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When all you have on your mind is chicks, there’s something wrong – but there’s also something right.  So we’re going to Sasquatch and my pseudo-girlfriend is in the Philippines – or so I think. So then and I’m thinking, okay, she is on a different continent and I'm going to be surrounded by 20 000 women for the next three days. 

There's no mistake, I'm going to be living in torture thinking about the nature of fidelity for probably the rest of my life.  But it makes me feel better assuming  that pretty much all chicks are scandalous. So you ask, what the hell does this have to do with Sasquatch Music Festival? Well, recently my attitude towards women has been thrown off kilter.  I love women – but my relationships are screwy.  Are women fucked?  Or am I fucked? Anyway, I pack up my shit and go to Sasquatch to find out more.

For the last two hours I’ve been running around tying up all the loose ends I can identify. At this point, I need rest if I’m to survive the festival with any cognitive capabilities left in tact, but it’s 3:00am in the morning and I’m totally unprepared. Sleep will not happen. 

After 2 hrs of oft-interrupted rest, we drive all day and finally arrive. There are half naked people everywhere, soaking up the rays and getting faced. So we set up camp and virtually tear our clothes off to absorb the sweltering heat of the afternoon sun whilst cooling our insides with chilled beer, wine, and barbequed hot-dogs. 

At the concert grounds, looking out over the valley and noticing that my friends are nowhere to be found, I spot a girl with long blond hair blowing in the wind sitting alone on the grassy slope of the amphitheatre.  There are people everywhere and Go Go Bordello is putting on a show that would spin the mind of any psychedelic music freak.  In this moment I have to approach her, but before I do, I revel in a thought: Sasquatch makes me feel that my relationships with women are complicated instead of properly exciting.  This has to change.

So I found that excitement by pretending to be someone else and lying my ass off.  She’s totally enthralled and looking at me with a mischievous smile.  I look at her with a half grin and realize I have two options in this moment: kiss her and relish in this stranger’s mystery, or tell her I have to go get a drink and find my friends.  As I’m walking away I look back out over the canyon and to where I had been sitting just a few seconds before; she was gone and all I wanted to do was find her and ravish her. I’m a pussy.  

Later that night, back at the campground, I leave my friends to stumble around under a guise of the pseudonym Chaz Rhynholtt, in search of a girl with which my personal abandonment can be shared.  And then I meet her, or so I think.  She tells me her name is Trixie and that she's from Vermont.  It was total bullshit, but she fit the profile.  We found each other wasted in the dark and staggered into a random tent.  I think she was on drugs.  Nothing happened anyway.  

The next morning we drank under the shade of a tarp strung between the van and another vehicle.  There wasn’t much to think about until I considered whether little Trixie from Vermont had taken advantage of me, or if I had temporarily filled her emotional vacancy.  Who wins in a one-night stand?  Maybe Trixie knew more about me than she knew about herself, even with my bullshit name.  

The bedlam of Sasquatch was relentless.  Everyone was getting drunk and stoned out of his and her mind.  And those who weren’t you couldn’t distinguish anyway, nor did you care.  At the end of it you feel disheveled and elated.  But what’s quenching is the real sentiment you walk away with: it’s not the end of a single time where you just go nuts.  No.  It’s the intrigue of all the craziness, and searching for it in every unimaginable situation you find yourself in as time goes on, including reuniting with your girlfriend from the Philippines.  That should be fun.  

-Phillip Marlowe

Check out more of Phil's writing, here on STOKEshow.