Last night, toward the end of the night when I was in a bar with maybe ten people, some of those people being members of Bloc Party, I couldn't help but feel really cool, thinking to myself that my choice of entertainment for a Wednesday evening was the same as a really hip rock band.

The night started out with dinner at Niki's house. Mussels and sangria. It was a really nice meal. Then we went out to an open bar at No. 1 Chinese that when we first arrived seemed really odd, some people still sitting at tables finishing their dinner and a couple other confused seeming people ordering from the bar. And this is ten o'clock, things will change at this place in so short a time and then change again in a perhaps even quicker span of time and this is what amazes me about nightlife and bars - how it is like a tornado of people, it picks up force and becomes a wild party and then just as quickly, it all gives way to entropy, the place becoming totally empty. Towards eleven, the dj (The Captain), who was awesome, played The Whispers' "Rock Steady." Now I don't know if you know this song or know how much I love it and get obsessed with it from time to time. When I worked at the Strand, I told my co-worker who was also a dj that he had to buy this record and play it, that people would love it. He took my advice but claimed people didn't love it. Now I wasn't there, so I didn't get to hear it played at a bar, and I have never ever once heard it played in a bar/dance setting, and so when the dj started playing it, it is fair to say that I lost my shit. I lose my shit easily for songs I love but for a song I have always wanted to see djs adopt and play at parties, I started dancing and singing along so happy even though no one was really dancing at this point.

Shortly after other people started dancing, everyone was, and not bobbing their heads, but dancing on tables, shaking limbs like wild. It was so good to be at a really fun, high energy dance party where people weren't dancing there just to be be able to point themselves out the next day on Lastnightsparty or the Misshapes site - where they dance to be perceived to be dancing, where it is the possible gaze that motivates them. This was so much more pure, so much less restrained. It was wild and perhaps by telling you that, I am doing the same thing. Perhaps I was dancing and having so much fun last night knowing that the gaze of my Livejournal was observing. It is a document of the night still, something to say look how cool I am, there at that bar with Bloc Party and cute homos (see Missed Connections). But regardless, it was amazing, the music, the dancing and the energy. It reminded me so much of a New College wall because it was one great song after the next, not just playing a specific genre of music, but throwing anything up at the wall and knowing it would stick because it was a great song: Daft Punk, David Bowie, ODB, MIA, Hall and Oates, Michael Jackson - it was so awesome.

And for whatever reasons, because when you are drunk, you, or at least I, like to wander around, to try out other bars, Joe and I decided to go to Phoenix. We stayed there for one drink and decided that No. 1 Chinese was way more fun, so we went back, not even an hour after we had left it in full swing, and we had to wait outside to get in because the place is a restaurant and is weird and the doors were locked from the outside at night, so we had to wait for someone to come up from the basement and leave to let us in. And who should be wandering around upstairs but Kele Okerere, the easily recognizable lead singer of Bloc Party. We knocked and he let us back in and we went back downstairs to find the formerly packed dancefloor completely empty, the dj booth empty, and only about ten people hanging out in the bar area. I am so amazed by stuff like this. There is a passage in A Heartbreaking Work that I only vaguely remember but in it Eggers muses about the potential of human hands and how together we could tear apart cities and rebuild them in the dark of nights, and it is a similar awe that I am under when I think about this mass of people all coming together, shining for a brief moment and then moving off to go shine in other moments, other places. But hanging out in the deserted bar I was wondering where those other places were, thinking of Burr's "Blackout Bar" piece and thinking about empty bars and how they are capable of signifying so much about humans, their movements through time, and their deaths, the bars at 4 in the morning, trash on the floor, people long gone. We had another drink. I gawked at Bloc Party while Joe and I both talked to this boy, Jared, who we both had a crush on prior to talking to him, and then we went home, making the bar emptier still.