I am too close to the stage. Dr. Dre is making eye contact with me and he's shouting something about whipping people's asses and doing sexually violent things and for some reason I have all of his threats memorized and I'm reciting them back to him in perfect synchronicity, but that doesn't seem to make him any happier. The stage is Spinal Tap with a giant talking skull, a bouncing hooptie, false storefronts and Snoop Doggy Dogg riding a chrome-bedazzled, three-wheeled bicycle. I am at Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean, not a hip-hop show, and Dr. Dre is the ship's captain; an imposing rapscallion threatening death and rape and commanding, "Everyone put your hands in the motherfuckin' air!" But I can't move. And I fear that Dr. Dre might stop the concert and scold me, make an example out of me for not obeying. "Stomp a mud hole in his ass!" is all he'd have to say, and thousands of stoned loyalists would pour over me from the stands. Instead I reel myself in, take a breath and move my body to the side of the stage where Dre won't notice my nonparticipation.

In my new spot, an imposing shadow falls over me and I look up to see a HUGE tray of cotton candy passing overhead like The Mother Ship, causing me to feel the boundaries of my mortality for the honest-to-god first time ever. The vendor sees me flinch and he laughs and continues past, leaving me with a head full of Dre and Snoop's death poems. I feel the Grim Reaper tapping on my arm, but turn to find it is actually an old white lady with the word SECURITY jumping at me from her shirt pocket, big and bright, and I smile at her just as big and bright, because she is the Security Reaper, come to make me feel secure; she will secure me. God bless her.

"Where are you supposed to be?" she asks.

I aim my press pass at her. "Oh, I'm just writing about the concert for the newspaper." Big smiles. "Wanderin' around, checking it out...you know."

Instead of, 'You have to be in your seat. Keep moving.' The SECURITY Reaper looks out for me, finds me an empty seat to stand by in the third row. I ask her if she's been busting kids for weed.

"I smell it," she answers. "But I haven't seen it."

"It smells good doesn't it?" I ask her.

She reflexively answers yes, but then seems embarrassed to have admitted it and I lose her in the tea blur, only to find myself in a thicket of nubile, 16-year-old girls in tube tops and belly rings. I'm the center of their herd, pretending I don't notice them. I drop my head and begin taking notes in my long white tablet, labeled in blue, easy-to-read letters: REPORTER'S NOTEBOOK. Within seconds the young hootchie maidens descend on me with inquiries and expressions of desire.

"Do you work at the paper? I want to be in the paper," the fresh girls beg. "Where's the photographer? Can you get me backstage?"

And I look on them, tripping so hard I can't speak, and if I could, all I would do is moan, "Ooooooooh my god, yr sooooo beeea-u-tiful," like a molester.

"Are you drunk?" they ask.

I nod affirmative.

"Can you get us some beer?" they ask.

- - -

I was lost in one stairwell for half-an-hour until I popped out a side door of the stadium by two 13-year-old white boys with bleached blonde hair and sun-visors tipped at an angle Tampa malls consider gang related. The boys are digging in the bushes for some marijuana and pipes they'd stashed before the show and I think to interview the rebel kids, or at least ask them to smoke me out, but they run away fast after they find their shit. I walk on until I come upon a father and his two children; boy, 8, girl, 14. The father is the homosexually repressed Army-dad in American Beauty; he has buzzed, gray hair and I'll bet he likes steak. The father makes sure I know that he wasn't at the concert, "I wasn't in there." He says, pointing his thumb disgustedly at the Ice Palace. "I'm just here picking my kids up."

"Have you ever listened to the music?" I ask.

"Yes."

"What do you think of it?"

"I think it promotes violence," he answers.

"Why do you still let them listen to it?"

Their father replies, "Freedom of speech."

Freedom of speech? As a reporter, it is my destiny to make this guy reconcile the urgent question posed him with his fucking retard answer. It is your destiny to BUY THE COMMONPALCE BOOK…

(click here to buy the book)