"The Surreal Boom of the Budokan Stadium"

The sun had fought a fierce struggle that day but now lay deceased and conquered.
There were madmen everywhere. This was a time of celebration. "Rejoice! The sun lies dead!" the madmen sang and shouted. Underneath their feet, the grass shimmered with tears of dew. One of the madmen approached and said to me "You know how they say that you can't truly be mad if you know yourself to be mad? That is not true. That is NOT true. Madness... Madness is knowing you're mad and not wanting to have it any other way." Mulling his words, I could help but point out: "But that's circular..." Alas, the madman was mad, and had already wandered off, suddenly preoccupied with devising way to shoot fire into the sky. "Rejoice! The sun lies dead! And what better blasphemy than to make our own sun?"

Onstage, the madmen's priests preached their gospel. The guitarist painted the sky with bright blues and reds, the bassist denied the existence of contradictions, and the singer spoke of blindmen in the new dark. Those who before we had thought crippled would now become shepherds. The blindmen who had long navigated the seas of dark had been busy making maps. Making maps for those of us who would later come. For those of us who still played in the sun's playpen. Those of us who had not yet seen that the playpen was a prison.