Recon First

The last concert I went to before a few nights ago was David Bowie. Cal Expo, Sacramento, the summer of 1990. I was twenty-three. Then thirty-six years went by, and I didn't see another one.

A few nights ago — a Friday — I saw No Doubt at the Sphere in Las Vegas.

It started when my sister Tricia invited me. She had a timeshare in Vegas and a couple of extra tickets, and it was going to be a whole group of us — Tricia, the cousins and some of their friends from way back in grade school, Lyn, and me. No Doubt was part of their memories. The band came together in the mid-eighties, and for my sister and the cousins, they were part of growing up. Not really mine. I'm a ska and punk guy, and No Doubt always sat at the edge of that for me — a mish-mash of it more than the real thing. So I wasn't even going for the music.

And almost the moment Tricia asked, the anxiety started.

That's worth saying, because anxiety isn't really part of my stuff. I'm not someone who lies awake turning a thing over. But here it was. And Lyn didn't push — she deferred to me the way she does. Do you want to go? She left the decision in my hands, which only gave the anxiety more room to work.

And work it did. Every time I pictured the night, my body had a list ready. I don't like crowds. I don't like noise — and a show at the Sphere is nothing but noise, the kind that sends my tinnitus into a frenzy. There's the younger-crowd thing, too — you scroll the feeds, you watch the news, and you end up carrying a picture of people that isn't fair to them, even when you know full well the rage-bait is just what keeps everyone glued to the screen.

Here's what I finally understood about all of it. It was anticipatory. I was gearing up for a battle before I had a single fact in front of me. And that's the thing — that's not what a Marine does. We recon first. We get the lay of the ground before we decide there's an enemy on it. I'd skipped the recon and gone straight to arming up.

I went anyway. I went for Lyn. I went for love. She'd never been to Las Vegas. She'd never gambled. She'd never been to a concert. Not because she didn't want to, but because of where she grew up. In the Philippines, money gets weighed — you think a purchase all the way through before you make it. There's no putting it on a card and figuring out how to pay it back later, the way we do here without blinking. So a night like this was never a thing that simply happened. It was a thing somebody had to make happen.

And then we got there. The first thing I clocked was the crowd — and so much for that fear. I'd braced for a sea of kids. Instead it was ninety percent my peers, people my own age who'd grown up on this band, there for the same reason my cousins were. But the room had a brand-new fear waiting. We were up in Section 400 — six floors up, looking down on the stage. The Sphere is stadium seating, steep, the kind where the row in front of you starts at your shins. No guardrails. People fall in places like that — I'm sure it's statistically rare, maybe it's never even happened there — but my body didn't care about statistics. So I feigned excitement, and I waited.

Then the screen lit up. A countdown — eight minutes — and behind it, the whole inside of the Sphere became a wall of memory. Anaheim. 1987. Old flyers and ticket stubs and backyard-show photos, a band's entire origin story blown up stories tall. Somebody else's history, not mine, and I got to stand inside it. The seconds ticked down. The first notes hit — the downbeat — and Gwen walked out and Tragic Kingdom started. The lights. The band. The loudness. The cheers.

And the anxiety? It fell off. I don't know where it went. I didn't care. I looked over, and Lyn's eyes were lit up at the exact same thing I was lit up at.

That was the recon I should have trusted all along. There was no battle. There never was. Just a room full of light and noise and other people's good memories, and my wife beside me, seeing all of it for the first time.

So to you out there, dear reader — if you catch yourself arming up for something before you've even seen the ground, here's what I had to relearn at fifty-nine: a middle-aged man, a U.S. Marine, still gets ahead of himself. Still goes to war in his head with an enemy that was never going to show. The fix isn't to be fearless. It's to go and look — to get the facts before you decide there's a fight.

Because more often than not, what's waiting on the other side is something just like this. A room full of light. Your wife's eyes lit up beside you. And you, just happy to be there to make the memory, with the one you love.