I don’t even know where to begin with this…
Cari and I saw the Eagles at the Sphere in Vegas on Saturday night. (Incredible show. You all know how much I love them.) Our seats were down on the floor, 9th row — great spot to see the band’s faces up close, but TBH not the best spot to see the amazing visuals. You had to really lean back and look up to get the full effect.
During “Boys of Summer,” the visuals show a man and woman swimming romantically underwater behind/above the band. I’d seen a brief clip of this before the show, so I kinda knew what to expect.
And then I leaned back and looked up.
I’ll get back to that in a moment. But let me turn the clock back a couple years.
If you saw my post two years ago after my accident in Maui, here’s how I described it:
There’s a camera shot you’ll see in most movies or TV shows that have a drowning scene: The camera is in the water, pointed up toward the sky above. You see the drowning person’s POV as they presumably look toward the air that they need to survive. It might be a few inches away or many feet, but the point is to show the desperate distance between where they are and where they need to be.
Speaking from real-life experience, that camera angle is incredibly realistic.
On Sept. 24, 2022, I was lying on my back on Kaanapali Beach in Maui with probably six inches of water above me, unable to breathe and, worse, unable to move. I remember looking up, my head on the sand, and seeing the gorgeous blue sky above the water, desperate to get one more breath of that fresh Hawaiian air. But the six inches of water felt like a mile, and I felt like I’d taken my last breath on earth.
That image — looking up through the ocean water to the blue sky and sun — has been stuck in my head ever since. On several occasions, I’ve tried to get Dall-E, ChatGPT, and other AI image tools to recreate it. They never quite got it right. I remember sending Cari one of the images and saying, “I know this is kinda morbid, but this is kinda-sorta what it looked like when I was about to die.” (She agreed that it was morbid so I didn’t send her any more! 😅)
But morbid or not, I’ve NEVER been able to get that image out of my head. There’s no way to forget that moment. When I think of that whole day, it’s always the first thing that I see.
So, back to Saturday night when I was enjoying live music from a band I love with the woman I love in an incredible venue, and all of a sudden I look up to the top of the Sphere.
My eyes got wide, I stopped singing, and my mouth opened wide. After a few seconds, I leaned into Cari, pointed up, and said, “That’s EXACTLY what it looked like.”
I spent the rest of the song with my eyes glued straight up. It took me right back to that moment. By the end of the song, I was in tears and an absolute wreck.
But here’s the crazy part: It’s been really good from a mental health angle! I don’t know how to explain it, but seeing something that looked exactly like what I saw has somehow made it less painful.
It’s like finally I don’t have to try to create a visual memory of it in my head, or with some AI image generator. I SAW IT AGAIN in the setting of one of my all-time favorite songs, with Cari right there, a fave band, etc.
The only bad thing…I was so frozen in the moment that I didn’t get any photos or videos of it myself. 😕
So this morning, I joined an Eagles/Sphere Facebook group and politely asked if anyone had any photos or video of the top of the Sphere when the swimmers were on screen. Holy crap, people sent me some GREAT stuff and I got all emotional again looking at the pics and videos. That’s where I got the photos in this post.
As Don Henley said earlier in the show, quoting Plato, “music is medicine.”
