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Being Boring
11 February 2005
4 16:27

It has come to my attention that I'm not fun anymore. I don't know precisely when or how it happened, but somewhere along the line, I slipped from the "Fun & Saucy" column of life into the "Boring & Cranky" column.

Evidence? Here goes...

I received an e-mail Wednesday inviting me to Happy Hour at Posh on West 51st Street Friday night, to be followed, optionally, by a visit to Crobar, where Erick Morillo (Remember that inescapable "I Like to Move It Move It" tune? Yeah, you know you liked to...move it. And so did I. Well, he was responsible for that.) will be manning the decks throughout the evening.

Now, of course, I'm going to go to the Happy Hour at Posh. I have every intention of eventually getting around to spending a day sometime in bed with the organizer of this little group and his partner, and I enjoy their company, and for the most part, I've gotten good service at Posh in the past. I enjoy the atmosphere and the fairly inexpensive (by Manhattan standards, anyway) drinks. Socialising with booze? Oh, yes, I can do that.

As I read on, though, considering the details of this Crobar outing, I thought, "Crobar?! Ack. What the hell is that? It sounds unpleasant -- like you might get something pried open and mangled in the process. Who wants to go to a place called 'Crobar' that doesn't even have the class to spell itself correctly? And $25 cover to pay more for drinks and stand around listening to painfully loud hard house music for hours on end while surrounded by sweaty drugged-out muscle-queens who will take no notice of me in a scene where I pointedly do not belong? I don't think so. That's just a little bit too much gay for me, even if it's not actually a gay venue."

I leapt to the comfort of the strong arms of the superior-dancing conclusion that the music would be the ear-splitting nerve-grating hard house, heavy on beats, noise, irritating synth samples, shrieking women and repetition, which is so often favoured in drug-infested gay (and other) clubs, without bothering to explore the DJ's oeuvre. I assumed that the crowd would be unpleasant, fraught with coke-head club queens and meth-addled G-drinking gym-bunnies. I thought, "I will not belong there, and I don't want to spend the money to be made to feel outcast, and I don't like to dance anyway."

Waitasecond! "I don't like to dance anyway!"? What the fuck is that about? Since when do I not like to dance?!

Okay, so my musical snobbery has been legendary for ages. I sneer openly from the side of the dance-floor at DJs who spin nothing but beats. I plug my ears at tinny meaningless wailing from large black women. I laugh derisively at "music" that sounds more like flatulence than melody. My ears require complex layers of clattering rhythms to pique their interest. My ass demands clever bass-lines with insidious funk before it will groove. My heart beats only for soulful vocals with wrenching, hook-laden lyrics which cry out for voices raised from the dance-floor singing along. My head needs the rush of giddy anthemic melodic lines so that my brain will consent to soar into the aether, forget earthly cares, and permit me to get on the floor and get down. But who's to say Mr. Morillo would not provide these crucial elements?

I used to love to dance. I used to love sweating euphorically in the midst of a crowd of people who were feeling the same groove. I used to love spinning tracks at parties that inspired the same reaction. I used to love to listen to songs that made it difficult for me to sit still. I used to relish the releases of hot new remixes and snatch them up at music stores on 12" vinyl or on CD, so that I could introduce them to friends at parties or on mix discs. I used to burn these massive epic mixes for friends' parties. I used to throw insane parties of my own, drenched in sweat, booze, smoke and sex, packed with hot men and women, myself included, in (and sometimes out of) skin-tight clothes. I was the go-to boy for a good time any night of the week, and when the public party places closed for the evening, I brought the party home with me, riding the night into the dawn, even if I knew I had to be clean and sublimely functional a mere hour and some change later. I used to drop serious cash on these pursuits and think nothing of it.

What in hell has happened to me?

Now, I dress in carefully-selected, buttoned-down, dry-cleaned, starched conservatism, and I have no time to purvey that sort of fun. I work incessantly, and when I'm not working or traveling to or from said work, I want only to sleep, or occasionally fuck. Where once I was high-energy dance-club, I fear I am now firmly adult-contemporary easy-listening. I envy those with the resources to do what I once relished, and I scorn them for their pursuits of the party that I used to have. And isn't it ironic?

I ran some of these points by my choral cohorts last night, and they all dismissed my misgivings vigorously. After all, they find me interesting and enjoy my company, so I can't possibly be boring, for if I'm boring but they find me fun, then they, too, must be boring, an unthinkable possibility. The fact remains I work too much (not necessarily too HARD, but too MUCH) to have any fun, to BE any fun, and I don't make nearly enough money to make it worthwhile. And I'm STILL not doing what I meant to do. I've turned my life upside-down and shaken out all the loose garbage. I've destroyed everything and built it over again. And I've just realised that I am still miserable. Fuck me.

r

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