Skeletonwitch & chill

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Skeletonwitch & Iron Reagan kicked off their 2016 tour here in Asheville, North Carolina at a venue not far from where I live called The Mothlight.
At the time I was recovering from the first of two spinal surgeries to remove a rare form of central nervous system cancer that had been found growing near my tailbone.
Physically, I'd tolerated the resection well, and had been healing up for going on a month.
After some coaxing, my sweetie had agreed that my body was sufficiently un-fragile enough to go out and see some live music.
Two conditions.
No mosh pit.
No exceptions.
It'd been three weeks since I'd left the house and I was literally still on crutches, so... easy enough, right?
Done & done.
This show was clearly going to sell out so I stopped by Harvest Records the week before to pick up three tickets. One for my sweetie, one for myself, and one for my buddy Paul who was going to be in town from DC on a work trip that next weekend.
Paul & I are friends from Minneapolis, Minnesota - circa 2006/7ish - and had a long track record late nights, wild parties, and reckless pit shenanigans.
See, I am a kinda big dude - 6'3", 230 - and Paul is a kinda small dude - 5'6", buck-twenty. The functional result of this mass disparity means that Paul becomes highly pick-up-able & only slightly less highly toss-able in a tightly-packed, high-velocity circle pit.
There was a particular maneuver we'd spontaneously concocted - possibly at a Daughters show - on the floor of Cedar-Riverside's now defunct Triple Rock Social Club that we'd loosely dubbed "The Hamster Wheel".

Here's the format.

While on opposite sides of a circle pit Paul & I would lock eyes then take off across the center, directly towards one another. I'd come in low & solid and right before impact Paul would superman-leap as hard as he could towards an invisible point a foot over my head. If we'd timed it right, I'd grab the back of Paul's knees with one hand as they hit my shoulder. His momentum would take his whole torso down past my butt, where - upside down - he could grab my other hand from the front, get pulled through my legs all the way back to upright, then launched across the circle to the side that he'd started on.
Like a hamster's wheel goin' around, I guess?
I'm not clear how/why we derived the nomenclature.
For a moment in time it became like our own, personal, slightly more acrobatic & silly Wall of Death.

Anyway.

Paul hit town the afternoon of the show. I'd been off the kind of post-surgery pain killers you don't want to mix with alcohol for an, uhh, "responsible" amount of time so we'd started puttin' back beers at my place right outta the gate. Talk turned to bands we'd seen together and the wild Minneapolis times spent getting obliterated, riding bikes, breaking into shit, destroying private property, etc.
The Mothlight is only a few blocks from my house and I'd been getting pretty good with the gimp-sticks so as door time approached we set out on foot towards the venue.
At this point maybe you're thinking, "Uh-oh. Spinal-crutch-boy with a buzz on & his lil' bad-influence buddy are staggering towards a thrashin'. Have fun apologizing to your girlfriend for breaking that very reasonable promise - and probably your back - at the emergency room later, ya jabronis."
And if our timing had been slightly different you'd be right.
But instead of ending our night in the ER, we began it by running into IR.
As we slowly traversed the Haywood Road intersection by The Brew Pump we crossed paths with a crew of dudes who had just exited the Westville Pub.
It was Iron Reagan's Tony Foresta & Phil Hall with a couple other thrash guys.
I say what's up, and Tony replies with something like,
"Shit man, dudes are usually on crutches AFTER our show, you coming tonight?"
I say yeah, heard it's sold out, we're limping to the spot right now.
"Right on, don't do anything fuckin' stupid and we'll get drunk and watch Skeletonwitch at the bar."
They take off down the block at normal walking speed and my sweetie gives me a look like, "See dumb-dumb? Even Foresta thinks you gotta keep it chill tonight."
So that's what we did.
Well, Paul ran the gauntlet & crowd surfed, as one does.
But I just hung with buddies and enjoyed the shit out of the IR set without placing myself in harm's way.
And sure as shit we ended up raising a glass to Tony from across the bar during Skeletonwitch.
Promise to girlfriend: kept.
What a guy.