It took 14 hours in a Chevy Aveo and a few of the ugliest road-side Waffle House steak sandwiches before we arrived at Wal-Mart on Thursday morning. We had been advised that the parking lot pre-game at a mecca for cross-country travelers sailing down I-24 was an event not to be missed. Sure enough, when our little yellow car penetrated the sea of station wagons, VW busses, and pickup trucks just before 4am, we knew that not only had we had made it, but disappointment was not going to come easy. Whether it was the damp Tennessean dew on the windshield, the glowing stars in the sky, or the 5,000 hippies playing Frisbee between truck beds slamming Colt 45 before dawn, something had told me we made it to Bonnaroo. And to think, it didn’t even start yet.

The Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival has been an annual occurrence in the rural wasteland of southern Tennessee for seven years now. What was originally geared as the ultimate in music festivals among jam-band fans, the festival has, especially in recent years, diminished its roots with the hippie culture it once focused on, or, more accurately, expanded its roster to appeal to a much larger demographic. The last time Generation went to Bonnaroo, we took on hippies with a baseball bat after a botched nitrous deal and threatened an earth girl with an imaginary knife; this time, we were here to drink booze and watch Metallica. What was originally a poor man in Birkenstock’s Woodstock has snowballed into a behemoth encompassing countless genres. They kept the drugs, too.

Around 70,000 made the trip down to Manchester this year, and in keeping with an annual tradition, the Wal-Mart on Hilsboro Boulevard has become the gateway for many on the way to ‘Roo. With the festival not officially opening its doors until Thursday morning, thousands have been congregating at the superstore down the road to prepare in whatever means seem fit. My plan was to catch two hours of sleep under the stars on my roof. It was either the frat boys’ stereo cranking Pink Floyd, or the cans of Sparks Plus, but this plan was almost instantly aborted. It would be another twenty-one hours before I would get to sleep, as under the Tennessean sun, it is near impossible to doze before dusk, even in only mid-June.

Once through the gates at Bonnaroo though, it only took about an hour for me to abandon any concern for my sanity or physical wellbeing. Soon, the only things that mattered were finding grilled cheese and a camp spot not on an incline. Almost all of the attendees opt for the complimentary camping in the countless acres bordering the festival’s perimeter, and if you snooze, you’ll never be able to find the cheap handmade glowsticks sold out of your nieghboor’s trunk before MGMT takes the stage. With tens of thousands arriving into Saturday morning, the blur of Thursday begins to elevate into a hallucinated walking slumber as the sun sets yet again, but this time I am not clutching the steering wheel through West Virginia highroads, but surrounded by a sea of strangers who will also not be showering for a week. Already embraced by a dehydration-induced passout and a few pounds of trailmix in my belly, Bonnaroo taught me in just a few hours that sucking it up is indeed the only solution. Be one with your surroundings. Or something lame like that. I could feel the dirty hippie osmosis working already.

If you’ve ever camped, you know that Mother Nature wakes you up before seven a.m. without taking your hangover or REM cycle into consideration. When the internal temperature of the tent cracks 100 and the drum circles draw in closer, it’s damn hard to sleep past six. Friday’s festivities began with a lackadaisical jaunt from the tent to catch Primus-frontman turned hippie hero Les Claypool, and by two a.m. had escalated into near paralysis of my lower extremities. Twenty hours on your feet will do that to anyone, but somewhere between the gaps, Metallica did nearly three hours of material that predated the decade and a torrential downpour ravished Manchester. James Hetfield barked his trademark “Eeeeeyaaaah” at me from twenty feet away during “Harvester of Sorrow,” and before the night ended, I not only won back respect for the metal giants, but was again face-to-face with Claypool at three in the morning, watching him smack an upright bass in a pig mask doing his best Tom Waits impression. I was practically sober, but I could have fooled myself.

It is easy to overwhelm yourself at a festival when you can’t walk five feet without finding a bargain falafel, discounted Crocs and delicious, delicious drugs, but with over one hundred acts in four days, it’s practically unavoidable. You need to find games to keep your mind active, before it turns into a mashed slop of extended guitar solos and Dead covers, which is all too common. On Saturday I could already feel my body begin to deteriorate; it had been a few days since I had a vegetable that wasn’t deep fried, and even longer since I was on a real bed. Friday night’s storm ravaged the air mattress almost unusable, but what kind of guy needs an air mattress anyway? I am a dude, right?

It took 700 miles and over a decade to make it happen, but Saturday was my fourth Pearl Jam show, and the first where I was actually within sight of the stage, thanks to five hours of standing around a field, two of which forced me to subject myself to the droning redundant croon of Jack Johnson. If I had a vagina, it would be soaked, but given my particular anatomy, I felt nothing but a sharp pain deep in my gonads as the sexy surfer tormented me from the main stage with his adult contempary shenanigans. I thought about B.B. King, who had just walked off that stage an hour earlier, sitting in his trailer backstage, with a fat cigar and Lucille on his lap, bitching about the white boy on stage with no soul. I could only hope my imagined scenario was remotely close to actual reality.

Hours later, I was barely twenty rows from the stage when Pearl Jam opened with Vs. outtake, “Hard to Imagine,” then right into Vitalogy’s “Corduroy.” Eddie Vedder led the venerable grunge outfit through two dozen more songs before closing with “Alive” and Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower.” When they finished hours later, everyone with taste went to bed and a few thousands unfortunate suckers waited for Kanye West to show up late and do a half-assed walkthrough of his magnum opus bullshit for a hour. Or so I hear. I have taste, so I went to bed. Kanye West doesn’t care about smart people.

There is a breaking point which differs person by person, when shower withdrawl and hatred for hippies finally begin to eat away at the brain. Mine was Sunday morning, but after the brief mental collapse, I began the ascending transformation into being as close as I ever will be to a hippie. My shorts were cargo, my boots were now Crocs, and my bud was dank, dank, diggity dank. I stumbled into a gigantic redbearded leviathan backstage that morning, and once I realized the visual hallucinations were the result of dirty contacts, I concluded that the beast was actually acclaimed comedian Brian Posehn, who was spotted earlier in the weekend headbanging to Metallica from the reserved rafters above the stage. “I’m so glad they didn’t play ‘Fuel’ or any of that gay shit,” said Posehn. Finally, a soulmate. In my sunburned brain we were having a conversation about Dio, farting and being awesome, but after a few bottles of Aquafina, I came to, underneath a tree, clutching a hemp anklet, sobbing cries of “Jerry, Jerry…” to a leftover hippie from generations past; his lack of a shirt and abundance of gray chest hair forced me to question whatever was left of my sexuality. It was going to be a long ride home.

A boy can only drink so many Bloody Mary’s made off the hood of a Chevy Cavalier, and coincidently, this statistic correlates with just how much of a scumbag he has become. By Saturday afternoon, I realized that there was only so much of Bonnaroo I could take without strapping plastic explosives to my chest and blowing Kanye, myself, and a few thousand college kids looking for life experience straight to kingdom come. I paid my respects to the waning career of Mr. Robert Plant by taking in two of his songs with Alison Krauss, and packed up the tent.

Have you ever wanted to get away? Not physically, but you know, really just…get away? Have you ever started talking like how I am writing right now? Yeah? Let me tell you, Bonnaroo just might be the place to be then. I lost myself, found myself, realized I was just high and was still standing in the same spot, and hell, I even got to catch some great comedians and bands. When I look back on 2008, I don’t think in terms of semesters or seasons. There was the stuff I saw before Metallica played “One” with gigantic fiery explosions twenty feet in front of my awe-struck face, and well, there was everything that came after.