Confessions of a Fuck-Up Artist!

Vampire Country. 29 hours after yesterday's bad news and riding shotgun on Operation Reload with the Princess. I'm along on the Op for little more than moral support, the Princess nervous about meeting a new Contact who I've known a few years now through circles Perilous. On the Dante Scale this Contact is pure 1st ring, a virtuous pagan through and through, so I wasn't sweating the situation.

The original plan tonight actually was to brood in the dark, contemplate the recent defeat I'm stumbling out of as I start focusing in on the demands of the project ahead. Already I find myself jotting down snatches of diabolical bon mots countered by holy metaphysical zingers. Then deleting them the next day when sobriety fails to hear their music. The original plan was to do something at the gym. Fight the fat and the poison and the years, train earnestly to have the strength to do something that three years ago I was too weak to do. To lift my toppled father from the earth, to be a son strong enough to raise his blood fallen.

Ah, there's that ugly music again, ride it through, ride it out until the buzz fades and who knows maybe sleep will kick in before the dawn for a change.

The original plan was not to reluctantly say yes to the Princess on a brief Op to Vampire Country, a plan I stuck to until she said please. That's the rule, the one I rarely have to worry about, but when a friend says please, I don't say no. Those of you who know me know why. So I had a few drinks, ate a salad (eye roll), caught up. Did that thing you do when you grow up a latchkey kid in the 80s, where you learn to talk in insults because that's how people talk on TV.

Been having trouble with crowds of late, especially the ones where they know me, my face, my out of fashion 'fiction suit'. I got Cobra Kai sitting to the right of me, Lady Trouble a booth to the left, Nurse Feisty dolled up by the bar and Bob Dracula off somewhere making the rounds. I try to acknowledge them, but I can't find it in me to talk to anyone. Flustered and jammed up where I don't want to be, the voice. My Emergency Back Up Personality subroutines don't tend to activate until at least three drinks in and I'm still working on my first. It's been a few weeks since the last one. Careful though, feed the EBUP too much too quick and shit goes from zero to id in under an hour. Cut to scene of the illuminated Id-Beast from Forbidden Planet howling in rage when caught in the electric fence of Space Prospero.

One of dad's favorite movies come to think of it.

But as quick as I can think it the Princess says something out of left field that makes me laugh or makes me say something that makes me laugh (as I'm prone to do when, well if not happy then certainly relieved). The adventures of Veronica and Jughead in the 21st Century. Ah, but then the Contact arrives, Imake small talk easy, the EBUP sputtering into life against the quiet vigil of my nature, then make my way to the Head to give them time to talk business.

Objective accomplished, I say saluting myself in the mirror, request permission for Evac after one more for the road. Request permission to go cream in the dark with words on a page because it's the only place left I can scream anymore without scaring anybody.

Permission granted, I wink back after giving it some thought, and fuck off I go back into the crowded world I'm trying to remember how to be a part of.

Some folks reckon me for an introvert, at least until drunk that is, then I become an introvert who looks at other people while talking to myself loudly. Others figure me for that unique brand of extrovert known as the Wise Ass, which is really just shorthand to them for an Asshole with passive aggressiveness issues. Fair enough. But honestly though, I see myself more as a Metrovert, a person who thrives when submerged into the ebb and tide of the city crowd. You there, the Northbound Crazy talking about how our cell-phones are allowing intangible aliens to incubate in our brains - to you sir I listen keenly knowing full well a man shaken by Enochian angels. You, the two giggling teenagers dressed in fast-food uniforms with Cleopatra make-up who wanted to see, then touch my tattoos right there on the bus - I offer assurance that doing so won't get you in trouble with God though your parents are another story. You, the kid in the red hoodie on a skateboard held together with band stickers who shot me the devil horn salute when he saw my Baphomet shirt before rolling down the road - I wish you safe travels in your infernal adventures ahead. You, the old man behind me on line who told me about his grandson in the Marines and the miracle of Jesus that bought him back alive to you from Afghanistan - thank you. You, the little girl in the Iron Man mask who on a street where the sex workers scream death threats at each other, wave triumphantly at me before soaring back off into invisible adventures - I salute you.

