too old for the scene

I knew I was getting too old for the scene when I complained of the entire show being an underage event. No 21+ balcony, no bar scene for the adults, no place to lounge and enjoy a beer while watching the music and the kids go crazy.

I used to be one of those kids. Sixteen, seventeen, twenty years old, and full of aggression. Full of rage, of anger, of passion for life, maybe just passion for youth and all the recklessness of ‘living for the now’ that goes with it. I used to sit through high school seething, insecure with raging hormones and raging emotions. Perhaps perceived, partially in truth, I was an outsider. I didn’t have great friends, and I didn’t really want them either. At the shows though, we were all the same. Our own group of outsider teens, each with our own energy, vibrating at the highest of frequencies, needing to connect. Needing, craving physical interaction, even if through violence, our needs were met. And the music was the backdrop, cliché as it sounds, the bands provided the soundtrack to the violence of our interaction.

But that was years ago. Now I wanted to enjoy my whiskey ginger and not worry about swinging elbows and falling down. And I definitely did not want to do this from the far side of the club where the bar was located, but truth be told, I just didn’t have the energy to fight my way to the front anymore.

The music was good, not great, as they played the songs I knew they would. But as the show went on, I started to get back into the old spirit, bobbing my head with the music, jumping a little in place. Excited, I could have been seventeen again for a minute. A friend gave me a shove, and it was on. I ran towards the front, just like the old days, knocking people out of the way, throwing elbows and furious glances in the direction of anyone who wouldn’t let me easily pass. And then I broke through, out of the crowded masses and into the violent chaos of the mosh pit in front of the stage.

I staggered for a moment in the sudden brightness, so close to the stage, the back lighting creating silhouettes of the band screaming only feet away.

I smiled.

And then it was madness, the perfect madness of fifty kids jumping and sweating together in time to the music. Very loud music, played very fast. Pushing and shoving, elbows flying, legs flailing, people falling all over each other, connecting in unison. And I was in the middle of it with a huge smile on my face, sweating on, and being sweat on, one of the pit’s elders, losing myself in time to the music as the show came to a furious close.

I was being pushed, spun around with the other kids as the strobe lights alternately lit us up and then pitched us into blackness with the final crescendo of heavy guitar wailing. It was one of those passionate moments, just to enjoy life in the crowd. Light and I was able to see the singer finishing his screams into the microphone, dark and nothing as I spun. Light and I could see the smiles of the shouting kids, applauding a passionate performance, dark and nothing again. Light and I was able to make out a face, a girl, spinning in the pit with me, her face rapidly approaching mine. Darkness and nothing.

And then she hit me.

All five feet and one hundred pounds strong, she head-butted me with a fierce determination found only in teenage punk rock girls. And it hurt. In the darkness, I thought back to the hundreds of shows I had been to in my 25 years alive, and the relative luck I’d experienced in never really getting hurt in the mosh pits. A couple bumps and bruises, I had always been fortunate to give out a lot more punishment than I had ever received. And now this, I was too old for this.

As the house lights came up, I was able to see my attacker being picked up off the floor by a group of her girlfriends, all dressed in their punky chick uniforms. Christ, she looked to be about 15 years old. Blood running down her face from a gash in her forehead, she appeared vaguely dazed, and then she saw me. She focused for a moment on unsteady feet and smiled. Amazing. I smiled back, the action further opening the cuts on both my split lips, the pain mixing with the adrenaline from the show creating a euphoric feeling as I walked toward the exit, my own face covered in blood.

I felt for my teeth, all still there, though some definitely knocked a little loose. I smiled to myself as I knew I was getting to be too old for mosh pits, but I knew I’d never be too old for the shows.

Spotlights at the Circus

Mists spread across the arena, braced by steel scaffolding and safety ropes. Catapulting through the haze: performers with blue sequined eyes and clothing vacuum-sealed against their bodies. Complex lighting arrangements hang like egg-sacs from the ceiling; big brained things that swivel and glare across the expanse. Beyond that, in the shadows: the four of us. We see action and, like spiders, trap and release it in our lights.

There are four of us attached to the umbilical contraption called a headset. We are each in our own corner, high up in the rafters of the domed circus canopy. Dressed in black and hidden by the darkness, we are each a featureless silhouette to one another and to the audience below. Gripping the hot metal cones of our spotlights, we are an awesome disconnect of the senses. We are a rush of signals through the radio. We are the optic lens of the spectator, widening and narrowing our irises to define action that we are not a part of.

While performers leap and glide across the stage, performing inhuman acts of skill and daring, we remain in the rafters, shadowing their movements with long strokes of our arms. We are attached to these athletes, to the strain of their muscles and the shading of their skins. We tense in wait to follow, tracking the tautness of each elastic tendon. They are cats preparing to pounce. We are their shadows.

We are in the action, but we are also outside of that action. We form a web of communication outside of it, like an external nervous system in sympathetic movement with the primary atoms. We are part of the complex network of machinery, among fabulous contraptions like the Russian Swing, the German Wheel, and the Shoot-Through Ladder. We cross-light during the Spanish Web and scissor acts with inexplicable names like Adagio and Pas de Deux.

We are in darkness, invisible, and detached from others. It is sensory deprivation, but it is also an overstimulation of the senses. There is an otherness present – a sense of being fully in tune with the movement of strangers. It’s like being a third species, with a peculiar awareness of what it is like to be more than one person. Like homunculi at the circus, our impressions are distorted and surreal. We have enlarged sensory organs, with afferent nerves wrapped around the four corners, swallowing the crowds inside of us.