Last night I said to my wife quite possibly the saddest words ever expressed in the English language, “The guy in front of me just had his credit card declined for a can of Mike’s Hard Lemonade.” This was moments before we took our seats for the opening night of Nine Inch Nails’ Tension 2013 tour at the Xcel Energy Center in sunny Saint Paul, Minnesota.

The preshow crowd watching wasn’t as exciting as I thought it might be as most people were either sporting their fanciest foot long metal goatee or pulled out the only black t-shirt in their suburban closet—except for my wife, who was sporting quite a lovely Easter green. The only person who really made me wonder was the happy gentleman sporting his Anal Blast concert finest, although based on the graphic on the back it was really hard to tell if that blast was an implosion or explosion. The one thing I’ll never get used to about arena shows though are the people wandering around with hotdogs and tater tots at a concert.  I just seems weird to me.  Although, I did look at many concession stands and much to my consternation I couldn’t find any Nine Inch Nachos to snack on.

We grabbed some popcorn and headed to our seats, which actually turned out to be one of the most bizarre and disappointing aspects of the night’s event. We were in section 103, which was the side of the stage and were actually pretty good seats if you didn’t want to suffer a seizure during the intense light show. However, the Xcel staff ran caution tape across the last two seats of the row before the stairs to section 102 and placed numerous security staff on those stairs. You see, no one on the end of the row was allowed to use those stairs – and quite honestly even though they led down to the stage, there seemed to be no purposes in it other than to have the security staff talk during the entire show. Repeatedly, people snuck under, over or tripped through the caution tape to go up the stairs and repeatedly the security staff would tell them to go back and climb over the 20 people in their row to go to the bathroom or to fail in their attempt to purchase another can of Mike’s Hard Lemonade. My lovely wife’s typical form of social protest is threatening to write a strongly worded letter actually called a security employee over to our seats and told her to shut up. I’ve never been more proud.ne thing I’ll never get used to about arena shows though are the people wandering around with hotdogs and tater tots at a concert. I just seems weird to me. Although, I did look at many concession stands and much to my consternation I couldn’t find any Nine Inch Nachos to snack on.

Anyway, let’s get to the point. The show last night was excellent. The drumming was amazing and the light show even better. At one point, they had LED screens in front of and behind the band having some kind of funky red, green and yellow party and I thought to myself this could be the post-industrial Mos Eisley Cantina band for the spaceport in “Serenity.”

However, if your knowledge of Nine Inch Nails ends with “Downward Spiral” and a couple of radio play songs after that and you want to relive sitting in your dorm room playing “Pretty Hate Machine” while swilling Zima and talking about how you are going to stick it to the man by not having 2.5 kids, a minivan and a house in the Suburbs (you had 1.5 and an SUV instead, nice hustle) this is likely not the show for you. The show was exceptional, don’t get me wrong, and worth going to on the musical talents of Trent Reznor alone. Now if your thing is seeing the 25th anniversary of “Flood,” or “Doolittle” or “Copper Blue,” or Rancid’s 20th Anniversary, or Mike Doughty reimaging Soul Coughing you might come up a little short in your entertainment dollar.

This gets to one thing I didn’t understand about the show. It’s a rock concert, yell, scream, sing along, have a great time, but don’t just talk above the music for the entire event. We had numerous people around us, and keep in mind we paid $75 per ticket or a tick below the Federal deficit after Ticketmaster convenience fees, to hear two hours of music. We had several people who just wouldn’t shut the hell up for five minutes (this was on top of the non-stop talking of the security guards). That said, the drunken chatty guy in row 19 did provide us the most entertaining moment of the entire concert. There was about a five minute delay in the action due to a technology problem.

His buddy shouts out, “Head like a hole.”
“Black as your soul,” he calls back.
“I’d rather die”
“Then give you a home.”

Clearly, this was the concert he’s been waiting his entire life for.

Nine Inch Nails busting into an industrial wall of sound, didn’t happen often enough during the night to cover up this dude’s blathering. Instead, a lot of the show was more of an ethereal and dark Bjork. And because I wasn’t experienced in hearing Reznor with a live band, when he did beat our brains in with sound, I kept hearing Ministry’s “Jesus Built My Hotrod” in my head.

