(I may be paranoid, but not an android)

Everyone kept asking me: "Are you going to cry tonight?"

One hot summer night in 2001 when we were all sunburned and joyriding in downtown Chicago because someone thought we were too old to pick up chicks in the suburbs, I noticed a huge crowd at Grant Park and rolled down my window out of curiosity and heard something I would never forget. You know how you don't often recognize a particular event as a turning point in your life until after the fact, when you can look back and see the precise moment everything changed? But once in a while the turning point is just so big and obvious that you can't miss it?

That was me, sitting in the backseat of a Honda, falling deeply in love with the hypnotic bassline of some song. One minute I'm belching and carefree and cracking jokes with my buddies, the next minute I'm stunned silent, wide-eyed and spellbound. "Yo... what is that?" I kept asking everyone in the car, and someone eventually replied, "I think it's that band that did Creep."

Over the next few years, I couldn't help but become a complete Radiohead-head. I had it so bad for them. Every song from every album was downloaded, including every b-side, every cover song, every remix. Hours were spent perusing all of their fansites. Purposely, I started making less sense when I talked. My default AIM away messages went from "I am away from my computer right now" to "We've got heads on sticks, you've got ventriloquists."

To this day, I still don't understand my intense fascination for Radiohead. It doesn't really make sense on paper. I mean, I grew up on gangsta rap. And it has nothing to do with the fact that they produce the best guitar sound in the world, or that Thom Yorke's unlikely charisma is so affecting, or that even with their impressive body of work they still continue to innovate and push the envelope. I just "get" them, more than even most fans I think. There's something haunting and exhilarating about the music they make, something so special that I've been sitting here staring at this very sentence for ten minutes now, and I still can't come up with words that would do them any justice.

Friday night I finally saw them play live after all of these years, and even though for about five hours it was too hot and I was too close to too many filthy, sweaty strangers, I'm pretty sure it was the greatest, most complete night of my life. Most of the other 75,000 people that were there might have declared the same thing too, the way they went absolutely nuts when Radiohead started playing the song that personally started it all for me, the one I heard in the backseat of my friend's car almost a decade ago: "The National Anthem".

It's hard to pick out the most memorable moment of the set -- although I need to mention how spectacularly eerie "Paranoid Android" got during the mellow third act of the song when everyone slowly swayed their arms in the sky and out of nowhere this cloudy haze somehow enveloped all of us, or the chills everyone felt when Thom Yorke's falsetto broke our hearts with "House of Cards" -- but the best part of the show was when they played "Fake Plastic Trees". I've never been a huge fan of that song, but listening to it live has changed everything for me once again, and I'm not sure how exactly to describe the emotion I was feeling but the best I can do is tell you that I felt this strange sort of pressure on my chest.

There were no tears of happiness, but my sister told me I was close.

Near the end of the song these fireworks at the Field Museum started going off, which surprisingly wasn't distracting at all; somehow, it perfectly enhanced the climax. Later I would find out that it was totally unrelated to the concert and wasn't supposed to synch up to anything at all, which I thought was an amazing coincidence. I couldn't get over how perfect the moment and moments were. Everything was just so aligned, so symmetrical. Everything was in its right place.