Sustain Release, Year 12

There are easier ways to spend a weekend. You could sleep in a bed. You could shower when you wanted. You could eat meals at recognizable intervals and go to sleep once per night.

Instead, we went to Sustain.

Thursday evening resembled ordinary life. Cars were being emptied, tents were going up, coolers were dragged across grass. People walked around carrying bedding, cases of seltzer, loose articles of clothing and bottles of things they had optimistically decided would last until Sunday. Little neighborhoods appeared where there had only been grass several hours earlier. Everyone still looked relatively clean. Everyone still had some idea where everyone else was. There was the feeling that objects had designated places and time could still be measured according to ordinary standards.

I saw Escaflowne at seven and Malibu (live) at 10, then wandered over to the Gym for D. Tiffany and Roza Terenzi. By one in the morning, the weekend had begun doing what festivals do to time. Midnight stopped meaning midnight. Breakfast became whatever you could find whenever you woke up. Sleep became negotiable, something you could do for 45 minutes and then reconsider. Distance was measured less in feet than in whether you could still hear the other stage.

At night, the place became harder for me to understand geographically. Without my glasses, lights stopped behaving like lights and spread into enormous soft objects suspended between trees. Reds bled into blues. A person 20 feet away could become a silhouette and then disappear entirely into whatever was glowing behind them. Stages lost their edges, and sometimes I knew where I was because I recognized the music before I recognized anything around me. It was less like navigating a piece of land than moving between different concentrations of light and sound.

There is a point at Sustain when you stop experiencing it as a series of events and begin experiencing it as a place, which is important because I am terrible at experiencing places with other people. I love my friends. I love dancing with my friends. I like finding them in a crowd and watching that little recognition happen when one of us hears the same thing in a track. I like the particular idiocy that develops after several uninterrupted hours together, when everyone becomes extremely funny despite nobody actually saying anything funny. Still, I would almost always rather dance alone.

This isn't misanthropy so much as logistics. When I am with other people, some portion of my brain remains assigned to them. Are they having fun? Are they tired? Do they want to go somewhere else? Have they eaten? Am I keeping them here? Did somebody disappear? Does somebody need water? I start treating the evening like a minor administrative position nobody hired me to perform. Alone, there is nothing to manage. You stay because you want to stay. You leave because you want to leave. Nobody has to vote.

Over the weekend, I developed a system where I would tell everyone I was going to bed, and sometimes I even meant it. I would make it back to the tent, sleep for an hour, then wake up and realize I wasn't particularly interested in being asleep anymore. Instead of telling anyone, I would simply leave again. My friends believed, reasonably, that I was in bed. This gave me several hours in which nobody expected anything from me. It became, more or less, how I saw Sustain.

Friday began in daylight, which at a festival feels slightly accusatory. At night, everyone looks good. Darkness is generous. It hides the dirt under your fingernails, the increasingly ambitious state of your hair, the fact that you've been wearing some version of the same outfit since yesterday. Daylight provides an audit. By one, I was at Lakeside Cosmo, and at 3:30 I caught about half an hour of Myles Mac and DJ Possum. Around us, Sustain had settled into its daytime personality. People lay wherever they had managed to find shade. Others moved slowly between camps and stages carrying towels, drinks, bags, and whatever else they had decided was necessary for the next few hours. Nobody seemed particularly interested in arriving anywhere quickly. The urgency that takes over at night had disappeared.

A few days earlier, Cade had told me they wanted to see James K but couldn't make the night they were playing in Brooklyn. I told them I thought James K was playing another gig in Brooklyn soon. I knew I had seen the name somewhere recently, but it took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that the other gig I was remembering was not in Brooklyn at all. It was Sustain.

At 6:30 we went into the Grove. By then the light had changed and people were moving toward the trees in loose groups, crossing the bridge while the sun dropped behind them. The afternoon heat had broken. Everything had gone gold around the edges, and for a little while the collection of tents, temporary structures, paths, and bodies stopped looking like an encampment and started looking like somewhere people might actually have chosen to live. It is one of the strange tricks of festivals that something assembled almost entirely out of temporary materials can, under the correct light, look permanent.

