Free

On New Year’s Eve 23 years ago my husband and I fell in love in New York City. We had just met the previous day through mutual friends but we consider the Phish concert we attended at Madison Square Garden on December 31, 1998, as a type of anniversary. After all, the live performance on this special holiday was the entire reason we and our friends had all traveled from North and South Carolina and Virginia up to the Big Apple.

My husband and I even trekked from NC to the Florida Everglades the following New Year’s Eve for Phish’s two-day outdoor festival in which 75,000 people were in attendance to ring in the Millennium. My husband, who was then just a boyfriend, had considered proposing to me that night, but aborted the mission. I was a foolish feminist at the time and he thought I might actually say “no” since I was under the degenerate delusion that “marriage is an oppressive institution.”

Today and 21 years of marriage later, we still feel a certain nostalgia for Phish’s New Year’s Eve concerts, so we have often watched the live broadcasts, even though we are very much not the hippie libtards we once were. Thank the Good Lord!

Auld lang buzzkill

But this New Year’s Eve, the band chose to reschedule their sold-out four-night stand at the Garden “to avoid further spread of the coronavirus.” Seriously.

“With the Omicron variant of Covid-19 surging in New York City, we have made the very difficult decision to reschedule next week’s run of shows at Madison Square Garden,” the band explained on their website. “The health and safety of Phish fans, our crew, and venue staff is paramount in our minds. While Phish has played shows this year as the pandemic has continued, this variant’s ability for rapid transmission is unprecedented.”

I suppose a live performance even sans 20,000 concert-goers is better than what the band did last year: a four-way zoom call between the band members while they played fans in a virtual chess game. Lame.

But man, is this year’s political theater just dripping with cognitive dissonance. Heck, as many people in America have died of Omicron as have died at a Phish show in 2021. That’d be one single human. A tragedy, yes, but a reason to shut down society or even a rock concert, hell no.

The New York press admits that Omicron isn’t leading to death. Of course, they credit the “vaccine” for this “news,” claiming that the jab and its subsequent boosters “offered protection against omicron-related deaths.” Sure, a vaccine is meant to “produce immunity,” yet now is supposed to only provide “protection” or just “soften the symptoms.” Changing definitions to fit your agenda is just what the (spin) doctor ordered!

“Flashbacks” & flash forward

In December, the virus worked its way through our jab-free family. Being sick is never fun, but with a regimen of Ivermection and vitamins, fresh air and walks, plenty of fluids (including some Holy water), and prayer, I can personally attest to the fact that the coof isn’t the end of the world. Even the New York Times is now casually saying that the “endemic disease does not need to dominate” our lives or society at large. It’s time to move forward, people!

Of note, both my husband and I saw odd visuals in which whiteness was extra white, crisp, and silvery, almost crystalline. It totally felt like an acid trip, which I know a thing or two about from my decadent “daze” in the jam-band scene. Not sure if this experience was a flashback or a wu-flu feature, but the very real optics felt quite manufactured, not at all natural … kind of like Phish’s audience-free show where beyond the stage wasn’t their loyal fan base, but rather only a sea of lonely lights.

Hippie hubris

Perhaps Phish was right in canceling their holiday gigs. After all, the lion’s share of their fans are white (and white-passing) – a racial group now considered second-class citizens when “healthcare” professionals are determining eligibility for antibody treatments for covid patients. Yep, black, Hispanics, and Asians are given first dibs due to race. One NY journalist was right on the mark when she tweeted that “White people need not apply.” Precisely.

Phish would probably agree that such white-hot hate for whitey is merely a “critical metric” for promoting “anti-racism,” similar to the band’s Phans for Racial Equity. This nonprofit emphatically states as fact: “Phish fans (phans) of color have long experienced discrimination and racism in the live music scene, and also the denial and erasure of their experiences by White phans who ‘don’t see color’ and preach ‘love and light,'” thus, urging “White phans to reflect on the White privilege inherent to the jam-band scene.”

Sheesh. Nothing like biting the homogeneous hand that feeds you. Maybe Phish suffers from the self-loathing cancer of white guilt, sincerely believing in the demonic ruse of “#BlackLivesMatter and that none of us can breathe easy until all of us can breathe freely.”

Maybe they’re weaklings who just caved to the pressure of businesses being squeezed into supporting BLM. I mean, with a net worth of $200 million, Phish Inc. is a pretty lucrative business with a lot to lose. Or maybe they’re savvy capitalists using charity as a tax shelter. Who knows.

I’m not sure what’s in their hearts, but PHRE (get it?) sure ain’t about true human freedom and flourishing. What is certain is that this Phish case study perfectly exemplifies the entire globohomo zeitgeist, from covid craziness to anti-whiteness and everything in between. It’s all the “spirit of the age,” and it’s truly what ails us.

Connor Boyack aptly describes the psyop as “whiplash“: humans being pulled back and forth by the regime’s constantly changing, but consistently illogical and always dictatorial narratives. The hubris and hypocrisy can strain not just a man’s body, but also his mind and soul.

Gaslit garbling

Take some of Phish’s New Year’s Eve song choices and lyrics.

“Free“
I feel no curiosity
I see the path ahead of me
In a minute I’ll be free
And we’ll be splashing in the sea

This early first-set song is both a hat tip to the borg mentality and an ironic song choice considering the situation.