While I might have been annoyed with all the talking, surprisingly I wasn’t bothered too much by people holding their phones up to make a crappy video recording of the show as it seems to happen more and more lately. I suspect the reason for that is there was a EMP machine secretly embedded with the sound and light equipment exploding any cell phone attempting to record the show—at least if we suspend reality like they do on TV.

Overall it was a good show and entertaining. The encore was a serious downer, and more of an indulgent clapping intermission than a real please come back and give us more. When encores are scripted, it just feels contrived. The first song of the encore received the least applause and cheers of any song in the set and while Hurt was amazing as a final song, the whole extra session really felt like it sapped some of the energy from the crowd after closing the regular set with Head Like a Hole.
The net is this: My wife and I enjoyed the show and are glad we went, but it felt more like checking a band off a concert bucket list than an experience of a lifetime. Maybe it was my unfamiliarity with a number of the songs. Maybe it was the Xcel staff or the people around us who wouldn’t shut up. Or maybe the encore brought down my experience. I’m not disappointed in the show, but if you are a casual Nine Inch Nails fan, it’s just a decent show.

By some luck or fortune frowning upon me, my first genuine Cleveland Browns memories are the Tommy Kramer to Ahmad Rashad Hail Mary in 1980 and, of course, just two weeks later Red Right 88.

With all the adventures of being a host for Cleveland Browns fans coming to the Twin Cities for this week’s game, I thought it might be worth a few minutes to reflect on nearly four decades of being the equivalent of an Internet sensation who gets hit in the gems with a whiffle bat sixteen (and-very-occasionally more) Sundays each year.

We all know about the heartaches that come with being a Cleveland sports fan. Just like the weather, there is a gray cloud hanging over us. Even if at halftime or the seventh inning stretch feels like 75 and sunny, we know that within the hour the dark clouds will roll in and suddenly it’ll be sleeting, and frosty chunks of our breath will fall to the earth with a hearty splat.

But Cleveland sports memories are so much more than that.

I remember- before I learned that math is the work of the devil- adding the Browns halftime score to the opponents score, and vice versa to make sure the Browns were at least tied by the end of regulation.  I don’t know, even when I was little I wanted free football and unnecessary Cleveland drama.

I remember my mom insisting on vacuuming the living room during the early part of the second quarter as a “protest” related to existing gender roles about women hating football. This was, of course, after she made us hamburgers with Velveeta for the start of the game. I suspect melted Velveeta had as much impact on my childhood development as pumping lead marine gasoline as a teenager.e devil–adding the Browns halftime score to the opponents score, and vice versa to make sure the Browns were at least tied by the end of regulation. I don’t know, even when I was little I wanted free football and unnecessary Cleveland drama.

I remember lying on the couch bobbling a football during the Browns game until something (at least in fifteen to twenty intervals minutes) caused me so excited that I smacked myself in the nose with the ball, or worse, knocked over a lamp.

I remember my dad pouring a whole bag (Good God!) of Thomasson’s wavy potato chips into our giant silver bowl and me insisting on getting the biggest chip—Dad always let me take that chip and then I’d promptly bust it trying to get a massive glob of chive dip. In confirming how to properly spell Thomasson’s, I learned they were discontinued by their new owner in the last few years. Not as disappointing as say The Drive or The Shot, but it’ll get dumped into the “you can’t go home again” bin like my favorite Cleveland Heights bar if they close.

I remember walking out on the field (thanks HBO for putting a TV camera in my seat) during the inaugural Rock and Roll Hall of Fame concert and thinking “all my childhood sports heroes puked, bled or puked blood on this grass” as I walked to sit behind a real life Simpsons character in a Pink Floyd shirt who HATED George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic.

I remember moving to Minnesota and getting harassed fifteen billion times because after every major event and minor non-event during a Browns game either my dad called or I called my dad.

I’ll never forget getting two phone calls from my dad during the Rancid concert and worrying the whole time there was a horrible accident only to call him afterward to learn he wanted to talk about the Trent Richardson trade for fifteen minutes. Only then in passing did he say, “Oh! By the way, your mother wanted me to tell you our cat died.”