James K played live among the trees, and the music seemed particularly suited to that hour when there was still enough daylight to see everyone but not enough to believe the day had much time left. The Grove slowly darkened around us. Then James K became Deep Creep, Deep Creep became Naone, and for several hours there wasn't much reason to distinguish one part of the evening from another. Gab, Gabe, Lana, Kayla, the Danes, and I were still moving around as a unit, dancing and jumping with the spectacular confidence of people who had taken enough Adderall to believe their bodies were renewable resources.

At some point during a long weekend, a group begins to splinter. Nobody announces this. There is no fight or decision. One person wants food, another wants to see somebody elsewhere, another goes back to camp, and somebody else says they'll catch up later. The large organism you have been traveling around inside breaks into smaller pieces. Looking back, that stretch from James K through Naone was probably the last time I remember all of us being together in quite the same way.

By midnight I was alone at the Gym for CCL and Yushh, which was exactly where I wanted to be. There are certain kinds of dancing that become more difficult in the presence of people who know you. Not because you're embarrassed, exactly, but because friendship creates a kind of audience even when nobody is watching. Alone, I didn't have to wonder if everyone wanted to stay another twenty minutes. I didn't have to locate anybody in the room. I could move three feet to the left because I felt like moving three feet to the left. I could leave without explaining myself. More importantly, I could get absolutely filthy with it without periodically resurfacing into conversation.

After about an hour, I crossed over to Bossa for Amelia Holt, stayed there for another hour, then went back to CCL until around three. Somewhere in there I briefly saw Kayla. By that point, encountering a friend unexpectedly had begun to feel less like meeting somebody you had arrived with and more like encountering another member of your expedition several hundred miles from base camp. There was recognition, brief excitement, confirmation that both parties were alive, and then each of us disappeared back into whatever we had been doing.

I finally went to bed around three, and this time I meant it. Somewhere during Friday, my immune system had declared war on the entire landscape. I had really, really, really bad hay fever. Trees, grass, pollen, possibly air itself had become biologically hostile, and there is nothing particularly glamorous about trying to have a transcendent musical experience while your face rejects nature. Eventually exhaustion and antihistamines and whatever else was happening to me won.

Morning at Sustain is strange because there isn't really a moment when the night ends. It only thins. People disappear gradually. Dance floors become less dense, conversations get slower, somebody sits down and does not get back up. The distances between sounds grow larger until eventually you notice birds, which feels vaguely insulting after spending the previous several hours listening to music through speakers large enough to rearrange your organs.

Around nine, the camps entered their quiet hours. Tent flaps hung open and shoes sat outside entrances. Towels and clothes had been abandoned wherever somebody had found something capable of holding them. Empty chairs remained in little circles formed the day before, while hammocks contained people who had clearly made different sleeping arrangements several hours earlier. Occasionally somebody emerged carrying water or moving toward a bathroom with the grim concentration of a person completing an essential government task. The grass was beginning to show evidence of several thousand people repeatedly crossing it, but for a few hours the people themselves were mostly absent.

I liked Sustain particularly well at this hour. At night you encounter people primarily as bodies in motion. Morning reveals the infrastructure required to produce them: the tents, bags, wet towels, abandoned shoes, half-empty drinks and whatever somebody had decided was important enough to carry back to camp at four in the morning. The place became domestic in an extremely temporary way. It was a neighborhood where nobody had walls and everybody had gone to bed at the wrong time.

It was also one of the few periods of time when there was nobody to keep track of. For most of my life, I have preferred doing certain things alone. Movies, concerts, plays, dancing especially. It isn't that I don't want anyone there. In fact, I usually want them somewhere nearby. This is apparently a meaningful distinction. Knowing my friends were around allowed me to stop worrying about where they were. Sustain made this unusually easy because you could disappear without actually going anywhere. Walk alone long enough and eventually you would find somebody you knew, or you wouldn't, and both outcomes were fine.