“Sigma Oasis“
So take off, take off, take off your mask
The fear’s an illusion, so don’t even ask
You’re finally weightless, so take to the air
Sigma Oasis, you’re already there

This second-set opener was an odd choice since back in September, Phish said, “For everyone’s safety, please wear a mask at [the New Year’s] shows.” To be able to “breathe freely” is a concern for black folks they don’t even know, but not for their predominantly white fans. Got it. Oh, and let’s not forget that the band also required “proof of full vaccination … [for] all fans over the age of 12.”

“Down With Disease“
Down with disease
Three weeks in my bed
Trying to stop these demons that keep dancing in my head
Down with disease
Up before the dawn
A thousand barefoot children outside dancing on my lawn

As said previously, the coof didn’t keep my family down for long, but the narrative is of the devil, especially its anti-child impositions. The New York Times has even said that covid hysteria has been “upending children’s lives” and has needlessly created a serious “crisis” for youth. Ya think?

Sure, the rest of us have been yelling this from the highest rooftops for the last year and 8 months, while the Gray Lady is now acting as if she’s been saying it all along while also pretending not to notice that her minions are culpable in creating and undergirding the mass deception and reveling in the subsequent demoralization. That’s the sickness, y’all! But I do agree that kids should definitely be shoeless, feeling the soft grass between their toes, and boogying in the sunshine like no one’s watching.

“A Life Beyond the Dream“
Now I’m letting it all roll by
I can see, I can see
A life beyond the dream
Don’t give up hope
Keep dreaming

The second-set closer speaks of optimism while the band simultaneously fosters the neurotic nightmare of coof conformity. Here’s to ditching the surreal and embracing both the corporeal and ethereal.

“Blaze On“
You got your nice shades on
and the worst days are gone
So now the band plays on
you got one life, blaze on

Opening set three, this is a peppy and seemingly hopeful ditty, but tinged with some dark lyrics, like “chemtrails raining down on you,” “be proud of all your crimes,” and “I met a liar called the messiah.”

The centerpiece of the third set featured “Everything’s Right” as bookends around holiday favorite “Auld Lang Syne.”

“Everything’s Right“
Time to get out, I paid my dues
I need to shout there’s no time to lose …
Focus on today, you’ll find a way
Happiness is how, rooted in the now …
The line is in the sand, the flag is planted
The rest of your life don’t take it for granted …
This world, this world, this crazy world I know
It turns, it turns, and the long night’s over and the sun’s coming up
Everything’s right, so just hold tight

Um, yeah. We’re done, Phish. We don’t want to hold tight. We’re over feeling like we’re “in prison without a crime, the sentence stretches on undefined,” as you opine in the song. “It’s time to get out!”

While sauntering amongst the motionless lights and across the floor where there should’ve been thousands of dancing fans, drummer Jon Fishman (above) sings “Baby Lemonade” by Syd Barrett — an apropos choice since the Pink Floyd co-founder consumed so much LSD back in the ’60s that he literally lost his mind. Likewise, covid-mania is meant to create a sort of mass schizoprenia in which catatonic conformity to the narrative trumps reality.

Phony “phreedom”

By the time I fell for my now-husband at that fortuitous ’98 concert, I’d already attended six Phish New Year’s Eve concerts (every year starting in 1992). And by the time I hung up my Phish hat, I’d seen them live nearly 60 times. I was a budding journalist in those days and had even interviewed the bass player, Mike Gordon, on two separate occasions.

I felt pretty liberated back then, yet I was anything but. I wasn’t cool, I was cookie-cutter. Just another long-haired girl in a patchwork granny dress, I was a gal beguiled by sinful pleasure, phony freedom, and a misunderstood sense of belonging.

I understand now that God was preparing me for something, even though I made some pretty damnable mistakes and typically in multiple and quite unapologetic fashion. It’s clear to me now that the Lord can “use those things to make us into the people He wants us to be,” as Fr. John Whiteford explains, but only if we let Him.

“It was George Orwell who suggested that the perfect totalitarian society was one in which all citizens are so trained to habits of obedience that there is no need for policemen,” wrote Richard Webster. The dystopian phenomenon manifests itself more and more with each passing day. You can either bend to it or not.

Divine freedom

You can participate in godless groupthink and be a slave to this world, or you can be free in Christ. The globalist covid narrative with all of its odious tentacles is the “trap that deprives us of freedom as a holy gift received from God,” warns Archbishop Marchel of the Moldovan Orthodox Church.

Christ conquered death and removed it “as the great club of Satan over sinners,” remarked Fr. Josiah Trenham. “There is no more power of death for those who are joined to the Resurrected one … [and] death no longer can chain anyone.” Jesus came to free those who through the “fear of death were held captive.”

Jesus fulfilled the Law. Men are no longer required to have physical circumcision, for example, because Christians, both male and female, and Gentile and Jew, now have circumcised hearts. And it is this freewill choice of faith that leads to true liberty here and to our eternal health and happiness in Heaven. It’s a yoke that’s easy and light, not a heavy and deadly one like the bondage of sin.

As the late Archbishop Dmitri Royster stated, “It is in Christ, as perfect Man, that man comes to the full realization of what it means to be in the image and likeness of God. For man’s freedom is an Icon, an image of the Divine Freedom itself.”

Phish lead guitarist Trey Anastasio donned a special third-set shirt that read “Good Luck,” but we don’t need luck; we need God. It’s time to be curious for Him, His Word, His Saints, and His Church. Our Messiah’s no liar and he’s no sigma. Rather, He’s the Alpha and Omega.

“The fire of ascetism and true yearning for God will change us,” writes Fr. Stephen Freeman. “And then we will shine like the sun.” So, blaze on, brothers and sisters. Let’s be truly free.