Wisconsin, Los Dells Festival 2019

Los Dells festival is a Latino festival that is celebrated during the labor day weekend. Around 35 different artists attend this festival; including artist like Ozuna, Logic, Bad Bunny, Carlos Vives, T3r Elemento, and Natalia Lafourcade among other great artists. I attended this festival last year (2019) and it was crazy to the point that I had a realization of my own mortality, and this is how it happened..

One week after starting school last semester I went to Los Dells Festival, which is a Latin music and arts festival. I remember we arrived there on a Friday night and we were not allowed to go to the camping site that night, so my friend German and I had to sleep in the car. After a night where I barely slept because the car was cold and uncomfortable, we woke up at 6 AM. The camping site didn’t open until 8 AM, so we decided to go to the gas station to get a coffee and something to eat. One we were at the gas station we bought like twenty 1 liter cups because our alcoholic beverages were all in glass bottles and the security on the camping site had said that glass wasn’t allowed in the camping site, but we didn’t care and we hid all the glasses in different parts of the car. We only had the 1-liter cups in case they found any of the bottles, so that way they wouldn’t take any of our alcohol. At 8 AM we finally got to the camping site and we started setting up our tent; it didn’t take long. After we finished setting up our tent, we started making “ceviche”, which was the only food we had for the next two days. Since it was only around 10 AM we started drinking light by drinking “caguamas” (32 oz beer), we also had tequila, but I thought it was too early to get drunk, which is ironic because after the first caguama my body wanted tequila and after the first sip of tequila everything seemed more beautiful; German and I went into the forest to enjoy the view while we were drinking tequila.

Back at our tent, we saw some friends that we had just met last night, and they invited us over to their tent. When we arrived at their tent German and I were out of tequila, we had drank a whole bottle of tequila in less than half an hour, man I was feeling good, I was having such a good time. Moments later I see that the other guys were taking shots of Bacardi and vaping, suddenly they offer me a shot, which I rejected because I hate shots, but my friend German kept yelling at me “culo si no, culo si no” (You a pussy if you don’t), so I had to take a shot even though I hate Bacardi. Not only did they offer me a shot, but they also gave me this thing, which they were using to smoke, they said that it had marijuana liquid in it instead of nicotine. I had never tried it before, but I was like why not? I’m already feeling wasted and I thought it wasn’t going to have much of an effect on me. Well turns out I was completely wrong about it, that shit put me in another world, another dimension, I didn’t know if I should’ve been enjoying it or if I should’ve been worrying about my life. I was seeing people in fractions as if my eyes were a camera and they were taking a picture every time I blinked, I could hear people voices but I couldn’t understand shit of what they were saying, so whenever someone talked to me I would just look at them and smile. At some point German and I ended up in our tent eating ceviche.

After eating all the ceviche German went to sleep and I couldn’t tell if he was still breathing. I tried going to sleep but I couldn’t, I had so many things going on in my mind that they wouldn’t let me close my eyes. I was thinking about what happens after we die. Does our soul go somewhere? Do we have a soul? Do we just die and that’s it? No purpose? Nothing special? Those questions were going through my mind, again and again, trying to figure out what really happens to us when we die or if there is any purpose for us here on earth. I couldn’t come up with a solid answer, I just made different scenarios with different outcomes in my head, which made it worse because I couldn’t think of anything else and it was starting to freak me out. I had never thought about life and how suddenly it could end and that there is the option that I will never remember anything of what I lived, that there is no other chance of living another life, after we die is done, we just turn into dust, no reincarnation, no heaven, no hell, just a memory in other people’s minds.

Why was I thinking about that? maybe it was because school had just started and I was scared of what to expect, maybe I was missing my family or especially a person, or maybe it was just because I was super wasted, I don’t know, but it certainly made me appreciate life more. Appreciate more the little moments of happiness or even the moments where I don’t feel well because it’s possible that we only have a chance to live life.