The concerts planner

This year has been quite a shitty one.
If you trust old sayings, it's because 2016 was born with the misfortune of being a leap year.
Part of me thinks that I can’t discriminate an year over its divisibility by 4.
However I've already lived through a pretty good number of leap years to know that 2016 is the typical overachiever, overdoing it just to show off.

Even so, there's been some good things too.
This year I printed 2 blank calendar templates, one for the office and one for home and I started noting down gigs.
I started to write down the name of the artist on the day I was going to the concert: at the beginning of the year I already had a couple of gigs lined up, gigs that I still have to see (Francesco and I were quite keen at getting our hands on tickets for Wilco).

The gig-plan is the only agenda I’ve been keeping up to date in the past 9 months. I’ve missed appointments because I wrote them down at the wrong time, on the wrong day, at the wrong address.
Or a random combination of the 3 wrongs above. And guess what? When it comes to meeting, 2 wrongs don’t make a right, but more likely some awkward conversatio on the phone, apologising for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

But the gig agenda is still keeping up. So far it suffered only one set back, in July. On the 13th I was supposed to go to Carroponte to watch Counting Crows playing. Adri & Fra had taken a day off well in advance, "parked" the kids at the grandparents, we were all set. Then a monsoon decided to fall over the area that hosts the Carroponte and the concert was cancelled only one hour to go. I think that in a couple of years the 3 of us will be able to talk about it without swearing. I think...

It's not just the concerts I enjoy. Sure the music is the main thing, but there are other parts of going to concerts. The first one is "going": in the last two years I've been to only one concert in Torino, all the other gigs have been somewhere else, scattered around Italy and Europe. Travelling is always mind-opening, even if only for a couple of days.
And then there's the people. Sure, at concerts I meet way too often people that spend their time on Facebook, taking pictures and videos (while I am singing murdering the song just one row behind them, I can't imagine the sound of those videos), leaving in the middle of a song to fetch a beer (yeah, when it comes to concert, I'm an orthodox and a snob). But then I've also met cool people. People that I might or not meet again, but that I formed a bond with thanks to the songs, or the mosquitos trying to eat us alive in Milan. People that weren't even at the concert but I happened upon in my wandering the day after and spent some good time talking about music.

Now October is starting and while the year starts accelerating towards the Christmas break, I'm getting ready for the next big round of concerts. Five, or maybe six of them, depending on whether the magic of the fairy ticket works out as I hope.