When I was writing 2013’s You Don’t Know Me But You Don’t Like Me, my book about becoming a Juggalo and Phish phan, and also losing my goddamn mind and finding myself, I would occasionally take a long view. I’d look forward to a moment in the future when the obligation of having to finish a book about Phish and ICP would no longer hang heavy over me and I’d be able to go to shows not as a half-assed would-be pop anthropologist with an ambitious professional project to complete but rather as a fan.

The same was true when I was working on Weird Al: the Book. I could not have imagined that after completing You Don’t Know Me and Weird Al: The Book my work with Insane Clown and “Weird Al” Yankovic would not be finished. Not by a long shot. Heck, my work writing books about the wicked clowns and the clown prince of American pop music wasn’t even over. I wrote and published 7 Days in Ohio about a week spent covering both The Gathering of the Juggalos and the 2016 Republican National Convention three years and the book compiling all of the entries in The Weird Accordion to Al should be finished in the next six months or so, God willing.

Phish is different. I haven’t even contemplated writing a second book about Phish but they remain special to me. They’re more than special to me. They’re sacred. I want to continue to go to Phish concerts until I die or they break up, ,whichever comes first. But as a struggling freelancer with two small children, I generally only have the money, time and freedom to go to the shows in my hometown, and sometimes I do not have the money, time or freedom even for that.