as they hopped and turned in unison.  I think it was actually five songs, but during the encore they played for fifty minutes straight without one low moment.  The Phish fan base has been stereotyped as a bunch of lazy pot-smoking dudes who just sit in awe with tiny pupils and red eyes as other people perform for them, and that’s not necessarily an unfair assessment of most of the jam scene or pot smokers in general.  But there were also plenty of people dancing beautifully with their own bodies, and that’s what being alive is about (and I say that as someone who’s taken a very long time to feel comfortable dancing in public; not to say I’ve gotten any better at it).  And the band themselves are a great example of quality, care, stamina and showmanship.  They had to be serious to learn their craft, and fun human beings to make everyone enjoy it.

Somehow this all led to me having the greatest growth experience of my life.  This was all the way on the other side of the world, on this magical pair of islands named New Zealand.

As I have written and will continue to write, that experience propelled me to many more growth experiences around the world until this day, always understanding that there’s something inside of me that I need to trust and believe in to live in a happy dream, and that I can’t do that without learning from and listening to and working upon the fabric laid down already by other humans, and that no matter what I achieve it’s all eventually hollow unless it’s manifested as some sort of joy shared with others, whoever they are, although in a selfish way I want to know that it's helping others I know to grow.

About a year after my first big time rock concert, I found myself in a campervan with three other Americans I’d met a few months earlier during a camping club adventure to a place called Paradise (it rained the whole time there).  One was Russ, from Oneonta, NY, who loved jam music, Phish, music festivals and having an enjoyable laid back time whatever it may (434) be.  Then there was Dane, from Wyoming, who seemed like the most laid-back dude I’ve ever met in my life, and now he’s some super nanotechnology wizard.  Finally, there was Dave, an environmental studies major and the most energetic hiking enthusiast I’d ever met at that point in my life.  He studied at the University of Vermont in Burlington, and often saw Trey Anastasio and Page McConnell around town when he lived there.  We got on a plane to Wellington from Dunedin and picked up the camper rental at the airport.  We named the campervan Dr. Zaius after a Simpsons episode parodying the The Planet of the Apes.

It had all been Russ’s idea, to rent this campervan and drive around the North Island for ten days during our fall break (seasons are reversed in the southern hemisphere).  We all pitched in and flew to Wellington at the south end of the North Island, and the first true epic road trip adventure of my life began.  The only other time I was in a car with my friends and going somewhere far away and beautiful had been Yosemite in California the year before for spring break.  As magical a milestone as that experience had been, it had only been a few days, had a set destination with reservations made by my friend’s parents, and led to us going back to his parents’ house soon afterward.  This time there were no plans at all, none of us had seen our parents or would see our parents for months, and we had an enormous campervan and beautiful diverse landscape at our fingertips.  New Zealand law requires that anyone driving a car must be at least 21 years old.  Dane and I were 20 and just a few months away from 21, so we couldn’t drive.  That would drive me crazy now, but back then I loved it.  We had this enormous sitting space in the back that folded down into one of the beds, and Dane and I just hung out back there all day like it was a living room.  Instead of watching TV, we were watching the most beautiful landscape we’d ever seen fly by day after day, and the other guys couldn’t get mad at us because it would have been illegal for us to take a driving shift.

"Dr. Zaius!  Dr. Zaius!

Dr. Zaius!  Dr. Zaius!

Ohhhh, Dr. Zaius! 

"What's wrong with me?"

"I think you're crazy."

"I want a second opinion!"

"You're also lazy."

Every day we went somewhere new with no clear plan in sight, or at least devised as late as the end of breakfast.  Our first day on the road Russ remembered that his parents’ friends lived in a town on the way, so we got to stop in for some good old-fashioned American chicken and French fries, see this awesome reggae band named Katchafire which happened to be in town, and have a free driveway to park for the night.  After that we developed this pattern of finding a sparsely populated beach in the evening, cooking a hearty meal usually involving pasta, drinking lots and lots of alcohol, and playing lots of cards.  At some point we would go have our solo walks along the beaches or sand dunes or whatever the topography happened to be wherever we were.  That's the unique beauty of New Zealand: it has every landscape and climate you could dream of, and it's all packed together tightly onto these two small islands so you can see everything easily.  All you have to do is travel really really really far to get there, and then the rest is easy.  

