Sunday, March 5, 2006

the music that plays when we walk with heads held high, heads bobbing

I think the reason that last night I was imagining my life as various movie scenes buoyed by an awesome soundtrack was because just a couple hours earlier, I had seen a night from a couple weeks ago edited together with a soundtrack. Jamie's friend, Daniel, made this short little video of Ethan, Jamie, and I wandering Chelsea galleries drunk. The video is really cute and it's so fun to see your life played to a song, with a soundtrack.

Around eight thirty, I found myself heading up to the regular's house on 96th Street. While there, he asked me if I wanted to get stoned, and I said, of course, because getting stoned sounded like heaven. And stoned, I did get. After three hits, I told myself that I should stop if I planned on still going to Daniel's white party later that evening, a party which I had even went and bought pants for at the thrift store earlier in the day. And I was already terribly messed up from this amount of pot, and this man, I don't know how he functions so stoned because he smoked so much more than I did and seemed pretty together. He insisted that I take a few more hits and help him finish the joint. Man, I was out of my fucking head, to say the least. I got a blowjob from him and have never orgasmed stoned and fucking hell, that was weird and amazing. After I came, I was falling apart more and more. It took me so long to get dressed. I wasn't sure if I could get my arms through my sweatshirt and meanwhile, this guy is making normal conversation with me and I am trying not to let him know that I am in outer space and have no clue what he is talking about and I just need to focus on trying to get my arms through my jacket.

I got dressed and left so that I could fall apart in true fashion without worrying about what someone else thought of me. The L wasn't running last night and so it was a long, long, long ride home last night totally messed up. On the downtown 1 train which I took to 42nd, I stood up holding one of the poles and don't even remember what I was listening to at this point, but do know what I imagined I was hearing. I looked at my reflection in the pole, how skinny and rectangular it made me, and I imagined myself as one of those rectangular cartoon characters in that Dire Straits' video "Money for Nothing." I put on some chapstick, only to drop the cap from it on the ground. I looked down, and said Oh no, and saw all the faces of everyone around me, and I was sure they knew I was stoned and were going to see me have to try to pick this up. I started giggling nonstop and then quickly picked up the cap with lots of concentration and tried to stifle my giggling.

I switched to the N train at Times Square and also switched the music I was playing to Funkadelic, which was amazing music to listen to in that condition. "Lunchmeataphobia" was playing, and put that track on and tell me that it does not sound like the score to The Warriors. Before I had gotten on the train, I had passed a human statue in white paint. On the train there was a young mohawked teenager with his girlfriend. And the N train has that orangish glow, that grimy atmosphere and I totally felt like I was trying to make it back to Coney Island safe before the other gangs got to me. I was living The Warriors on that N train. The mime and the young punk seemed such perfect scenery to this shot that I was a part of.

Then once I had finally made it on the J and was riding over the Williamsburg Bridge, "Oh, I" came on and it is such an amazing song. I am not sure I had ever listened to it fully before last night. But it is probably the most soulful of any Funkadelic song - oh, it's so good - and listening to this looking at the skyline of my city and all the annoyed faces of the people on the train who just wanted to be home, I felt so good, this good music playing, this jamming soundtrack to my movements, this music to live by. There are all these various rhythms and that is what happiness is - when we have found one and are in sync to it, and strut down the street because somewhere in our head this tune is playing and there is that camera in the bushes and life is amazing and so will this shot be - and unhappiness, those are the moments when we are not finding a groove, when we are arrhythmic and are not sure what to do with our limbs to this song, that we just aren't grooving. To say the least, I was grooving last night, was terribly happy.

I came home, really inspired by all these thoughts about music and really in love with Funkadelic and plugged my Ipod into my computer speakers and cranked that shit because no one else was home and I was going to listen to this amazing music and dance and live and sit on the couch and stare into space and eat all the junk food I had just picked up at the bodega. Then a song or two into my rocking out, I heard some noise from Jillian's room and paused my music to hear that Jillian and Josh were indeed home, were watching a movie which they must have had to turn the volume up on because I was rocking the house to Funkadelic and thinking out loud. I was way embarrassed and turned down the music, faded it out of the shot and watched a bit of a movie until I felt tired and ill from all the crap I ate and went to sleep, lullabied to sleep by the memories of Funkadelic playing.

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