Nowhere To Go But Everywhere

I remember the day vividly, as the world opened up for me in ways that I would never expect. I ditched school one afternoon with a few friends during my sophomore year of high school to see Oasis in concert in San Francisco that night. Needless to say, I was excited. It was their Be Here Now tour, and as an anglophile living in the East Bay who found Britpop to be the soundtrack of his teenage years, I wasn’t going to miss a moment of that day, so much so that I was going to arrive in the city about 10.5 hours early to get into what I could only describe as a mood: Virgin Megastore, City Light Books, Bill Graham Civic Auditorium… I apparently didn’t even need a map. 

There is a part of the story that is etched into my mind, one that I won’t go too far into describing but that included bumping into Liam Gallagher in the middle of Union Square at about noon, buying a few imported singles and my first copy of Brave New World (and somewhere in there, smoked some really, really bad weed, which, for the sake of this story, was the first time I got really high). We even got mugged as we walked to the concert, which again, is all part of this transformational day in San Francisco in 1998. A lot happened.