Russ and Dave were morning people who liked swimming in the sunlight and even saw a whale, whereas Dane and I preferred to roam around at night under the moon.  I remember that being a distinct debate between us at one point, over which could offer more truthful experience.  I was big on the night time, even back then.

The highlight of the whole trip was the night we found a secluded cove near Cape Reinga, the very northern tip of the North Island.  We did the usual pasta dinner as the waves silently caressed the shore, and then split a bottle of 160 proof absinthe four ways and… well… yeah, it was really fun.   

Real absinthe has something in it called wormwood that supposedly makes you see the world even more differently than an epic content of alcohol already does.  The ingredients said “imitation absinthe”, and it tasted like what I imagine cleaning fluid would taste like, but it definitely got us roaring with energy.  I didn’t start drinking until I was 19, and even then it was very moderately.  This trip probably involved the most drinking of my life, obviously always after all of the driving for the day had been done (not that it mattered for Dane and me).  That night I realized I’d come a long ways from spending Friday nights alone in my dorm room.  We still had some of our brains about us, and made a “no swimming” rule since none of us had had absinthe before.  Besides that we went crazy.  Dane and I thought it would be a great idea to pass out on the beach, and then decided that was a terrible idea after ten minutes and went into the van to sleep.

The next morning we drove up a nearby cliff and saw this sign post.

I sat beneath it.  I asked my new good friend Russ to help me remember this moment forever and take a picture of it.  He took a really good picture.  I don’t remember whose idea the sepia tone was.  Then I took a few more close-ups of the sign itself, and I’m sure Russ might even have his own pictures under it, and Dave and Dane too for all I know.  But I’m the writer.

I remember thinking there was something special about Japan as I looked out over that ocean, as I was pretty aware (there’s nowhere you can be that isn’t where you’re meant to be) that I was staring in that direction as the sign was pointing that way.  Japan had been mysterious to me ever since I learned about adventurous virtual reality through Super Mario Bros., Donkey Kong and other Nintendo games that I played at the babysitter’s and eventually was allowed to own myself.  And the Ninja Turtles.  Definitely the Ninja Turtles.  And the women.  I mean… you know.  There are amazing beautiful women everywhere, but the only ones who told me I had a nice butt when I was thirteen were Japanese, so I knew that that sign was a very important clue.

After that we roamed around a few more days and had a wild night out in Wellington that ended with Dane and I rescuing the campervan from an angry Kiwi who threatened to call the police on us because Russ had parked it in a parking lot where they were setting up an Asian food market.  I remember being really impressed by this foreign city and thinking that I wanted to live in a foreign country again someday.  After all, New Zealand was already so much fun, and this side of the Pacific was looking more and more like a great place to be as I met more and more people from different countries, especially during our visit to the cosmopolitan capital city.  I knew that you could teach English in Asia if you knew something about the English language and finished college, and I did and was about to in a year.  But first I wanted to try out real life in my homeland, America.

Those days were the most enjoyable of my life at that time, and in some way will never be surpassed.  I think a good life should consist of at least a few of those types of memories.  It was so spontaneous, so free, so independent… and yet we were a team.  Four different guys with different styles from different places who had just enough in common and were in the same place at the same time, a universal intersection where our life journeys intersected.  This happens every day with everyone.  Just imagine Grand Central Station in New York, or better yet, Shibuya in Tokyo.  Complex soul stories inherently entering our cosmic tales whether they liked it, loved it, loathed it or didn't even notice it.  Some stories go deeper than others.  It was the first time in my life where I felt like the world was open to me, and that it really was a big blue sphere that was mostly fluid, at least where we lived, and that it was a mystery all the way down to the center and out into the infinite sky, and no matter how much I wondered why, I’d still have to live my way into a lifestyle that would make my spirit fly.  I also understood just how amazingly, ridiculously lucky I was to even be there. 

