If there is a picture at the bottom of this email, taken inside a club, it means I went dancing alone and successfully uploaded a photo.
The idea started with a sense of regret. A week ago, Saturday, I went to a hardcore show with a friend. Big crowd, small room, fast songs. Soon a slam-dance started – all types, all ages throwing their bodies at other bodies. As soon as it started, I wanted in. I loved the frenzy and physicality. Still, my mind spent the next hour and a half crafting reasons why that was a bad idea. Don’t get hurt. Don’t look stupid. Over and over, an inner voice suggested that we – the mind, the body – might wait for a better song or the right moment, maybe take an extra minute to reconsider what likely was a silly impulse.
Ninety minutes later, we drove home.
“You didn’t want to be ‘old guy in the pit,’” a friend said later when I told him the story. I said sure, but that wasn’t quite it. The pit had been full of old guys, also lots of older and younger women, everybody crashing around, elbows out, like so many basketball centers boxing out in the paint. Though he was right, I said, in that I had worried how I might look, might seem, though for god’s sakes in the eyes of whom? When I knew nobody there except the one friend?
I have a hard time with little risks. Big risks are never the issue. Alpine climbing, ocean things, things done in remote wilderness – somehow these were always acceptable to my mind and worth the gamble. (Of less merit: My college mountaineering club had an induction ritual wherein you climbed out the backseat of a speeding car and clambered over the roof – i.e., exit one window, cling to the roof by gripping it on either side, then swing your legs over and slide in through the window on the other side of the car, ideally performed while the vehicle’s moving at high speed. So dumb.) Still, the same for risks in career and art. Self-employment is nerve-wracking, writing is a rejection game, publishing books is wildly unpredictable, and amid it all are constant disappointment and discouragement, outside and within – but I guess I wouldn’t have it another way.
Though it’s the smaller, perhaps safer dangers I find more daunting. Putting myself not in harm’s way but something truly scary: the path of other people. In my early twenties, it was approaching a girl at a bar. In my thirties: starting conversation in a room full of strangers, or making new friends. Not the ego-death of psychedelics, but the ego-exfoliation of insecurity. Mid-week, I saw a friend for a drink. His wife was out of town, he’d been scheduled to attend a dinner that night where he’d know nobody except the host – possibly his most anxiety-ridden scenario, he said. Then the host cancelled at the last minute and he was surprised to feel disappointed, to realize he’d been looking forward to testing himself.
(Unrelated, but made me think: The pandemic is going to be washing through us for the next twenty years.)
So, I was thinking about all of this, regretting my reluctance at the punk show, and decided to do something. Put myself in mild discomfort. Take a risk that had little risk at all. I love house music, I love dancing, why not throw myself into something I’d love. I found a party on Friday with music I like. I’d go alone, no checking my phone and no drugs, nothing to crutch the moment. Typing this, Thursday afternoon, I’m definitely nervous. Who’s that gray-haired man spinning around near the speakers, lip-syncing to Robyn? What the hell is he playing at?
If there is a photo below, the fool was me a few hours ago, figuring out during a break how to upload some evidence. Hopefully playing at it enjoyably.
In tomorrow’s supplement for supporters, 3+ things to love:
A new release from the band that made my favorite album of 2018
Raves for two new movie, the best dance/party-related film of recent, and a new middle-brow podcast about curiosity
Some excellent drawings of London shops
What the what
Meditations in an Emergency is a weekly dispatch from author Rosecrans Baldwin about something beautiful. Supporters receive a Sunday supplement with 3+ things to love, along with a monthly longer piece sent from the road, for some inbox wanderlust. ⛰️
Books mentioned in Meditations in an Emergency are stored in a Bookshop list.