Commence le festival!

In some respects, going to a festival concert is like trekking across a barren desert: If you don’t plan ahead and stock up on provisions, you’ll end up a miserable mess of unsatisfied human impulses. The same can be said for brothels, but nevermind that for now.

To be clear, a festival concert is different from your standard, run-of-the-mill rock concert. A typical rock concert, if there’s an opening band, usually lasts about three hours max – the length of an epic historical movie, or the time it takes John Kerry to finish a sentence. Depending on how far you’re willing to travel for this three-hour show, the whole experience eats up a good chunk of the evening and sets you back about 75 bucks. Unless you’ve opted for concert beer, in which case you may need to borrow against your 401K.

A festival concert is a different beast. As the name implies, it devours vast stretches of time, and in some ways feels like a bazaar on an alien planet, where the hours ooze by in un-Earthlike ways, and hanging beads on kiosk displays hide the faces of exotic creatures. In the festival’s case, these creatures are humans who are slowly being consumed by flaming skull tattoos and metal implements that give their heads the light-refracting qualities of misshapen disco balls. Whether on Earth or Tatooine, chances are they’ll charge you 80 clams for a plastic necklace.

With myriad vendors, kiosks, and peddlers hawking merchandise, making one’s way from the venue’s entrance to the main stage can be a gauntlet of temptation. This is where it pays to have experience at these things. The T-shirts, the trinkets, the food – all of it is ridiculously overpriced, and it’s sold mostly to those tragic souls who are caught unprepared. Many of these unwitting concert-goers have the shell-shocked expressions of dying squirrels. (Not that I’ve ever stopped to examine the face of a dying squirrel. That would be creepy.)

Anyway, the best way to escape these things with one’s wallet intact is to plan ahead – and more importantly, to eat ahead.

Because food is really where they screw you to the wall. Unless you’re a camel, chances are you can’t go more than a few hours comfortably without consuming something. That’s why people continue to eat Snickers bare despite the fact that they’ll cause someone’s waistline to blow up faster than a dying star. In a festival situation, the trick is to locate something beforehand that resembles actual nutritious food, and then eat so much of it that the ensuing stomach cramps are only marginally preferable to death.

Just last week, I journeyed to the lush mountains of New Hampshire to attend a day-long concert in the middle of the woods. Because of the venue’s remote location – and the inflated food prices sure to be found within – a buddy and I stopped at a small general store on the border, where we grabbed enough provisions to see an 18th Century army through a merciless winter. After choking back a sub the size of a toddler, we split a box of chicken and potato wedges, the latter being so shockingly large that had the potato been whole, it could have sunk a medium-sized fishing vessel. I felt like I was having Thanksgiving dinner at Ted Nugent’s house.

If all that sounds a bit disgusting, it’s because it was a bit disgusting. But it also lasted us throughout the evening, and by the time the headliner took the stage, the miracle of digestion had made it possible for us to walk to our seats without leaning on each other for support. The resulting calories gave us the energy to sustain the self-punishment of headbanging through squealing guitar solos. That’s really all you can expect from nourishment, aside from the minor detail of continued living.

It was thanks to this planning that we were able to avoid the inflated food prices of in-house vendors, freeing up those funds for other purposes, like skydiving lessons or black tar heroin.

But that unfortunately does nothing about the price gouging itself, which is prohibitive to crampless eating. You see this kind of gouging elsewhere. Grocers will sometimes raise the price of bread and milk before a natural disaster, for example; and you’ll sometimes see a spike in air conditioner prices right before a heat wave, which is why I always buy mine while my ankles are still wet from snow-encrusted tube socks. But only at festival concerts, and in a few other scenarios, can you expect to pay eight bucks for a beer, six bucks for a water, and five hard-earned greenbacks for one of those giant pretzels the size of steering wheels. The pretzels sounds like a good deal until you realize its marble-sized salt granules just make you thirsty for the six-dollar water.

Only a prolonged mass boycott could change things, but that seems unlikely, given that most music fans don’t approach festivals like a week in the wilderness.

And so the price-conscious soldier on, with potato wedges that are hard to lift without assistance from a professional wrestler. It’s not the ideal system, but it’s survival. Daniel Boone would be proud.

Maybe. Probably not.