A year after the fact, I finally feel I am brave enough to tell the story of Lollapalooza 2003, Bonner Springs stop. The show was held at the amphitheater formerly known as Sandstone, and the musical line-up included the Donnas, Incubus, Jurassic Five, Audioslave, and Jane's Addiction. I was excited about the Donnas, but my raison d'etre that day was to hear Audioslave (I loved their musical ancestors, Soundgarden and Rage Against the Machine) and Jane's Addiction (I've been crazy about them for more than half my life).

There is no shade at the amphitheater formerly known as Sandstone. No shade at all. The structure is built at the bottom of a hill, so there is no breeze either. What there is—and in great abundance—is profiteering. Cheap t-shirts were selling for $50. Hats were going for even more. Most spectacularly, bottles of water were $4, and if you wanted a cup of ice, you had to pay an additional $4 (the price of a soda). Keep in mind that this was all occurring on a hundred-degree day in July, and that the bands started playing at noon.

And so the fun began.

My friend and I sat and listened to the Donnas while the sun scorched down on us. Some nearby frat boys heckled them, indicating they should stop playing and remove their clothing at once. They were just intimidated, though, because the Donnas rocked. Anyway, other groups came and went. It got hotter and hotter and hotter.

I had not eaten much since we'd been there, mostly because the typical concert venue fare (e.g., pizza, pretzels, nachos) did not sound digestible. At six o'clock I had a Mr. Goodcents sandwich, which I suspected had been thawed and refrozen multiple times.* My friend and I sat on a grassy knoll, looked for Kennedy, and fell into a weird, overwhelming lethargy. After a while, I noticed that my fingers and toes had plumped up like Ball Park hot dogs. I also had a headache that began as a dull ache and progressed to a discomfort akin to having a scorpion crawling around inside my forehead. And then, the nausea set in.

I sought out the first-aid station, which was a little encampment attached like a barnacle to the amphitheater fence. When I described my symptoms to the EMTs, they were convinced that I was simply dehydrated. I kept telling them this wasn't possible. I had consumed a great deal of water in the past eight hours, and when I tried to drink any more I wasn't able to keep it down. But instead of acknowledging this, they ushered me over to the little revival tent beside some industrial fans, a mister, and an orange cooler of water. Every few minutes, I rushed over to a large trash can and expelled a portion of my insides. It was not pretty. Not only did I lose my lunch that day, I lost my lunches from the previous two or three weeks as well. I came to know that trash can intimately—the peculiar pattern of wear on the rubber handle; the strange way the bag rose up into a plume in the back, like a little wisp of white smoke. And this was the extremely unenviable position I found myself in when I realized that Audioslave had taken the stage. They sounded amazing, but I don't think I'll ever be able to rid myself of an intense, visceral reaction to "Show Me How to Live." Every time I hear Chris Cornell's voice, I think of vomit.

Eventually, one of the EMTs actually started listening to me. He asked what I'd had to drink (one margarita at noon-thirty; eight bottled waters since then) and eat (a pretzel and that frost-bitten Goodcents sandwich). He asked about the headache, the lethargy, and the swelling, and then he told me that my problem was hyponatremia. Hyponatremia occurs when you lose too much of the salt and nutrients in your body, either by extreme exercise (happens to marathoners) or by excessive fluid intake (happened to me). He said I should leave immediately, and that I should stop somewhere where I could get a jug of Gatorade.

"How much should I drink?" I asked, weakly lifting my head off the picnic table.

"Drink it until you feel better."

I did, and it worked. Half an hour after I chugged as much red sports drink as I could get down, I felt almost entirely better. Except, of course, that I missed Jane's Addiction. To this day I have not heard them in concert. I have not stood in a sweaty crowd and let the high, keening voice of Perry Farrell drift over me like a hallucinogenic breeze. And it's all because of hyponatremia, the Silent Stupefier. So let this be a lesson to anyone attending outdoor concerts this summer. Sometimes alcohol really is better for you than water. Bottoms up.

FOOTNOTE:

* While we waited in line for the sandwiches, a pseudo-Goth girl glanced at my cowboy hat and made a little tally sign to her friend. "That's twenty-seven," she said smugly. If I had felt a little less like a lobster being boiled slowly in a saucepan, I might have pointed out that wearing a hat that shaded my face was a damn sight smarter than wearing a long-sleeved black shirt and pants when it was a hundred degrees outside. That's not social protest—that's just stupidity. I mean, what was she doing, protesting the sun? Oh, look at me, I'm attending an extremely commercialized music event, but I'm going to demonstrate my superiority over all earthly creatures by protesting the sun!

Idiot.