Around you all I feel welcome to the party, an honorary member of the tribe, a man worthy of your consultations and confessions. In the city I am pulled from headphone soundtrack and flow of introspection's narrative by your random charms, by the ambush of your vulnerabilities, by the raw weird sharp in your eyes.

I am a Metrovert and in the city I am never alone amongst her strangers.

Driving home from L5P earlier this afternoon, going down the side streets slow through a sun shower when at a stop sign I come across two kids and a rooster trying to break into a car. The kids are teenagers, late high school or early college, thin of physique with one a ginger dressed in Hanna Barbara shades of Shaggy Green and a brother in a Falcons tank top. The rooster was all black of feather and the car was one of those cube on wheels numbers in pollen olive. Now it was clear that the kids owned the car, body language didn't vibe any surreptitious chicanery on their behalf and their faces betrayed a helpless frustration through the rain. The two were attempting to jimmy a coat-hanger through the window with no luck and mouthing curses. The Rooster, meanwhile stood with the two boys, looking as if he was urging patience and dispensing advice.

"Now boys, I can sympathize with your aggravation at our current situation , but there's no need to stir ourselves up a kerfuffle with the foul language, especially when you're both so high on Bubba Kush that you're now taking advice from a farm animal."

"Sorry Mr. Clucky." They both chime.
"It's okay boys, just remember that if the Pigs roll up, to be cool, I'm the one holding after all. Now let's focus our collective energies on getting that window open, getting home, and getting baked to some quality Adventure Time episodes."

"Sure thing, Mr.Clucky!" The two boys chime in and redouble their efforts to get into the car as the car behind me at the Stop sign starts blaring their horn.

So, on a personal level, the real difficulty for me in watching the second season of True Detective was how much Officer Velcoro (Colin Farrell) looked like my friend Bud (if he decided to grow a mustache that is). Which might explain the dream I had with him in it this morning. The authorities let Bud out of prison early apparently to play himself in a locally shot movie about the Terminus Punk Scene and we were meeting up in L5P to celebrate.

We met at the Point for a few victory rounds, waiting for our friends to join us, when he slid his copy of the script across the table towards me, asking if I could maybe re-write the ending for him.

"What's wrong with it?" I asked flipping through the pages without looking at them.

"I die in the end." He gave me that mischievous little boy smile of his and he made a gun out of his fingers that he pressed to his head, "Remember?"

Which I hadn't, at least not in that dream, and when I looked down at the script again the last twenty, thirty pages of it were blank. When I looked up he was gone and then everyone we knew started to roll into the Point - drunk, stoned, loud - all asking me where he had went off to. I didn't have the heart to remind them of what his ghost had to remind me.

When I woke, an hour before the alarm, I reached instinctively for my Space Wifey forgetting she had left the day before and in the gloom of early morning laid in bed smoking cigarettes until the alarm told me to do otherwise.

Oh, my lost brothers in arms, have I ever stood as tall as when I stood in your ranks?

Kicked ass at work, got my paycheck with a little something extra in it, smoked a bowl of lemon kush with a coworker in the office parking lot, zoomed through traffic like I hot-wired me a Batmobile, hit the gym to do laps in an empty pool, treated mom to a fancy dinner out, scored a bag of gourmet cookies that got rung up for spare change by accident, confirmed that the Space Wifey will be in town tonight, and as the sun sets the weekend spreads open before me with all the sensuous promise of a demon lover ready to take me to those heights that heaven alone can't reach.

Some days I don't float through the bullshit as much as I'm just too exhausted to know I'm sinking, but some days, like today, I positively soar over this world of bittersweet sorrows.

