Project Description

INKTOBER 52 2024 Week #34: RIDE.

“Presumably my fellow Metallica fans will instantly get this one. We’ll also conveniently ignore the darker meaning to the phrase ‘ride the lightning’ that the song is about.
I got bullied a lot when I was younger, I felt ostracized and different. When high school rolled around, it was a regional school, so I had an opportunity to sort of reinvent myself and make myself less of a target. On the morning of the first day of school, I found myself ready early, waiting for the bus. I decided to see what this whole MTV thing was that people my age were watching. I was not a ‘cool’ kid, up to that point in my life my musical tastes were pretty much exclusively Weird Al and the soundtrack to the 1986 animated ‘Transformers: The Movie’ (which happened to contain a lot of heavy metal, I just didn’t know it). The very first music video to hit my eyeballs was ‘Enter Sandman’ by Metallica, followed closely by Megadeth’s ‘Symphony of Destruction’. I became an official metal fan that day, which made it easier for me when I got to school to connect with a group of friends who were also metal heads. Maybe I read too much into such things, but I’m pretty sure that changed the course of my life in a small but important way.
33 years later, I finally set aside my introversion and dislike of crowds and went (with two of my adult children by my side) to see the band that has provided most of the soundtrack to my life. While I sometimes wish I had made the effort to see Metallica when I was younger, the concert was awesome and made all the more special by sharing it with my kids and some friends. On the second day of the two day concert we were even treated to an impressive lightning show (at an outdoor stadium. I don’t know how many other crowds of tens of thousands of people cheer in unison for every bolt of lightning and palpable crack of thunder…), which was still lingering in the distance when Metallica was on stage playing ‘Ride the Lightning’. Pretty epic.”

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