Retard Of The Year Award

Seeing as how the original lineup of Dinosaur Jr. recently reuninted to go out on a concert tour, I thought it would be a good time to recount how a Dinosaur Jr. concert led me to be named Retard of the Year for 2003.

On November 5, 1994, a friend and I attended a Dinosaur Jr. concert at The Riviera Theater in Chicago. A good time was had by all.

A number of months later, I went into a local record store and noticed that they were selling a number of Frank Kozik silkscreen concert posters. I've always enjoyed Kozik's work, so I decided to pick one up. Looking through the posters, the only band represented that I had ever heard of was Dinosaur Jr. So, I purchased that poster (the one pictured above) for the bargain price of $12. (To see what it sells for now, click here.) Because this was a legitimate piece of art (albeit, a very ugly piece), signed and numbered by Kozik himself, I framed it and hung it on my wall. And, regardless of where I've lived or what else has been hanging on the walls, this poster has always been hanging on my wall.

Fast forward to 2003. That poster is still hanging on my wall. One day, I just happened to glance at the poster, and actually looked at it for the first time in my life. The poster advertises a concert for Dinosaur Jr., Come, and Juned. "Hey, I went to a Dinosaur Jr., Come, and Juned concert once!" The poster claims the concert was on November 6 at The Metro in Chicago. "Hey, the concert I went to was on November 5 at The Riviera in Chicago!" After having had this poster on my wall for eight years, it finally dawned on me that not only had I been to a show on this tour, but I had been to the one the day before the one advertised on the poster. An almost totally random purchase that I based on nothing but preference in bands had turned up a poster for a concert that I had missed by one day. An incredible statistical anomaly, and one my subconscious mind probably realized right off the bat, but took the rest of my brain eight years to get the joke. And, hence, I was crowned Retard of the Year in 2003, for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Incredible Oversight (and probably, retroactively, for the previous eight years I had failed to notice this). Way to go, Hero!!