As the pagans watched their gods castrated into Christian saints, so the news of the Masquerade's imminent demise was received by the children of a vanishing Terminus. Sure, there had been earlier panics over the years, predictions spread by industry scuttlebutt of the Old Fourth Ward's most infamous music venue being sold out to developers. In the end though the battered marquee stood defiant as a pirate flag there off North Avenue, promising loud bands and night clubs events to come. At night, beneath its dim glare, shifting generations of the Bored dressed magnificent and rough in Anger's drag could be found waiting on line. Waiting for music as music can only be heard by the young - with a whirlwind devotion that will either dwindle into commodified nostalgia or into the dusty fetish of the collector. There it waited to bring us stories to be forgotten or retold even as the crazier, scarier parts of the city were quietly beaten back to and all down Boulevard into homogenized respectability. Even when the prostitutes waiting at the dawn bus stop were hustled away, the dealers quarantined, the homeless shuffled, there was the Masquerade.

But this time is different.

We can all feel it in that place that instinctually recognizes the shit from the drama.
There's no escape this time into the ether of rumor. Not after watching the slow motion Disneyfication of Little Five Points unfold, seeing the reanimated corpse of City Hall East become an exclusive hive for the cokeheads over in 'creative', and bitterly having a final round in Mannie's before it becomes another slab of mixed-use blah. This we know, this we lament.

For many in the circles it is my privilege to orbit (even if only as an old square) there is a history here of first shows, seen and performed. Of mosh pit purple hearts, of sneaking in on guest list bluffs, of bathroom hookups, of parking lot blunts, of chances taken and lost in between. In this I would be no different. Over a decade back now and an old shipmate has his main DJ cancel out of the opening night of his new club so with gleeful fear I volunteered to take his place.

And over the years there I have made more people dance at once than there are seats in all the venues in Vampire Country. There was nothing like it, there was nothing like us at a time that like all times was nothing like any other before or after it. We were never bigger than the music we put on our most dashing disguises on for and offered our strangest dances... but at times we felt as big as it.

In the end there was bad drama, there was resentment, there was compromise, there was a shift of vision, of geography, of luck, of career, of disposition and then what we were was no more. Some of us grew outwards, some of us inwards, and some of us with both tragedy and good fortune revealing their most extreme heights somehow remained the same.

Some of our lives continued on their course while too many of ours had been cut too short.

Yet even as the scene changed, along with its music, fashion, and tech into a strange new zeitgeist the lessons, the memories, the rage, and poetry its friendships gave remain. At times it is a source of strength, at times its experiences have given me a smiling distrust that puts me at distance around the laughter of friends and other strangers. It is in my reflexes, it is in my art, it is in my bravado and charity both.

Just as what this city once was is still in you, children of a vanishing Terminus.
Its madness, frustrations, and quirky dangers. Its songs, its nights, and glazed inebriations. As they have been in what you have made so will they emerge from what you have yet to create, make of it what you will, but make it better than you think you can or it's not our time that will have been wasted.

A thousand miles of strip malls, town-homes, corporate cafes, and sterilized bistros won't make a difference if your head's in the right place. Back when I hit puberty in the suburbs of Fort Liquor, South Florida, where the old went to die and the landscape was as monotonous as it was flat, I watched a generation of punks, skaters, goths, skinheads, gang-bangers, freaks, and madmen rise against it. In the end the monotony won but not before we left one fuck of a story behind us. I'm guessing it's not too different with anyone reading these words, I'm guessing something similar will happen one day out of the gentrification doom we see upon us now.

This weekend, after reading the news of the Masquerade's demise, I got a visit from my cousin and his best friend. They're younger than I was when I started DJing at the Masquerade, on the cusp of a brief road trip across America for shits and giggles. All they could talk about is the places they're going to go and the movies they're going to make. Seeing their raw wonder and enthusiasm I know what the pagans knew when their myths were assimilated and hammered into a dull piety with a cross.

That though dreams may end, dreaming does not.

Before the technological marvel that is Social Networking came along, folks had to rely on the strap-on Anal-O-Scope to know how big an asshole a casual stranger might be.