It’s Sunday afternoon.  You’re sitting on your back patio, settling into the next chapter of your 955-page book, and sipping a glass of water, when you get a text message that ruins your whole afternoon: “Hey you heading down to HSBG?”.

At first glance, this may seem like anything but an afternoon-ruining message.  A good friend of yours has just invited you to join the festivities at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in Golden Gate Park.  But as you consider your current state of being, envision the event in motion, and imagine the journey required to get there, you realize you have suddenly come down with a serious case of San Francisco’s particularly virulent illness: Festival Guilt.

Festival Guilt can be associated with any one of San Francisco’s numerous fantastic festivals.  There’s the world-famous Pride Parade, the boisterous and costumed Bay to Breakers, the grimy and pungent Haight Street Fair, the pastoral Stern Grove Music Festival, and of course Mission’s Carnival.  But perhaps the strongest strand of Festival Guilt is associated with the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival—a three-day celebration of bluegrass, blues, folk, indie rock, and country music that draws the likes of Elvis Costello, Emmylou Harris, and MC Hammer.

All one has to do to contract festival guilt is:

1. be aware of the festival

2. be friends on Facebook with one or more attendees of the festival

3. not attend the festival

What really packs the guilt in HSBG is the fact that it’s free.  A typical raving description may go something like this: “Oh my god it’s like the GREATEST festival ever.  There’s like six different stages all with AMAZING bands playing all afternoon and everybody just brings beer and blankets and you can just wander from stage to stage and dance and drink and mingle and it goes Friday, Saturday, and Sunday afternoon and it’s FREE!”

Photo of a comfortable red couch

Your couch. A common place to contract Festival Guilt.

But here you are on a comfortable chair about four miles and four hundred feet of elevation change away from the site of said festival.  You’ve had a long week and last night you went out with your friends.  Or maybe you didn’t have such a long week—maybe you’re unemployed.  And maybe you didn’t even go out—you stayed home and watched a movie with your roommate.  But you’re kind of tired anyway and you just don’t FEEL like it.  You’d have to take two buses or ride your bike over the hill and then find your way down to the park and call your friends over and over until they pick up and shout at them over the din to discover at which stage and in which section of the crowd they’ve eked out a few square feet of territory.  Then you’d have to elbow your way through teenagers and hippies and families with dogs and children, hopping wildly over blankets and bundles, tip-toeing along narrow strips of grass and avoiding broken bottles until finally reaching your group in the midst of the gyrating masses.

Sadly, no amount of excuses will assuage the Festival Guilt once it has taken hold.  The fact is you really like that one band that’s playing and you know that once you get there you’ll probably have a really good time and there are likely a whole lot of single ladies there that you should be meeting.  And you know that everybody there will tell you how amazing the festival was and how it was basically the highlight of their year.  And it’s free, damnit.

The best way to deal with Festival Guilt is to avoid contracting it in the first place: don’t accept free newspapers, avoid local blogs like the plague, and try to plan lots of excursions.  Because no matter how many weekends you spend in the city, no matter how many invitations you accept and meet-ups you organize, somewhere, in some corner or micro-neighborhood of San Francisco, an unbelievably fun, enriching, and free festival will be taking place without you.