I was going back through my early posts, and it's weird to think about how much of my fandom w/r/t Phish both has changed (less high on '94, much higher on '99) and hasn't (my Cypress opinion has been unwavering), as well as what it was like when I was just some random newbie on the board stepping into this wide, wide world I had no idea was quite so all-encompassing. And it made me think about my first live experience, also, and how much it helps set me apart from lots of others in the community - that it's in 3.0, that it's after years of immersing myself in the band via having scads of free time during law school, and so on. And it's wild - like, nobody really has a good thing to say about this show beyond the Hood (I don't, really, either - the Mule's pretty cool, and they hook up nicely in Disease for a bit), but it still has *so much* meaning for me, especially in the camaraderie I shared with fellow .netters, just as much as when I saw the band walk out on stage or when I realized Hood was heading out into uncharted waters.

I suppose that's what draws us so deeply into the band (and, as well, the parts of the band we stump hardest for) - that deeply ingrained nostalgia, as deeply ingrained as our nostalgia for anything else (like, for me, Star Wars or Calvin & Hobbes or Picasso), and so often instilled during exceptionally meaningful times in our lives. And, I suppose, even when we argue about how our perceptions and our memories and our biases should be shaping the music that we all hear in so many different ways (Phish's live catalog is essentially a Rorschach test - I always think about someone with no affinity to the band listening to it and experiencing it in a way we would scoff at but ultimately has just as much weight as any of the ways we do), we ultimately have that pull of nostalgia that brings us together, that realization that it's memories like Fish pounding away on Mike's bass with his mallets during that Mule (or, for others, something like that dumb old giant hot dog, or "Hey Mike, stay on F", or - if you're REALLY lucky - watching the band move from Twist Jam to Walk Away in person) that bind us together. We're all in this together, as some dude once sang.