Aunt Erin introduces the concept of rocking on, and the need for all to do so.

It's our very first guest post, Batman! With love from your Aunt Erin, here you have it:

Dear Batman,

I want you to know that your Mom just danced her ass off at a rock show on Saturday.
You were there too, but since I think you are perhaps more like a fish at this point, and
less like a thing that rocks out, I’m not sure how this first concert experience affected you,
if at all, but regardless, it is an important milestone.

Your Aunt K-chan was the real dancing champion of the evening, so much so that she
is concerned that she might need a warning label, if a sticker that says "may cause
excessive dancing" is the sort of thing that one must be warned about. (Other warnings
about your Aunt K-chan: May cause extreme snuggling and May cause blindness due
to sun-like energy, so you’d better wear your shades. Consider yourself warned.) But
your Mom kept up for all of her having a Batman growing in her body and yours truly,
Aunt Erin, made a decent accounting of herself for being the less physical sort. (I do
love to dance, but by the second encore, I wasn’t sure that I was going to be able to keep
standing up.)

Whether or not you were able to sense a certain amount of singing, dancing, jumping,
screaming, clapping, and being able to feel musical reverberations through your body, a
rock show is an important thing. Knowing about this particular experience is important
for two reasons. First, is that the experience is proof that your Mom is really a lot of fun.
This is something that you will forget from time to time because she’s your Mom and you
will have different complications in your relationship where you grow and change and
have conflict. But the knowledge that your mom rocked out with you before you were
even born is an image that might serve to remind you of the coolness of your parent in
times of need.

The thing that’s really important about going to a rock show, or finding some other way
to sing and dance and jump around and just generally exalt, is the joyous experience
of it. There you are in a room full of people all experiencing the powerful sensation of
rock ‘n’ roll, your senses trained on the band, feeding them your attention, feeding on the
sound and the lights and the antics and joining together with the rest of the audience in
shared experience. It is a powerful thing. When you bounce up and down in time to the
beat. When you raise up your arms and scream at the top of your lungs. When you keep
dancing even when your feet hurt. When the whole audience is singing along. This is
an experience where you know that you are part of something larger than yourself, part
of a great big singing and dancing musical organism, but also part of an unfathomably
huge singing and dancing universe. All that energy created by rocking out surrounds you
and connects you to all that there is to connect to. It doesn’t matter how precisely you
choose to think about the implications of this. All that matters is that you feel it and that
throughout your life you find ways to connect to it. Rock is love. (In as much as so many
things, and perhaps most of all just connecting, are love.) When you arrive, you are going
to have so many people who love you and who want to rock out with you. So rock on,
Batman.