I Don't Feel Young

It appears I write about music too much. Probably listen to it too much to begin with, but what can I do? This too is a way to go.

Saturday night was John's birthday and DJ gig at the Depot, just up from Penn Station and across from the Charles Theatre. We rounded up a sizable posse to attend and celebrate, which came with its concerns: the specific people present set up several potential situations, of which any combination thereof could have come to pass. Drama in other words, though I don't much like that particular usage of the word.

It was Maura I was most concerned about, what with Jen and John both being there. But it turned out that was the least of everyone's worries. The night started out well enough: John took over from the opening DJs around midnight, and spun some tracks that upheld the mood, even if they were not as club-happy as the tracks the openers played. There was a nice crowd gathered on the dancefloor, and though I knew most of them from various walks of school, there were a few strangers, which is always good to have at a gig of any sort. But then John played Squarepusher's "My Red Hot Car," and it damn near cleared the house; as Song said, I love Squarepusher as much as the next guy (probably more than the next guy), but that kind of IDM is always a gamble in a club DJ set, and in this case, it didn't pay off. People became bewildered and retired to the bar, and soon you could count the people left on the floor on one hand.

From there it quickly turned into Samuel Beckett's dance party. Sterling's girlfriend and her roommate got drunk and asked him to drive them home, and he did, after which he became caught up in some kind of vicious altercation between the roommates (the specifics of which I still don't know of, nor do I have any desire to find out about) and didn't return until 1:30AM--long after he was supposed to take over the decks from John. I found Hannah and Mike sitting awkwardly next to each other on a bench and thought, nothing good can come of this (and sure enough, nothing good did). The quarreling roommate called and demanded John and Maura quit the place and go back to take care of her. When one of the Depot staff hit the fog machine near the end of the night, it felt like trying to pull a veil over the desolation of the floor and the quiet violence of the evening. Call it, I don't know, Waiting for DJ, or maybe Club No Exit.

Of course, none of it actually had anything directly to do with me, but I'm never one to turn down an existential night on the town, or the chance to craft one from a more or less mundane sequence of events. I swear I'm not a sadist. I'm almost always at first sympathetic to my friends when they get themselves in trouble like this, identifying their plight with some element of my own history even when this identity is wholly unjustified, but after they make the same mistake a few times, my sympathy starts to wane. I wasn't always the sarcastic and distant critic of others' lives; I've just been hanging out with the same people too long.

Yesterday I had a conversation over coffee under the heated, enclosed outdoor awning of a restaurant with a very good friend of mine that settled a couple of issues about the weekend and even gave me something resembling a sense of vindication. If certain people are to be believed--and there's every reason to believe them over the others--I must be doing something right. Even if it is slightly daunting to be nominated for someone else's moral compass.