To be completely honest, New Zealand wasn’t just the most transformational experience of my life.  It fluctuated between intense joy and ultimate isolation and loneliness.  Even beyond the 29 hour solo journey to get there with three transfers, the first hour where I realized I was on the other side of the world for five months and DIDN’T KNOW ANYONE or even where I was going to live after the first week, or how to get an apartment on my own, or hit the social reset button completely after finally figuring out how to have a social life and close friends after two and a half years at college.  And even after I made friends, there were still a lot of lonely nights where I just wandered around the city because I didn’t know what else to do.  I didn’t really know how to write back then.  I mean, I had been writing since I was five and seriously since writing classes in high school and college, but I rarely chose to do it on my own time.  The same with reading, although there had been a burst of interest the year before when I realized I didn’t care that much about governing the world anymore and wanted to learn the secrets from literary masters that could be found in the libraries, which housed the masterpieces to the puzzle of how to live this whole life thing.  But New Zealand was so awesome and freeing that I rarely read unless it was for class.  I was having too much fun socializing and learning how to explore to get engrossed in books.  But still, you miss home your first time living in a new country.  You miss people, and you still long for love no matter who and where you are.  There’s a magnificent gift of beauty to be in paradise, and there’s some sort of intertwining loneliness that accompanies it, reminding you just how much bigger the world is than you, how much older and experienced it always has been before anyone was here and will continue to be, not to mention the stars and space, which I saw very clearly at times.  

I had never lived in a big city before either.  120,000 people, but still.  I was a country boy now.  I’m originally suburban, but I’ve called that farmhouse home since I was eleven years old.  I remember getting the feeling that this must have been what San Francisco was like, as in a prototype.  There were huge hills (the steepest in the world, actually), lots of weird fog and strange weather patterns from being on the coast of an island, a bay we could see from the window and a general laid back peaceful feel to things.  New Zealand culture wasn’t exactly on the cutting edge of art or world politics, but that made it more attractive.  It was a place where you could just be and go at your own pace without worrying about the overall rat race of humanity and nations and competition.  I was able to find my own path.  Somewhere in the second half of the year I read a Norman Mailer book that my dad mailed to me, and it was a thousand pages, so that took some time.  I'd never read anything even half that length before.  That’s when I really started getting into serious reading, and I read my brains out the following year back in America.

We went back to Dunedin and back to class, but my educational journey had just begun.  After all, I’d just learned how to really read a map.

After that beautiful ten days when none of the world’s problems matter and the pinnacle of human history might as well have been achieved, we returned back to pseudo-reality as college students, although we were abroad, so we weren’t even really students at our real colleges.  I was still a year away from knowing anything about true responsibility other than doing my homework and not screwing up too badly as I walked and talked around the world.  Even so, those ten days provided exceptional training for working as a team, planning, making directional, financial, and logistical choices several times a day, always going somewhere new with different roads and rules and food, never knowing where you’re going to sleep each night, making sure the water’s emptied and filled and the dishes are done and someone’s bought dinner and cooked dinner, all while having the most fun of our lives.

Dane showed me a world of possibilities by discussing his crazy theoretical physics courses with me and showed me how to break the rules and have fun our night out in Wellington (a bouncer thought I was too drunk, and I seriously wasn't, but he wouldn't let me in, so Dane made me switch clothes with him so the bouncer wouldn't recognize me.  He thought it was funny, but was a very stubborn man).

Dave made sure we went on some cool hiking missions, since that was his passion.  I never could have imagined how much that passion would spread to me and manifest itself years later in the strangest places.

Russ is a band manager and should be a band manager.  That's exactly what he did for us.  We all worked together democratically, but he was in the driver's seat most of the time.  Dave did his share of the driving, but Russ had most of the ideas about how to have the most fun, and that involved some responsible decision making and getting things done.  On the other side, he constantly reminded me during my whole stay in New Zealand that I can't get too stuck in my own head analyzing fearful possibilities and just kick back and let loose when the pressure gets too much, and I'll be better for it when the real games begin.

On top of that, Russ provided us with plenty of great extended improvisational music, including his younger brother’s band, Jim Kata, who is incredibly talented, fun and awesome. Later they would write this amazing song about trying to find your home, called “When the Day Comes”, and another one about finding it called “Place of Dreams”.  Russ became their manager as they re-formed in Ithaca, half a year after I left and moved to Brooklyn, where they often played in clubs and stayed in my living room.