And hopefully after this weekend is over, I’ll remember introducing my dad to Cleveland’s beloved Hanford Dixon who he surmised would be our guest only after three tries.

I’ll hopefully also remember taking him out on the Mall of America Field at the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome (I still owe the head of PR at the Mall of America for my slip up at their suite during the preseason) because I’ve spent the last seven years reliving the exact same stories from other people that I have to share.

For people who don’t understand sports, they don’t get that it’s not about the result on the field. At its deepest level, it’s about human connection. It’s not about The Fumble, it’s that Earnest Byner, for better or worse, is part of our family. It’s not about The Shot, because we’d all have Craig Ehlo over for Thanksgiving dinner because we know he wouldn’t burn our house down—at least during dinner. It’s about the seven minutes and thirty seconds between phone calls my dad and I make during each Sunday’s Browns game. It’s about answering the phone with a shrug and sigh when an opponent hits a field goal, and saying “talk to you soon” before resignedly ordering another beer, because I mean it. I’ll always talk to him soon when it comes to Cleveland sports.

For those of you not used to fancy acronyms, or didn’t attend Hiram College, AVD stands for Alumni Volunteer Day and functions in conjunction with Hiram College Campus Day the first Saturday in September. More informally, it means we pack up the car with family and head out somewhere to do volunteer work for a few hours and be the general do-gooders our alma mater tried to inspire us to be. This year, AVD events were held in such exotic locations as: Minneapolis-Saint Paul, Washington DC, San Francisco, Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston and Toledo. Everyone is jealous of the Toledo events.

The last two years, the Twin Cities group ventured out to the Como Woodland School to douse ourselves with poison ivy, spread mulch and generally get stabbed in the thumbs by buckthorn. This year, after some last minute issues, we went to Second Harvest Heartland in the western suburbs (SUBURBS!) to do whatever the Upper Midwest’s largest hunger relief organization asked of us, like wearing a hairnet on my chin. I don’t know if that was actually required, but I’ll do just about anything for a free commemorative event t-shirt.

Things I learned this year:
1. Tortillas are like snowflakes. No two are identical and I’m really good at catching them on my tongue when dropped from 10,000 feet.

2. I want to Rock n’ Roll all night and pack tortillas every day. Of all the skills I developed from my liberal arts education, nothing prepared me more for today’s work at Second Harvest Heartland like the four years I spent scrubbing pots in the deep sink, changing milk bags and wearing a stinky red polo shirt for the Hiram College Dining Services.

3. Nearly 600,000 people in Minnesota and western Wisconsin are food insecure. To put this in perspective, the population of Minneapolis is 387,753 and Saint Paul is 288,448. Individuals and families who don’t know where their next meal is coming from, have to decide between paying rent and buying groceries or can’t generate enough income from part-time jobs are considered food insecure.

4. Nobody can pronounce Hiram. I have yet to do an AVD event where the coordinator pronounced Hiram correctly. There are approximately 44 phonemes in the English language. Which by the transitive property, means there are 1,687,846,998 ways to pronounce Hiram College.

5. It doesn’t violate child labor laws if you don’t pay them. Organizations such as Second Harvest Heartland have excellent volunteer programs to help keep their costs down. Today was a family day at the facility and our small group from Hiram worked with kids and parents from around the greater metro area to pack tortillas and onions.

6. Speaking of tortillas and onions. Based on our work today, each individual packed an average of 99 meals for food insecure people. Hopefully that meal won’t just be tortillas and onions, unless, of course, they’re into that sort of thing.

7. Recently, Fox News commentator Thomas Kersting suggested that child hunger is a teaching moment for parents. He proudly reinforces the shame of being food insecure. As someone who spent some time eating government cheese as a child and wondering why my mom’s money looked different, maybe the solution is simple. Since these hungry children aren’t going to get food in his world, the government could sell the new surplus of government cheese and wipe out the deficit.

8. Over two hundred and fifty people participated in Hiram College AVD across the country. This is more people than were in my graduating class and I suspect that less than 18.2% of them were hung-over this morning—violating Hiram’s long venerated tradition of doing everything before noon with a hangover.

So that’s it. I probably learned a whole bunch more but I think that’s enough for today. As we all know, beer tastes better after doing some work, and, well, I did go to Hiram.