Sometimes Utah Ain't Half Bad

It's pretty easy to be down on Utah; crime runs rampant, the beer is watery, overcrowded schools, stinky lakes, etc. Easy targets. Tonight I was reminded that there are some solid gold nuggets of awesomeness buried in these thar' hills. Witness the Gallivan Center. On Thursday nights throughout the summer, the Gallivan Center hosts free concerts featuring artists that I generally have never heard of. But that's not the point. The point is that any yahoo off the street can walk in, lay down his favorite sheet/blanket/hemp-pancho, and drink himself silly as long as he's willing to shell out a reasonable 4$ per beer or has the foresight to bring a darkly-tinted nalgene bottle full of booze. Deals like this are going the way of the dodo, my friends. For me, the extra gravy is that this venue is in easy walking distance from casa Pete. For everyone else, public transportation will get you within fifty feet of the venue.

I was, of course, entirely clueless about tonight's performers. I'm not feeling particularly eloquent at the moment, so let it suffice to say that Soulive was spectacular. It is a wonderful thing to go into a show with zero expectations and to come out overwhelmed. Overwhelmed and full of the most delicious chocolate cake I can recall consuming. Another joy of concerts at Gallivan is that you can bring your own food. Kristi and Scott, my two newest readers (everyone say 'hi') brought the aforementioned cake to celebrate Kristi's friend Kim's birthday. But back to Soulive. These guys were so cool, that for their second encore, they busted out, you guessed it, "The Ocean" by Led Zeppelin. Totally unexpected, cool as hell.

As an added bonus, since Salt Lake is a puny little peanut of a town with about two hundred people that are actually interested in going out on a Thursday night to see black men get funky, if you arrive solo, you will undoubtedly run into at least ten people you know. Of these ten, it is very likely that you will care to have a conversation with at least one of them. I got lucky because I only saw one person that I knew that I avoided conversing with. The person I saw was the college recruiter for the company that brought me to Utah and thus one of the small number of people responsible for conning me into moving to this state. My excuse is that the only thing I could think of to talk to her about was her apparent switch in sexual preference. This is pretty bad because I have not seen this person in about three years and my only evidence in reaching this conclusion were certain asthetic cues from her and the girl she was hanging out with. Nonetheless, I played it cautious.

Leaving the concert, I was rudely brought back to reality when I encountered this guy. This photo was both candid and an action shot, thus the suspect quality. What you see is my finger partially obscuring the lens and the bottom half of a dude who is racing down State Street with a stolen shopping cart. It is hard to tell from this picture, but I assure you that he was wearing genuinely atrocious, yellow crocs. I did not mention this in my last post, but the dermatologist had the gaul to recommend these "shoes" for my month of leatherlessness. I have seen these things before, but had not thought twice about them. I was recently given a strong opinion from a sensible friend lambasting this type of footwear. Seeing this douchebag (did I mention that he was wearing antennae?) giving shopping cart rides and nearly killing half a dozen people in the process fully corroborated this opinion. I now have much contempt for wearers of crocs similar to my contempt for people who drive yellow cars (note to self: blog about yellow car theory). Try as he may, yellow croc guy could not spoil a lovely evening in not-half-bad (I think that makes it half-good) Salt Lake City.