Russ kept telling me about this great music festival named Bonnaroo in Tennessee.  Apparently it was inspired by enormous fun Phish festivals from the 90s that would go for a few days and evolve into temporary tent towns numbering in the ten thousands.  Bonnaroo is four days in mid-June.  It's on a 700 acre farm near Manchester, which is pretty close to Graceland and Nashville, Tennessee, two very historically important and therefore presently influential places.  It began in 2002, the same weekend I graduated from high school in the countryside of upstate New York.  It drew about 30,000 people and 30 bands the first year.  Now it had 100 bands and 80,000 attendees. Russ had been twice.  He said I should definitely consider going the next year, as I would still be in New Zealand when it happened again that year.  I made a mental note of it.  It sounded like a great time, and Russ knows how to read the maps and direct you to a good time, whatever it is.  Four years later, Jim Kata was playing at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York, which is owned by my sister's college poetry professor and where she read several times.  The owner once told me personally that she is a very talented poet.  Anyway, Russ and I were outside, and I was talking to the drummer's ex-girlfriend, and Russ was talking to someone else and smiling as usual.  Some drunk Kiwi guy stumbles out of a bar singing "Mr. Tambourine Man" and points at the girl and me and says, "You... and you!  You and her!  You should get together!" and then pointed to Russ and said, "That man is the happiest man in the world!"  He was right about Russ. The girl and I had two dates and fizzled out.  We initially clicked because we both liked Ghostface Killah.  I liked him because my friend Jake from college had told me to listen to him, as he was the James Joyce of gangster rap.  Jake knew way more about books and culture than I did, so he was right.  So after a great first date, I found myself transitioning from gangster rap to talking about my grandfather telling me stories about traveling around the world and going to war, being overly sentimental, and she was still talking about loving any kind of music that has lots of gun shots, coke and bragging about fucking hoes.  Sometimes music connects you for the same reasons, sometimes it doesn't.

But before any of that happened, we had to finish our classes in New Zealand.  We couldn't go to Bonnaroo that year, but instead, at the same time on the other side of the world, we went to the most beautiful place I'd ever been.  I'd actually already been there too.  It was my first journey alone in New Zealand:

Milford Sound.

Rudyard Kipling called it the 8th wonder of the world.

The first I went it rained the whole time and I couldn't even see the mountain peaks surrounding this fantastic fjord.

We went back in the winter, it was... it... no words.

When I got back to college, I had to get my New Zealand credits transferred to my school, and they had to be approved by the head of my department, the only super conservative professor in the government department.  He ridiculed New Zealand's uselessness in the world, couldn't imagine why they even bothered talking about Nietzsche or Plato, said they were totally irrelevant politically, made fun of my appearance and likened me to a hobbit, even though I hated it every time someone assumed they were telling me for the first time that Lord of the Rings was filmed in New Zealand.  Yeah, I knew that, everybody knew that.  And yeah, the movies were entertaining and finely directed, but that had absolutely nothing to do with any of it.  Just sign the damn paper and let me go on with my life!

I finished out the year and was very excited to enter the real world when graduation weekend approached.  Martin Luther King's son, MLK III, gave our commencement address in an optional event the day before the actual graduation ceremony, a weird tradition of my school.  He told us to go out into the world and work hard to make it a more loving, just and caring place to be.  Afterward I was walking by Willard Straight Hall with my parents.  Militant black students had taken it over with guns in 1969, and my writing professor Dan had been there to help stop the police from charging in with bloodshed because he was teaching the first ever African-American literature course at the school and many of them were his students.  My friend Alex called me and told me to pick up a copy of the Cornell Daily Sun's graduation edition because my picture was in it.  I didn't like the Sun, but my writing hero Kurt Vonnegut describes fond memories working for them before he dropped out to fight in World War II and write a bestselling book about it.  So I opened a copy up in Willard Straight and saw an advertisement for Cornell Abroad with the following picture:

I'd submitted it along with four others for a contest, and none of them won anything because they were too scenic and didn't involve different people enough.  Fair enough.  That's kind of what New Zealand was about.  But apparently they liked this one and decided it represented their program well, without even telling me.

