A week before San Francisco’s 18th annual Outside Lands Music Festival is set to begin, my usual bike ride through Golden Gate Park is derailed. Massive shipping containers packed with festival supplies—food, water, and Cutwater Lime Margaritas™—are scattered across the park. Security guards send me on a detour all the way down to Ocean Beach, where the parking lot is completely closed off with yellow caution tape: more containers, more security, more Cutwater Lime Margaritas™️.

The rest of the city is also bracing for impact. An Inner Sunset resident listed their driveway as “VIP Parking” for $600 on Facebook Marketplace. Festival wristbands are reselling for up to $4,000. PG&E emails me a warning about “Peak Day Event Energy Use” for my Richmond apartment.

As it happens, these infrastructural endeavors are constructing an absurd alternate universe.

225,000 people attend Goldenvoice's Outside Lands every year, and this year is no different (75,000 per day!). They stop dancing only to refuel on uni smash burgers or herb-crusted lamb lavash or oxtail-loaded duck fat yucca fries. They pause between sets to thumb through vintage leather jackets at pop-up thrift shops, or to pose inside a photo booth, and it's a glorious sight to behold.

This year, there's music, there's alcohol, there's dancing, there’s so much pain in the world but not on this freezing-cold patch of grass. There’s Daniel Lurie in skinny jeans watching Geese. There are teenagers in oversized hoodies and short-shorts, stumbling to find their friends with dying cell phones and Smirnoff shooters stuffed into their boots. There are ENDLESS Cutwater Lime Margaritas™.

Outside Lands feels strange because it is strange. The lineup, featuring 140 artists from every genre under the sun, has no discernible theme. Its randomness is why it draws such a large crowd, bringing Marina moms, teenage punks, tech bros, frat guys, and Conan O'Brien (who was spotted with his daughter Neve, headbanging to wet leg) together under Karl the Fog.

The festival grounds are beautifully disorienting. The stages and production infrastructure render the space completely unrecognizable from the park I bike, walk, or run through almost every day. Even more confusingly, it’s wildly well-organized, with water stations and medical tents at every turn. I never wait for longer than three minutes to use the bathroom.

By nightfall, bedazzled thongs are falling from the sky. Charli xcx is headlining the main stage. She’s looking really hot, her set design is fantastic, her band is electric, she’s doing a whole Leather-Jacket-Rock-and-Roll-Black-and-White-1975 thing, complete with pyrotechnics, backup dancers, and outfit changes. Daniel Lurie and Conan O’Brien are presumably together somewhere in the VIP section, belting "Girl, So Confusing," clutching canned cocktails.

By Monday morning, the stages come down, the shipping containers disappear, and Golden Gate Park slowly returns to the version of itself that I know and love. The teenagers: home to their parents' houses. The hungover tech bros: logged back in to their remote jobs. Daniel Lurie: back to mayoral duties. For three days, though, an absurd parallel universe existed in the heart of Golden Gate Park; all of its inhabitants bound together by some universal dedication to something greater—perhaps music; perhaps community; perhaps toughing out the cold. Maybe just a great Cutwater Lime Margarita™️.

Either way, I'll be here next year, waiting for that strange portal to open again.