Derailed by prodigious body hair Sunday, October 15, 2006 |
Second post and I'm already going off-topic. Last night we went to see an excellent outfit called Ladytron, who had all the shag-cut electroclash derelicts and gold-lederhosened tarty-tarts working the Commodore Ballroom floor-springs, while we rather self-consciously nodded our heads to the beat until Nazma slinked off because her feet were hurting. Don't let our physical passivity fool you: it really was a fantastic show. We were just feeling really old next to the bouncing cellphone-camera-snapping scenesters with their supertight jeans. What does this have to do with shining futures abroad? Not much, but I'll try to draw a connection.
Once in a while, a moment will just click, and all of a sudden you wake up and realise where you are. Sound stupid? We wade through the haze of the everyday wake-work-eat-sleep routine here on autopilot most of the time, so I mean: that sometimes, something happens and you snap out of it. It doesn't take much: something as mundane as everything else, just in a different cast than the rest of the monotone.
For me, the moment came when the big beer-sodden bastard beside us starting flailing his elbows at a particularly punchy song. As we tried to avoid broken noses, the strobes caught his arm hair like little black icicles against the brilliant backdrop of bass and bobbing heads and everything just froze. And ridiculous as it sounds, the sight of the thug's thorny simian arms haloed against the strobe, every one of them distinct and deadly, like those vaguely Celtic-looking pointy-knot designs on t-shirts from Surrey, shook me from wherever I'd been: a discontinuity, and my head was in a different place from before.
Now, "buddy's got a lot of body hair" isn't exactly the sort of epiphany that inspires people to great deeds, and it certainly didn't cause me to do anything more than shift over a foot to the right. But there's a strange clarity in that instant when your inner sight suddenly expands, and you see all the possibilities and the manifold effects and consequences. Like, for instance, pulling up stakes and leaving promising careers and an increasingly resigned but dangerously comfortable existence. Everywhere we wanted to head, what it all meant, and what it would irrevocably do to us, crystallised in that instant.
What did I learn? Not much: the synths crested and pulled me back to the music and the moment leapt on, like gold-leggings on a sprung dancefloor. But I'd begun recently to believe and fear that the quotidian haze had utterly eroded my ability to process with that kind of lucidity, and Arm-Hair, with his muttonchopped appendages, had given me a strobe-light shot of hope: that I haven't completely lost it.
Despite how ludicrous this post has turned out to be.
Once in a while, a moment will just click, and all of a sudden you wake up and realise where you are. Sound stupid? We wade through the haze of the everyday wake-work-eat-sleep routine here on autopilot most of the time, so I mean: that sometimes, something happens and you snap out of it. It doesn't take much: something as mundane as everything else, just in a different cast than the rest of the monotone.
For me, the moment came when the big beer-sodden bastard beside us starting flailing his elbows at a particularly punchy song. As we tried to avoid broken noses, the strobes caught his arm hair like little black icicles against the brilliant backdrop of bass and bobbing heads and everything just froze. And ridiculous as it sounds, the sight of the thug's thorny simian arms haloed against the strobe, every one of them distinct and deadly, like those vaguely Celtic-looking pointy-knot designs on t-shirts from Surrey, shook me from wherever I'd been: a discontinuity, and my head was in a different place from before.
Now, "buddy's got a lot of body hair" isn't exactly the sort of epiphany that inspires people to great deeds, and it certainly didn't cause me to do anything more than shift over a foot to the right. But there's a strange clarity in that instant when your inner sight suddenly expands, and you see all the possibilities and the manifold effects and consequences. Like, for instance, pulling up stakes and leaving promising careers and an increasingly resigned but dangerously comfortable existence. Everywhere we wanted to head, what it all meant, and what it would irrevocably do to us, crystallised in that instant.
What did I learn? Not much: the synths crested and pulled me back to the music and the moment leapt on, like gold-leggings on a sprung dancefloor. But I'd begun recently to believe and fear that the quotidian haze had utterly eroded my ability to process with that kind of lucidity, and Arm-Hair, with his muttonchopped appendages, had given me a strobe-light shot of hope: that I haven't completely lost it.
Despite how ludicrous this post has turned out to be.