- Sport/Life

Published on October 30th, 2008 | by Daniel Boyle

Over the past week or so I went to a lot of shows, I spent a lot of money.

Next year I want to go to Europe. Each time I get paid I say “OK, now it’s time to get serious about saving” and then along comes something, and I spend all my money. Last fortnight, I thought I was going strong, I had around $800 in my savings, I finished the fortnight with a measly $200 left over. If that. Not impressive.

Berlin is the main place I’m aiming to go. In the past few weeks I have started a “German for Beginners” course. In the last few weeks it was pretty smooth sailing, however this week the levels stepped up a notch and I felt quite out of my depth. The reason for Berlin is that I want to compete at the world championships for Footbag, they’ll be on sometime around July/August. Whilst in Germany I also want to go to Wacken and drink a lot of beer.

Speaking of drinking beer, I think it’s time to cut down for a while. And by cut down I’m meaning not drink any. However, my willpower is not as strong as one would hope. We will see how we go. Over the course of the weekend I spent such a phenomenal amount on beer, and regularly made a fool out of myself.

I saw a number of bands over the weekend. There was a show at the Pot Belly on Friday. Taipan played “Five Days of Shit” by Deadstare. That was a pretty raging show. I was pretty wild that night. Too much beer.

I went to Sydney on the weekend as well. I saw Machine Head play with Slipknot. Machine Head were sweet, they are my favourite band, it was pretty much as I expected. Definitely not as good as either of the times I have seen them before, but I wasn’t expecting that. Slipknot kind of bored me. They were a band I listened to a lot in high school, but now that I am getting old, I am really just not interested anymore. They just have so many gimmicks (rotating drumkits, fire, blah, blah) they even played a lot of the tracks I loved as an angsty teen, but I just wasn’t into it, so I left halfway through.

What was excellent was not having to deal with one thousand sweaty bogans on the train back to the city saying how it was the greatest thing they have ever seen. That was probably the actual highlight of my night.

I don’t have too much coming up ahead. I’m pretty excited about the Ruiner show in a while (moreso Break Even, 4 Dead, Slowburn – good combo). Also The Abandonment are coming up soon, it’s been way too long since I last saw them.

When I moved to Melbourne the first show I went to was The Abandonment (Jake’s last show) and Samsara and some more at the Arty. I thought to myself “awesome, I’ll see these bands every week”. However, I never saw The Abandonment since, and Samsara only play from time to time, so really I was totally off the mark.

This weekend however, I would really like to be low in cost. That would please me greatly.