Although it can definitely seem weird to someone who has been pretty obsessed with the music for 20 years or more, I think it is only natural to have periods where one doesn't crave it or need it as much. All the enjoyment and benefits and memories of the thousands of hours of listening, traveling, attending shows, writing, coding, creating art, learning and playing the songs, and myriad other phish-related activities is still there, practically ingrained in your DNA at this point.

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Its disheartening to see such a backlash to simply sharing this experience. It would be one thing to comment on or disagree with the sentiment in a rational way, but to automatically infer that one is jaded and negative because they are in a phase where they are not listening to a ton of phish is really closed-minded.

I guess by definition we have a community that includes some of the most obsessed fans out there. By contrast, one of the things that I always found attractive about the phish community is the open-mindedness of most fans - the ability and willingness to go outside a comfort zone, in terms of both music, culture, ideas, lifestyle.

But, oddly, the cross-sections of fans that spend a ton of time on message boards seems to contain its own little subset of people that are really locked into their own mindset, unwilling to entertain the perspective of others, always needing to prove their knowledge or correctness. (Generally about something that is inherently subjective, nonetheless.) Bunch of weird birds, and not necessarily that fun to interact with. How do you really respond to someone that wants to tell you that the way you partake in recreation is wrong? Either flame or ignore. There's no constructive, interesting way to engage with someone like that.

Even worse, virtually inexplicable to me, is the meta-discussion questioning whether this is an appropriate topic of discussion. As a blog post. On a phish website. "Admin attention whoring?" That is about as ignorant, inaccurate, and unnecessarily mean-spirited comment as I've seen on this site. "Why is this on the front page?" Um, well, because its a blog, about phish, and one of the functions of the site is to post thoughts about phish. We'd use it more, but for the fact that more often than not, people would rather discuss things like whether the blogger is an attention whore as opposed to the thoughts presented. Or reveal their own insecurity and defensiveness by attacking and insulting anyone who experiences phish differently than they do.

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Personally, I haven't listened to hardly any 3.0 since January. Mainly because I want this tour to sound fresh when it hits my earholes in a month. But I'm also not able to hit many shows at all - maybe one or two. And I'm also ok with it. I'd rather go to more, but there are other obligations and responsibilities. C'est la vie. Am I a shitty fan because I am not pitching a fit or blowing off my family? (...which I may or may not have done repeatedly over the years...) Am I sucking the energy an life out of the community due to my lack of obsession? That's what some of you make it sound like. And I'm sorry you feel that way, but moreover I pity your inability to acknowledge an experience different than your own.

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Thank you to those of you that are able to comment on and discuss the ideas in the original post.