Weekend self-care open thread: We're riding out tonight to case the promised land

I finally got to see Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band this week.

Now, I've seen Bruce once before, in 1992. But it was in his interregnal period where he had disbanded the E Streeters to strike out on new artistic roads. I think I can explain the impression it made on me by saying that I don't remember much of the show. I mean, sure, that was 30 years ago. But I'm sure if Clarence and Stevie and Nils and Max and Roy and Patti had been onstage with him, it would have been an unforgettable night.

The concert was not a concert. It was a tent revival. It was a communal event. It was a transcendent experience. If you've never sung "Thunder Road" at full throated volume with 20,000 other Springsteen fans, I highly recommend that you do so while he's still touring. 

What was edifying was seeing how many young people were at the show. It wasn't just us olds and olders. It was a generationally ecumenical experience.

Bruce is our modern troubadour. He's the successor to Walt Whitman and Woody Guthrie. His songs are the tales of America which the comfortable wish to ignore. He's more a chronicler of the forgotten than any gobshite on right or left with their anger and their grievance.

So, for this weekend, we're doing it live!

I am quite simply a besotted fanboy. But I am so when I recognize a great and supreme artist. Bruce is this country's unofficial poet laureate, delineating the geographies of this hopeful and exasperating experiment we call America. And now I can rest easy that I've experienced him live, as he should be, with his brothers and sisters onstage with him.

Share your favorite songs in the comments.

As always, dear friends, be ever kind, gentle, and joyful with yourselves and those around you.

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