Honestly, I Wish I Went To Fyre Festival

So I watched the Hulu Fyre Fest documentary last night and it wasn’t quite as good as I wanted it to be, but pretty good. Maybe I was so fascinated by the whole thing and followed it more closely than most, but I didn’t find the documentary had much new information or anything particularly revelatory. There were a few tidbits like how they ordered 2 million dollars of alcohol from America to the Bahamas without considering the fact that the Bahamas had a 45% import tax on liquor, essentially making it a 3 million dollar order, and how they just lost the keys for two million dollars worth of houses because they were all in the same box, but not a ton. Or maybe I wasn’t overly impressed because of the fact that I hated almost everyone they interviewed so it made it harder to hate Billy McFarland, the sociopath scam artist who ran the whole thing and is in jail, with as much passion as I should, but most of the people sucked almost as much as he does (aside from Delroy, who was the man). I thought PR, marketing, and social media came out looking worse than McFarland did because so many people knew this was a failure and a fraud but they just laughed about it and kept plugging along anyway, like the FuckJerry people (who Hulu makes a point to point out that they produced the Netflix one, so I’m sure they’ll look great it in). I don’t want to give away too much so you should watch it.

Anyway, the point of this blog is that the whole time I couldn’t help but think “goddamn I wish I went to Fyre Festival.” I don’t mean that I wish I went to the festival they pretended was going to happen in order to defraud thousands of people, that would be my hell, I mean I wish I went to the FEMA scene that actually happened. I’m sure some of it’s due to my job and I wouldn’t be lamenting the fact that I didn’t get to live out a Survivor challenge if I was an accountant, but all I saw in the Red Cross commercial b-roll they showed of Fyre Island was great content. Still though, I don’t think it would’ve been just about the retweets. I really, truly wish I went to this festival with my friends.

Think of all your best stories you and your buddies tell. How many of them are about the time the AirBnb was pristine or the hotel couldn’t have been nicer and the flights were flawless and it was just an all around great trip? Zero. If Fyre Festival went perfectly then it’s something you put up a few Instagrams about and talk about for a week or two then go on with your life because there are ten million festivals and no one gives a fuck that you went to one. But if you went to Fyre Festival? You’re immediately one of the most interesting people in a room and everyone wants to hear your story.

There’s just something fun about living chaos with your friends. It’s why everyone refers to the time they were just out of college and dirt poor as “the good ol days,” because it was a bonding experience. It made you and your friends the locker room that “no one believed in” and provides that “us against the world” mentality that everyone yearns for. When I’m with friends we don’t talk about anything that’s happened in the last ten years. We talk about going to Toronto for an OAR concert with $200 between us, leaving Atlantis in the Bahamas and trying to buy drugs, or when we thought we were gonna get killed by guerillas in El Salvador, or particularly cold ski days, or anything that wasn’t ideal in the moment. No good stories come from good scenarios, so Fyre Fest would be the greatest story you ever told. You got to live out a real life disaster scene and come out the other side, that’s the best case scenario for a vacation.

Plus, I mean there was three million dollars of alcohol randomly strewn about on pallets. If you can’t have fun with that while in the Bahamas you’re probably not a very fun person. Things are so awful and apocalyptic that you can’t help but laugh and you’ve got an outrageous amount of booze at your fingertips, couldn’t have been that bad.