My little rave birds are coming, out of the blue, just when I was thinking about them. Funny that. Coincidentally, it’s like we see each other every time Daft Punk rides the cool wave again. First 1999, now this. Yes, this is simply bitterness for not being there last night. Of course it is. I subsist on bitterness. Bitterness, gingerbread and one moment of clarity per year.
Back to the birds. The last time we were together I had transferred schools and we were all erroneously banned from the previous for life. That was when being almost bad was a badge of honor instead of a shrugging mistake. When our experiences together could be distilled into just one. That time we went to that house party in the dead of night after that show in Baltimore and every guy in the world was a DJ or liquid and these guys were spinning in the basement and there was this insane European disco rapping that just busted in on the track out of nowhere and we turned around and saw that it was an impossibly cool guy who had somehow whipped out a microphone for an audience of seven and we doubled over laughing and eventually had to leave the room.
And later that night, when I was wearing the insane European rapper slash DJ’s sweatshirt (because I was cold, not because it was a good time) and a fifty year old man with his adopted daughter at a gas station tried to give me a hundred dollar bill because he’d “been there”. Yeah, I didn’t understand it either, though I still regret not taking it. Maybe because my yellow UFOs had a million straps he thought I was a scrubby runaway, about to be roped into a ring of sin that I could never escape. His imagination was far, far cooler than my reality.
We’ve all grown out of it; maybe just grown too old for it, as it was. Everything that seems cool at the time usually isn’t in retrospect—part truth and part wistfulness that it can’t exist anymore. And yet, I can’t stop thinking about it this week, because in variant forms, it keeps popping up. The opportunity to go to Paris for Thanksgiving and finally meet the older version, the 2007 version of what I suppose I gave up that night when I took off with the sweatshirt instead of the man…
Back to the birds. The last time we were together I had transferred schools and we were all erroneously banned from the previous for life. That was when being almost bad was a badge of honor instead of a shrugging mistake. When our experiences together could be distilled into just one. That time we went to that house party in the dead of night after that show in Baltimore and every guy in the world was a DJ or liquid and these guys were spinning in the basement and there was this insane European disco rapping that just busted in on the track out of nowhere and we turned around and saw that it was an impossibly cool guy who had somehow whipped out a microphone for an audience of seven and we doubled over laughing and eventually had to leave the room.
And later that night, when I was wearing the insane European rapper slash DJ’s sweatshirt (because I was cold, not because it was a good time) and a fifty year old man with his adopted daughter at a gas station tried to give me a hundred dollar bill because he’d “been there”. Yeah, I didn’t understand it either, though I still regret not taking it. Maybe because my yellow UFOs had a million straps he thought I was a scrubby runaway, about to be roped into a ring of sin that I could never escape. His imagination was far, far cooler than my reality.
We’ve all grown out of it; maybe just grown too old for it, as it was. Everything that seems cool at the time usually isn’t in retrospect—part truth and part wistfulness that it can’t exist anymore. And yet, I can’t stop thinking about it this week, because in variant forms, it keeps popping up. The opportunity to go to Paris for Thanksgiving and finally meet the older version, the 2007 version of what I suppose I gave up that night when I took off with the sweatshirt instead of the man…
3 comments:
Better make sure you bring your haircut.
zoom zoom zoom.
Wasn't it fun being a rebel? Always on the edge of getting caught, but never bold enough to cross the line overtly. I learned that it was much harder to hold to that when there were bills to pay.
I suppose that rebelling against the bills might be a good start, but there's that line... Plus there's Bubba. Perhaps it's not such a good idea.
Thanks for visiting.
"Bitterness, gingerbread and one moment of clarity per year."
Did you write that or did I? Because if I didn't, I should have.
Take it from me. Sometimes it's ok to revisit the Ibiza days (as long as it doesn't actually involve GOING to Ibiza).
It's amazing what a few years can do. Sometimes those European DJ types (sans manties -always sans manties) turn into quite the catch.
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