Six Tips for Blind Moshing

And the stories behind my hard-won wisdom

Find the podcast version of this post here.

Blind people do many things sighted people think we shouldn’t. Or, more accurately, we do many things sighted people believe, in abject horror, put us and others at imminent risk of death. We ride bikes alone. We hike mountain ridges alone. We surf. One of us climbed Mount Everest.

And sure, I, personally, have not done any of those things. I’m using the royal “we.” The very royal “we.” The divinely-appointed, despotic “we.”

But I have, in our grand tradition, done my fair share of things sighted people would at least deem inadvisable. Chief among them is the considerable time I spent in mosh pits at punk shows as a teenager and twenty-something.

I learned a lot from these experiences, and I now present my six most important pieces of advice for blind and low-vision people who want to mosh, and perhaps, cause some sighted people deep concern.

A quick note: currently, I am nearly completely blind. There is almost nothing I can use my vision for. And that’s in the “good” eye. The other eye is prosthetic, which isn’t good for anything except popping it out and absolutely terrifying people who didn’t know I have a prosthetic eye. But at the point in my life I was regularly going to these concerts, I had some useable vision. A very small amount. My prescription was a hefty +15, and it got me nowhere near 20/20. If you’re unfamiliar with these numbers, basically picture a guy with two snow globes on his face. Plus, he has a prosthesis, so one snow globe is decorative.

The subject of glasses brings me to my first piece of advice.