By Saturday afternoon, civilization had restarted around the pool. At one, everyone had apparently recovered, or at least agreed to behave as though they had. Saia was playing and people occupied every available relationship to the water: in it, beside it, dancing near it, lying down within sight of it. Night allows everyone to construct a version of themselves. Daylight is considerably less cooperative. Sunglasses do some important work.

The afternoon had the laziness peculiar to a party happening under full sun. People could dance for a while and then simply collapse onto the grass without this registering as unusual behavior. I kept moving between the pool and Sauna Village, where Downloadable Content was playing before returning to the pool for PAURRO at three. By four, I had once again reached the conclusion that I needed to become unconscious.

I am a slave to the disco nap. I have accepted this about myself. A disco nap is different from ordinary sleep because ordinary sleep suggests that the day has ended, whereas a disco nap is tactical. It is an acknowledgement that the human body has certain limitations and a refusal to allow those limitations to dictate the evening's programming. I left after PAURRO, went back to camp and temporarily ceased participating in the world.

At 8:00 I was back for DJ Miss Parker, because this is how Sustain gets you. You wake up and for approximately thirty seconds your body presents a compelling argument that the evening is over. Your legs hurt. Your face feels wrong. You have slept nowhere near enough. There is dirt in places you didn't know could collect dirt. Then somewhere in the distance you hear bass and subconsciously commit to doing this again.

By Matas at 9:30, I was sitting on a mound with Duncan and the LPB crew screaming "AMY." Amy was there, which at the time seemed to be more than enough reason to scream her name. The weekend had entered the stage where jokes no longer required premises. Names became jokes. Locations became jokes. Somebody approaching from the wrong direction could sustain a group for 10 minutes. Sleep deprivation had reduced comedy to something prehistoric: the profound hilarity of recognizing another human being.

Aurora Halal played live at 11:30. We were calling her Rave Mommy, a title I don't remember anybody formally proposing but which had nevertheless become accepted law. By this point the lights had become their own landscape for me. Without my glasses, individual bulbs expanded into halos and colors bled across the dark. Faces came into focus only when they were close. Everything beyond them existed primarily as movement, light and sound, and there was something unexpectedly pleasant about not being able to identify every part of what was happening around me.

Most of ordinary life asks you to see things correctly. Read this sign. Recognize this person. Find the door. Don't walk into the table. On a dance floor, a lack of clarity can become useful. The crowd stops being a collection of individual people and turns into motion. The stage stops being equipment and cables and bodies and becomes light coming through darkness. There is less information to process and consequently less to worry about.

Around midnight I Irish-exited Amy, Gab, Duncan, and everyone else and headed to the Gym for BASHKKA. No announcement, no committee meeting, no 15-minute negotiation about whether anybody else wanted to come. I simply left. There was something enormously satisfying about realizing that I could do this and nobody would interpret it as anything other than me going somewhere else.

The Gym was already moving when I arrived. By then my sense of time had become almost entirely musical. I knew approximately what hour it was because of who was playing; everything else was speculation. I stayed until around one and then, having learned absolutely nothing from the previous 24 hours, returned to camp for another disco nap.

I woke up around 4:30 in the morning. There are decisions that seem deranged when written down later but perfectly sensible when made inside a tent at a music festival. I could have remained asleep until morning. My body certainly supported this proposal. Instead, I got up and went back to the Gym for the second half of Rhadoo.

At that hour the room belonged to a different population than it had at midnight. Nobody accidentally stays out until six in the morning. By then you have either consciously committed to the project or made such a consistent series of decisions that the distinction between accident and intention no longer matters. People had settled into themselves. Whatever social performance had existed earlier in the evening had mostly burned away. Nobody seemed to require anything from anybody else except enough room to move.

