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Just try cramming more live music into a weekend. (I know it can be done, but it's definitely a special case.)

Start off Thursday with the Swim opening for Ted Leo & The Pharmacists. Watch your friends on stage opening for one of their heroes. Then enjoy the fantastic, fast and frenetic songs of one of rock's great unheralded songwriters.

Chill at home Friday before heading out to catch another of the rare Fourkiller Flats shows. Wish you had a ride home, knowing that whiskey drinking is the most effective and appropriate way to absorb the wailing, gravely twang of the Flats. Listen to mostly unrecorded songs, including one in all likelihood played for the first time live, thinking all the while that it's definitely time for a new album (right, gentlemen?).

Decide that a bright and beautiful Saturday in the mid-80s is perfect for sitting in the park, celebrating a used book store that's not only survived for 30 years, but grown and grown and grown and inevitably become an integral part of your own life. Settle in with a chicken quesadilla on a blanket front and center while a bunch of old blues session players crank out pitch-perfect, passionate tunes.

Then let Tucson's favorite sons and their best mariachi friends let loose with what must be about the best of the dozen or so shows of theirs you've taken in. Remember how you first saw Calexico with maybe a couple hundred people stuffed into an art gallery by the railroad tracks, must've been 1999 or 2000. Remember how they seemed to have a pedal for the passing train, and how they set the room on fire. Remember how on three or four albums since those same musicians captured a hell of a lot more attention and without a doubt became one of the world's greatest bands. Sit in anticipation for a particular song, a Bob Dylan cover you'd been soaking in for months, with several different bootleg recordings, before finally hearing them back Willie Nelson on "Senor." Celebrate as the trumpets bellow loud and mysterious. Shimmy and sway as the show stretches many songs and songs and songs afterwards. Depart with a poster and autographs, and the knowledge that such musical moments are priceless.

Let Sunday evolve slowly, but make sure to head downtown in time to catch the Skeletor parade. Mosey from there on over to the Ween show. Marvel at how packed the Rialto Theatre is, betting that none of the dozens of shoes you've seen there in the past several years had more people. Rock out with one of the strangest bands around. Ponder how despite never being fully joking or fully serious they've developed such a passionate following. Wish you knew a few more of their songs other than the Mollusk album.

Practically stagger out of the show, pausing to take in the painted masses and assorted weirdos passing by, hell-bent on some damn mischief or another. Let the fading crowd take over your thoughts, and provide the cinematic background for reflection on a weekend full of energy and curveball vitality and stupifying humanity, and sounds, wonderfully delivered sounds, that lodge themselves deep, as they should, offering continual refuge in the coming days and weeks from the numbing work and tasks that exist apart from the nights and the bands and the revelry and the nirvana of a well-orchestrated weekend.

Celebrate it all, and wait for the next round...