22:54 - June 04, 2002
the cool places
My dad and I and a friend of ours went to a club tonight that Connie described as the 'hot place to be' (which should have negated it completely, added to the fact that it was a Tuesday night at 8:30 pm, but whatever...) It turned out she's fairly 'counterculture' for someone 35 years older than me, and it wasn't a bumping, grinding, bad techno-blasting seizure inducing light patterning nightclub, but a decrepit little place off of Diversey with crumbling ceilings, a few arcade games, a bar, a makeshift stage, and student art covering the walls. (Poster: Respect your eardrums! Earplugs $1.) They were having Experimental Music Night, which was painful for the first half hour because it consisted entirely of a guy feeding off the feedback of his guitar and the feeding off the feedback of the feedback of his guitar, etc., and using an oscillator to make it go wowwow, if you know what I mean. The bartender talked to my dad about how his grandmother scolded him for the music in the club being loud, and my dad bought a set of earplugs, probably cringing at the imaginary manifestation of his own mother perched on his right shoulder, scolding. (Are mothers the angel within or the devil within? You know, like when they have fights from opposite shoulders when you have to make an important decision?)

The music got exponentially better, but better in the way that I automatically tuned it out; i.e. less painful, but with it, much less interesting. I played pool, pounding the stick on the ground in time to the arrhythmic bass drum. One guy, who was standing across the room, drinking a beer, stared at me in wonderment. 'How do you DO that, man?' he asked, shaking his head. 'Like, there's, like... no kind of steady beat like anywhere in the whole entire song.'

My chief observation, overall, was that all the 'cool people' hanging out at the 'cool places' don't really do much of anything except chain smoke and drink and stand sullenly in corners or in big groups of concentrated sullenness. There was a girl drinking a Guinness who had a beautiful winding tattoo of a dragon going up her right arm. 'Give me a fucking refill, asshole,' she yelled at the bartender once she'd slammed down her first. Her boyfriend then came up, protective arm ready. 'Was he bothering you, pumpkin?' Pout. Snivel. Gack. I wandered away, found a cat stretched out calmly on the couch by the pool table. It kept me company for the rest of the night, thumping its tail in time to the music. I want to have a button I can press that turns all my friends into cats. Reversible, of course.... but not for awhile yet.

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