I stayed until six, alone in the way I had come to understand being alone at Sustain, which wasn't really alone at all. There were people everywhere. Somewhere my friends were sleeping, dancing, sitting in somebody else's camp, or making decisions I would hear about later. I didn't know exactly where they were, and for once I didn't feel compelled to find out. Their existence somewhere nearby was enough.

Then it started raining, and rain has an extraordinary ability to restore practical concerns. Suddenly there were tents to think about, clothes, shoes, things left outside. Whatever revelations one might have been approaching at 5:40 in the morning become considerably less urgent once water starts falling from the sky. I went back to the tent and, this time, there was no secret return to the dance floor. I slept until 10.

When I woke up, Sustain was becoming a parking lot again. The strange little neighborhoods that had appeared on Thursday were being dismantled. Tents collapsed inward, sleeping bags were forced back into sacks they clearly no longer fit inside, coolers were lighter and garbage bags were heavier. Cars stood open while people attempted to solve the engineering problem of fitting everything back into spaces that had somehow contained it perfectly well three days earlier. Everyone looked tired in the honest way people look tired when there is finally no reason to pretend otherwise.

We broke down camp, and the routes that had become automatic over the previous few days began disappearing with it. There had been places where I expected certain people to be, paths I could walk without thinking, stages that seemed to possess entirely different personalities depending on the hour. There was a bridge I would probably always associate with people walking toward the Grove at sunset, a mound where one apparently sat and screamed "AMY," and a Gym that meant something entirely different at midnight than it did at five in the morning. Remove the tents, turn off the lights, and pack the speakers away, and you discover that underneath all of it there had been grass the whole time.

Maybe that is why festivals produce such disproportionate emotions. They exist long enough for you to develop habits and then eliminate the world those habits belong to. For three days I had lived according to a completely unreasonable schedule. I danced, slept, woke up, and danced again. I spent hours with my friends and other hours deliberately avoiding them. I watched daylight disappear through the trees and wandered through camps when nearly everyone was asleep. I took strategic naps as though preparing for military deployment, developed catastrophic hay fever, and spent part of Saturday night sitting on a mound screaming somebody's name for no defensible reason.

Somewhere inside all of that, I had also managed to be alone without being lonely, a distinction ordinary life does not give us enough opportunities to practice. We tend to imagine community as proximity. To love people is to be beside them. To go somewhere together means remaining together. If somebody disappears from the group, somebody eventually asks where they went, and I am usually the person asking.

That is probably the problem. I check whether everyone is having fun. I notice when someone has gone quiet. I wonder whether somebody wants to leave but doesn't want to say so. I start treating other people's enjoyment as a condition of my own, although nobody asks me to do this and most of them would probably prefer I didn't. Somewhere over the course of Sustain, whether because of exhaustion, the scale of the place, the lack of a phone constantly in my hand, or simply because I had wandered between enough stages by myself, I stopped doing it.

I trusted that my friends were fine, and because I trusted that they were fine, I could leave them. I could stand alone at CCL and Yushh and get filthy with it. I could cross between stages without asking whether anybody wanted to come. I could leave Aurora Halal without saying goodbye. I could wake up at 4:30 a.m. and walk into the Gym alone. I could dance until I wanted to stop and stop until I wanted to dance. Then, inevitably, I would find someone again: Kayla somewhere in the crowd, Duncan on a mound, Gab in the middle of everything, somebody I knew walking toward me across the grass. There you are. Then one of us would disappear again.

By Sunday morning the tents were coming down and the paths between them were disappearing. Soon there would be no reason to remember which direction led to our camp. People would go home, shower for an unreasonable amount of time, sleep in actual beds, and begin exchanging stories about things that had happened 20 feet away from each other without either person knowing. In daylight, with the stages quiet and the lights off, everything looked smaller.

We packed the last things into the car. There are easier ways to spend a weekend, certainly. I am not particularly interested in any of them.

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