Altered

Sometimes, when you see a steady stream of people all headed to the same place, you can just tell. I can't really pin it down, but it's there. When you go to a show or a lecture or a gallery, you can just see it in the people who are unfolding themselves from cars and ambling along, the ones who are going there too and the one's who aren't. Maybe it's something you recognize in their faces or that vague light in the back of their eyes, the way you can find friends in a bar by the way they straighten in anticipation when you walk in, the way their spine lengthens to meet you. A matching of intentions only maybe. But you can tell It's there.

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And I could tell. Last night.
By the shuffle step of the masses wreathed in smoke making their way into the bar last night.

I got Altered Thursday.


I woke up with the echo of bass beats tattooed on the backs of my eyes.


I saw the tracers from the lasers bouncing off the raindrops hitting my windshield on the early morning drive home.


I bear the trademark rasp of a night and a morning spend in a smoky bar, doubled over in laughter from a night spent with people I see far too infrequently.


I fell reluctantly in love with the easy sway of the regulars and robotic tics of the dancers and with the way the remote-control fog rolled down off the apse where they had nestled the turntables. With the easy give and take of the crowd. With the erractic bursts of songs I recognized melded in with the lovely thumping, pounding, squaking scritch of hands on turntable knobs and dials. It's hypnotic, you know, watching someone work and be so wrapped up in what they're doing that they only register the crowd in their periphery. They don't really play for you, the good ones...They seem to spin just to see if it can be done. And as ill-versed as I am in the world of an electronic-based genre (preferring smoky blues or rollicking bluegrass banjo or the occasional 80s rock ballad to anything else) I can hear the roots of it all in the jam. I can understand the appeal...the seduction of the music and the way it could envelop you.


I need more nights like this. The cold wash of something, anything new is refreshing. It's addictive. It's altering.