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| Another day, another bottle of cherry-flavored fun. by The Happiness Engine 10/03/2004, 12:14am PDT | ||||
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| "If I've only caused you pain
I'll give you my skin So you can feel, How I feel This is my existence." This quote pierces to the heart of finding meaning in a brief random existence. As I heard/sung these words, jostling in a sweating throng of bodies, blinded by strobe and color washes, afterimages ghosting across my closed (or open? hard to tell) eyes, all sense of direction and location was lost to me. There was just a sense of a group of people fleetingly united by their feelings of alienation from culture and existence. Dancing on the main floor, I started having mild hallucinations and vertigo. I was certain that the dance area was a subway car. there were no sides, but it felt like it was exactly the same shape, and I could see poles out of the corner of my eye. Sometimes the floor would have a raised dance center area, now rectangular and stepped, now round and graded. I again started to lose perspective, not knowing the size or shape of the room or what direction I was pointed in. Minutes crawled by like hours. I was sure it had to be 5 or 6 in the morning. The rest of the club must be closed, but somehow this group of us was still dancing away, increasingly desperate women throwing themselves at a slimming pool of grimy men. Even more desperate, the people just wallflowering on the couches watching other people lose their dignity, too afraid to risk their own. Suddenly a parade of tall people led by a short girl in a striped jumper and a muzzle slide onto the dance floor. There a pudgy blond girl, a pudgy brunette, an amazingly tall and thin black girl, the aforementioned "pony", and a crazy overlord with frizzy hair wearing something resembling a straightjacket. There is a very complex B&D relationship intertwining this whole display, with certain people having power over certain others. Needing to create the drama this group requires to live, the pudgy blond allowed the pony something that the master later corrected her for: words were spoken, a device was shown, and the pony quivered in fear and excitement. They filed out and in a few more times over the course of the night. Dancing continued, it must now be 7 or 8am. The dance floor is looking pretty sparse, The DJ is playing weird songs in a sort of contest to see if people can still dance to it. The lights go to flashing, moving blue, and an incredibly long Doors song about snakes and death drones on and on and on. Like some kind of freakish purgatory I must keep dancing forever with no passage of time. Then I see one person just standing in the middle of the dance floor, under a blue light. I had seen her earlier, she came in with a friend, blond, she was brunette. They both looked to be mid 40s, might have been mid 30s. Fat and yuppy. Her friend had located some meat earlier and was now nowhere to be seen. I look at this woman, standing still, with her head at an odd angle, and I could swear I see something dripping onto her black dress. She apparently has a small, but persistent trickle of blood from her left nostril. After a minute she seems to notice it and wipes at it ineffectually. Then she looks around for her friend. There are only blue shadows spinning under their own rhythms, oblivious to her. She tilts her head back, takes a couple steps in a sort of pantomime of dancing. All around is darkness, smoke, and a blue glare exactly like work lighting used during a scene change in theatre. Her in a brighter spot, a few whirling satyrs around her. She looks at them, half-pleadingly, hoping one of them is her friend. Drip, drip, drip. She makes a couple distracted movements, leans to the side. I am watching all of this, just another member of the chorus line in the climax of her life, wondering if I should intervene. She may be about to die. I heard Hunter Thompson say, "You buy the ticket, you take the Ride. Besides I don't have time for this woman's cocaine problems." So I just danced and watched. She was short and round, spike heels, spikey short black hair, exactly what you picture if someone told you "middle-aged Italian new yorker" I could see her being someone's grandmother, maybe in 5 years, maybe already. Drip, drip, drip went her party-girl spirits as she slowly sank out of the fantasy land of the young and pretty, who party all night and sleep all day and live happily ever after. She was slowly dropping into shriveled drug addict to the strains of Jim Morrison. By dawn she would be a barely recognizable husk, unclaimed at the city morgue, and could see it all happening in front of her eyes while the happy people danced in their own worlds. Eventually, broken, confused, and newly "old", she shuffled off the dance floor and into the shadows. When I left the club it was shortly after 4am. |
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Another day, another bottle of cherry-flavored fun. by 10/03/2004, 12:14am PDT  Re: Another day, another bottle of cherry-flavored fun. by 10/03/2004, 12:40am PDT |
