For Those About to Rock. by Patresa Hartman

Here are two entities I love, and if we are going to continue together like this for the remainder of a year of Thank You, it is best to understand and accept my unwavering adoration for:

1) Alanis Morissette; and
2) live concerts.

I love Alanis Morissette for her unconditional honesty and for the courage it takes to invite people into your journey, to watch you fall and rise and fall and rise and fall and rise. I love Alanis Morissette fans who know, intimately, her music beyond 1995's Jagged Little Pill. I love those fans who acknowledge her evolution as they acknowledge their own and therefore do not continually refer to her -- narrowly, so narrowly -- as an "angry chick rocker," as if anger were not normal in a whole spread fan bouquet of humanness.

I love the permission I feel to be equally and embarrassingly honest about my own revolutions. These confessions -- for that is what they are; and you, my priest -- are never attractive and always lit harshly by flourescence. I love that when I listen to Alanis Morissette I feel tunnels self-excavate into the core of me, where all of my truthiest truths wait to be called to turn. I love that albums like Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie and Feast on Scraps inspire me to write more courageously, because the darkness in me will validate the darkness in you and create some kind of magic laser show that turns all of it into light and light and light.

And so, in summary, it is best that you know that I love Alanis Morissette, that I find her wise and gracious and real.

Which brings me to adored entity Number Two, which is live concerts. I attended Alanis's Flavors of Entanglement Tour stop in Chicago on Thursday, and it was really friggin' awesome, if you don't mind my saying without eloquence.

Even if it had not been Alanis, there is something about a live concert that fills me, absolutely full up, with Joy. It is Joy. I know it is Joy, because it is pure and focused. I think it is the miracle of thousands of people united in their respect and celebration of one individual who digests the love and transmits it back -- through concentrated energy, which is waves and waves of sound. And we are all -- every single one of us -- swaying to the same frequencies, and we are loving it, and we are clapping and united, and we are singing in unison and dancing and loving our neighbors. We are loving our neighbors.

And I am sure that if we really wanted to get simple and peel back the convoluted layers of mess that weigh us down, that pollute the beauty of who we were meant to be, that all it would really take to spread peace on earth, is a friggin' awesome concert.

Rock.