25 May, 2005
twenty-one flight rock

(this has been sitting, unfinished in TextEdit for two days. but it's still fresh!)

alright... i need to just stop.
if not, i'm going to part someone's hair with a scirocco of swearing... and/or plant one of my size 10.5 hiking boot so far up someone's ass, they'll taste the rubber sole.
ah, corporate business in Amerika! profit created by the death of employees, and their unclaimed wages! leave the rest to take up the slack!

that, right there. is why i need to stop and decompress, a minute or two.
it doesn't help that i've got to piss like a racehorse, and the cleanup crew is in the loo. PsychicBladder, strikes again! uncannily able to predict the occupation of the restrooms by custodial personnel!

the amorphous details of the weekend past are painfully lacking in particulars. therefore, in the interest of posterity, future generations, and my waning memory, i need to flesh out some of the good stuff. or else i'll forget it when somebody makes a loud sound.

let's start with Biggles, my riding companion to DC. he's actually the one who discovered that the GangOfFour were going to appear in DC, again (my first encounter, a longer time span ago than the ages of most who read this). after lots of haggling, and banter, and head scratching, i made the decision that we'd need to camp out, overnight... via HotWiredotCom. agreed to by SlickWillie, who'd be settled before we got there, with the Contessa.

a person with no watch, and no timetable, i expected Biggles to drag ass to my house about an hour after he promised. i think it's best to think of him as eastern standard, not daylight savings... an hour off the beat. probably because of being born in Greenwich Mean Time zone. i was not disappointed... but prepared.

not a natural born navigator, and possessing no legal license, he reached for a beer as soon as i put wheels on the highway... and turned the zydeco on the CD changer UP. to eleven. just the right soundtrack for dense interstate sightseeing. not quite so for driving.

two hours of darting, crazed lane changes. tractor-trailers festooned with lighted crosses. HipHopHoopties. the minivan horde. and then, we approached The Obelisk, which i so name because of it's similarity to the object that caused monkeys to club each other in 2001:ASpaceOddyssey. owned by the BlondeBimbo's family. actually, the analogy fits NorthernVirginia pretty well.

only forty minutes to spare before showtime. just enough time for a twenty-one floor elevator ride to dump the bags, a splash of two gin-&-tonics down the neck. a burning nose.

heartbeat city. something in the air, on nights like these... you know the music is going to kick aside all notions of what you've heard, before. because, there's no good excuse for such raw nerves. streetlights, too bright. winos in their oily hoodies, too talkative. blue lights flashing, at all corners. that ticket, burning a hole in my pocket.

the one thing that has always obsessed me about witnessing live music, body and soul: the pulse of bass. loud beyond hearing. disrupting the rhythm of the heartbeat. sucking air from the lungs. exponentially amplifying from the ticket booth to the foyer to the big doors into the hall.

from that moment on, i am Music's whore.

even worse, this slavery, when the beat and the melody and the dissonance and the purpose of lyrics all take command, equally.
just like it did, across town, twenty-four years ago.

and then, the reality of the crowd and the bullshit conversations and the smoke surface. Biggles and SW, surveying the room for top-of-the-voice chats and pheromones. me, i'm just winding around it all. waiting for the first chords and the barrage of gale-force feedback, thump X 10 and politics from the PAs.

for which i was not denied.

voice ravaged from shouting the words... legs sore from dancing, relentlessly... making friends with people just as sucked into the moment as i. we stood as if in a disaster area, after the clouds part. colour me stupid.

so where are my companions?

as i suspected, Biggles was holding court in the basement bar, pontificating and schmoozing with whoever would listen. i found a place on the perimeter, and ordered myself a Boddington's, to pour on top of the Gin. smart idea, since i'd be the one driving out of war-zone DC. my mouth doesn't work that way, though... not a good bar guy, unfortunately.

obvious that this would go on indefinitely, i set about looking for Bill... standing outside, across the street. i hailed him up, we went to the car to wait. and wait. and wait.
not being able to leave a fallen brother behind, i sent Bill to rescue him. and, he needed rescuing, baited as he was by thirty-something frat boys with a hard on for taking the English down a peg. fuck frat boys. you heard it hear first... i almost got thumped by some at a Clash concert, in the day. their brains are all from the same cesspool.

"home" and dry on the twenty-first floor. until 5AM, when the beer ran out, and Biggles was about to hyperventilate... my job, talk him down, until dawn greyed the sky. THEN he passes out. of course, i could not. what little escape i could find was interrupted by the oppressive heat in the room, uncorrected by the thermostat. i though i was sick... but is was just the AC. or lack of same.
i blame Paris' family. and yes, you bitch, it was "hawt".

escape down interstate 95 with a comatose passenger, at 10 AM.

happy trails, to me.

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