Japandamonium!!!

Some people seem invested with the idea that Time is a very smoothly flowing thing. The way you hear some folks talk, you’d think Time just scooped you up in its hands and carried you along from one day to the next, step by easy step. I’m starting to think that this is just nonsense. There’s not supposed to be any consistency in how you move through your days, that would be a boring trip indeed; really, time rides about as smoothly as a bike with a bent-up front tire. I don't say this to worry you though, quite the opposite: this has not been the screaming and perilous part of the trip where the pavement rushes forward and you and see your entire dental history flash before your eyes, but the quick downhill exciting part where everything whirrs by and you think you're flying. I’ve been in London for a while now and I swear that the last week has been more full and vital than maybe any of the time leading up to it.

“We’re at Now now.”

I will tell you about where it all started a week or so ago, at a Blues Bar, a great, totally fucking great little place with a cheesy catchy name down around Oxford Circus. It’s trapped in the midst of all these horrific boutiquey places, window after window and store after store of bald mannequins with tight cheeks staring at you expensively in short skirts and lingerie, and by the time you find the door to the place you feel like your whole body’s covered with dirt. You can feel it all over your skin, it’s greasy and polished and impossible to rub off; it’s in your hair and in your jacket like cigarette smoke that stays sank into you after a party. By the time you get to that door you’ve almost had it, I’d almost had it, the city was just too much there for too long without a break, and even if it’s cold and not New York you can still feel the air lick you when walk the streets. Don’t get me wrong, I love it here, but you can get to needing a break. I needed one, and I found that door.

You walk in and it all comes off a you, it’s like they’ve got some magic machine by the door that just wipes you clean from top to bottom and blows something cool on your face. God what a great feeling! It was like plunging into cold water. The door closes and smoke and beer and sawdust swim up to hit your nose, and the light on your skin is clean and just bright enough to let you see who you are again, and then you look down and you say “that’s me!” and you keep on walking in. There’s music too, it’s perched up in a black box on the ceiling and when it notices you it spreads its wings and takes off. It ducks around a cloud of smoke swerves past the big men’s shoulders’ and skinny ladies’ necks and finds you clean but nervous in the thicket of bodies and clinking glasses, and it hovers there in front of your face and you stare up into its strange glass eyes and it’s just the most beautiful thing you thought you’d ever see, and here it flew all that way just to say hello to you. Then all real suddenly it comes in close and gives you a little kiss on the inside of your ear and you shiver all happy like the first time you ever got touched by a girl in the dark; now have a drink, or have two, it’s happy hour and they might have named it just for you!

And there are your friends, happy and clean like you are, and glad to see you. Really glad, what a thing! You drink and you joke with them, you meet new friends, friends of friends, friends of strangers, there’s a girl from Minnesota with her shoulders showing and a guy from Brussels with a cowboy hat and a leather zipper jacket, there’s nowhere to sit and nowhere to stand and everywhere to be and you’re smiling from your belly the way old men tell you to do for your health. And then the band finally makes it from the bar to the stage, an hour later than advertised but you couldn’t think to care or complain because the second they’re up they start making love to you and everyone else all at once. Magic. They’re good, man; even without the harmonica who won’t make it up from his bottle for another good hour, they are really good. The drummer’s sat up on a milk crate with his back leaning on the wall, his whole body looks relaxed but boy, you just try to follow his hands moving. A Hammond organ blesses us with the sweet sounds of a human soul made electric melody, and above a lanky dark electric bass, guitar licks fill it all in. There’s a big man singing whose voice sounds like it’s a hundred years older than you’ll ever be in your life. The music ripples through you, it touches everything in the room and bounces off again and it touched you too but it stays there. It bounces off the postered ceiling and off the stained sheet-music on the walls and off the racks of colored glass bottles behind the bar, but when it touches you it stays and just hits you again and again and again as it comes back off everything else, it hits you harder and softer and you feel like you’re standing under a waterfall and you can see those glass eyes hovering in front of your face and you can feel the bird kiss you on the insides of your ears.