My father didn't even go to his own graduation, and he always went on about the meaninglessness of big ceremonies like that, so I decided that it was too hot and I wanted to go without a dress shirt.  Or any shirt.  Or pants.  Or shoes.  I still wore my gown, and a tie.  And shorts.  But most people thought I wasn't wearing anything underneath.  One girl I knew peeked without asking first, and I liked that, and one guy I knew started to peek without asking first and I was confused.  Everybody complained about how hot it was while the head of the university used his entire commencement speech to laud all the great projects the university was pouring money into for its own glory and why we and all the parents should use our educations to give money back to them. There might have been a word or two of encouragement in surviving in the big wide world, but not really.  At least I was comfortable.

When we went back to our respective tents for our major departments to get our tangible degrees informing the world that we had in fact put in the time, energy and money to earn this piece of paper, I had to wait in line for a long time.  The same government professor was handing out the degrees, and when he got to my name he skipped me.  My dad had to tap him on the shoulder and remind him to read my name, and he came up with some dumb story about turning the page and missing it by accident.  I got my diploma and shook the hands of my bewildered professors.  I hadn't done it to offend anyone.  After all, I still had a gown and a tie.  I was simply employing the intelligent reasoning that had been passed on to me for four years and mixed it with a little New Zealand education: work hard, feel good and enjoy yourself.

That night I got a call from Glenn congratulating me.  He was set to graduate himself very soon.  He planned to move to Vancouver at the end of the summer, and suggested we go to a music festival again.  We'd started the year out at this small festival in upstate New York with a lot of jam bands, and suggested a repeat.  I thought a moment and remembered the most important fact of my life:

RADIOHEAD IS HEADLINING BONNAROO THIS YEAR!

Radiohead was the most cutting edge band in existence at the time.  I say that having successfully completed my introduction to Rock and Roll class the last semester of college (last semesters are great, aren't they?), where we only studied two modern bands: Radiohead and The White Stripes.  One of the sorority girls said Radiohead sounded scary when we listened to the song Kid A.  I can't say she was wrong, but I still loved it.  I have to mention my Los Angeles friend Brian here, because he was always going on about how perfect Radiohead head was, and loved them way more than I did, although I did already love them when we became friends.  Even so, he'd told me that seeing Radiohead live would be the best medicine for my mind, and he's a doctor now, so he knows what's up.

Glenn agreed that it was Bonnaroo indeed, and we ordered the tickets a few days later.

The next day, May 29, I said good bye to my friend Greg, who played the role of Glenn during college, although in his uniquely irreplaceable Greg way.  He turned on the radio in his truck and Led Zeppelin's "Ramble On" came on as he sped away.

Three weeks later I went to my first Bonnaroo with my great friends Glenn and Greg, two more magic helpers who have always showed me the path to enjoying the world more than I would have had the courage to explore on my own.  Russ met us down there.  I didn't even know he was going with his friends until right before we left.  Speaking of Russ, he moved to Ithaca after I left, and was very surprised to open up the Cornell Daily Sun and see the picture he had taken on the other side of the world...

Bonnaroo is the best adventure ever.

Bonnaroo is beautifully brilliant beats from the big ball, 

mixed masterfully with divinely decadent deviance.

(She's Like a Rainbow)

Bonnaroo is the magic music circus art exhibition of 

the mysteriously mushrooming multiverse.

It's still open to anyone who wants to go and find the means to do so.

Bonnaroo isn't actually Bonnaroo.

Bonnaroo means whatever you want it to.

Bonnaroo is the universe having fun for, with and through you,

wherever or whatever it is you do.

Bonnaroo is everything you have ever been through.

Fun Freedom, Great Times, Love, Music, Art, Friendship, Creativity,
Dancing, Poetry, Passion, Blood Pumping Faster, Mystery,
Strangers, New Friends, Sex, Desire, Fulfillment,
Seeing the Future and Being in the only Moment

The magic music is always manifesting all around you 

and inside you and everything you do.

Even if you travel to the opposite side of the world as you know it.

That's usually where the richest treasure shines anyway.