When asked to cover the Guns N' Roses "Not In This Lifetime" semi-reunion tour, I protested for like 10 minutes. Sure there was a moment in 6th grade when I snake-danced on the couch to "Sweet Child O' Mine," but I've never had strong feelings about the divisive band. Hadn't John Jeremiah Sullivan already written everything there was to write about Axl et al? And wasn't there some kind of play I was supposed to be seeing? Some book to read instead?

But the second my editor told me there was a "VIP Costco Cardmembers Lounge," I grabbed the nearest bandana and headed out the door. And so I went to CenturyLink Field. And it was fucking crazy. Here's what happened:

• If you think they didn't have individually wrapped "Welcome to the Jungle" frosted shortbread cookies in the Costco Cardmembers Lounge then you are out of your damn mind. Other things in the room: Photographs from a 1991 Guns 'N' Roses show. (Slam dunk on that Olympics tie-in, Citi Bank and Costco, official sponsors of the VIP experience.) There were also garish fuchsia chairs that looked like the inside of snake mouths, a spray-on tattoo professional, a truly wonderful service staff offering platters of lukewarm sliders and little boats of kale salad, and a photo booth experience.

• I tried to smoke a cigarette on the balcony overlooking the stadium while Alice in Chains played "The Rooster," but I got halfway through and chickened out. (New lead singer for AiC, William DuVall, does a fine job filling in.)

• As a functionary in the Costco Cardmembers Lounge was explaining to my friend and I that the bartender had called "last call" twenty minutes ago, a group of blonde women approached the bar and asked for more white wine and shots of whiskey. The functionary turned to the bartender and told him to pour the ladies their drinks. "OH, so that's how it's gonna be," I said sort of jokingly. The functionary shot us a glare and walked away. Just then, my friend and I glanced to our right and saw an old black guy laughing and shaking his head at us. He'd observed the whole scene.

• The most common nonGN’R shirt among fans: AC/DC.

• GN'R's set opened with a three-story high 3-D video of a golden revolver shooting the top off of the Space Needle.

• On the floor, I almost got in a fight with the guy standing behind me, who accused me of stealing someone's seat. The band was playing, "Welcome to the Jungle."

• Someone passed a joint around. I inhaled.

• You can hear Axl wheeze in his mid-range, otherwise he hit every "note."

• Another weird video played: Skeletons having sex, doggy style. This video was shown two or three times.

• On the way to the restroom, an opening in the medical tent's blue curtains revealed a woman passed out on a stretcher.

• Axl, who is a human ball of snakes, put on a t-shirt that had a ball of snakes on it. Axl would go on to change his t-shirt (and his hat, and the flannel he ties around his waist) several times. Slash wore one shirt the whole time that read: "I saw God on acid and he was tripping pretty hard."

• When Slash laid into "Sweet Child O' Mine," an image of me walking around the high school track during PE with an old crush flooded my mind. I wondered briefly how her children were doing.

• Another weird video played: Jellyfish with lungs for brains?

• The band appeared to have established a center stage safe space, wherein each non-Axl member of the band was allotted up to thirty seconds of centerstage time per song. Exceptions for Slash's show-off solos.

• My friend noticed that Axl Rose had a personal roadie and that the roadie had one job: Fetch. When Axl tossed his pink microphone stand upstage, the roadie retrieved it and set it back up only so Axl could throw it again while screeching with rodential terror. Sorry, roadie, that's just the cold November rain of trickle-down economics.

• Current rhythm guitar player Richard Fortus is not Izzy Stradlin, but they do look enough alike. Fortus punches his Epiphone every once in a while, just to let you know he's there and still looking like Stradlin.

• Axl appeared to teleport around the stage all night, Nightcrawler-like.

• They closed with "Paradise City" because of course they did.

The band played everything you'd want to hear them play. More than half of Appetite for Destruction. Only one or two from Chinese Democracy. The amazing thing was that over the course of 25 songs, the group did not miss a single beat. It was as if they had rehearsed the set down to the last strum. (No "One In a Million," though.)

Everything I'd ever read about the band led me to believe that the show would start two hours late, that Axl would spit on one of his bandmates, and that they wouldn't play the hits. But this was not the case. Then again, I wasn't really watching Guns N' Roses. I was watching an image of Guns N' Roses.

The tour's anti-utopian title, "Not In This Lifetime," recalled Erik Reece's book, Utopia Drive, which I reviewed last week. (It also recalled the Eagles' lucrative reunion tour title "Hell Freezes Over." The Eagles and GN'R would be the perfect double bill.)

In the book, Reece uses philosopher Walter Benjamin's notion of the "wish image" to describe a perfectly preserved Shaker village he had visited while writing the book. In discussing the purpose of the preserved village, Reece writes, "Because the future has no image, the utopian imagination must reclaim, must resurrect, past ruins and transform them into wish images that still carry a revolutionary potential for change." He goes on: "Because the original dreams of the ruin were never realized, it still bears a dormant potential to re-route the path of history."

Guns N' Roses N' Co. have resurrected the ruin of 1987 cock rock that is Appetite for Destruction. They've produced and maintain a dream image called "Not In This Lifetime," and it contains all the toxic masculinity and self-exploding cynicism locked inside GN’R's music—and just in time to soundtrack a Trump supporter's strut to the voting booth, too.

In this dystopian world, we live in the jungle, and all we want is finally to be taken down to the Paradise City, "where the grass is green/ and the girls are pretty."

Axl sings, "You can have anything you want/ But you better not take it from me" in "Welcome to the Jungle." That line—and there are plenty like them in GN’R's repertoire—is an embodied critique of late-80s greed but also an earnest declaration that we live "in the jungle." That idea is one of the many ingredients for complacency. If a person believes that we live in a dystopian society, then they can justify their selfish/cynical actions by pronouncing cliche conversation-closers like "it is what it is" or "life's not fair."

Axl and the crew have attempted to present a clean version of the old act, but all the blind rage and dull arguments remain preserved in every hip-thrust and self-serving solo, and the part of us that snake-dances along, the part of us that loves the vigilante individualism driving so many GN’R songs, is the same part that created and continues to foster the conditions for the culture of Trump.