viragette

I woke up this morning feeling like I’d been beaten with the Virtue Stick. Clean and hungry and sore all over from pumping iron (I like that phrase because it is so quaint, like feathered bangs). It’s been warm and sunny, and I’ve been riding my bike around town, hell-bent-for-leather style. Which means that I probably have been spotted with a set jaw and bikers squint, no doubt looking not at all as badass as I feel, but more like vaguely grumpy. It also means that in combination with hitting the gym, my legs ache all the time, and especially as I’m falling alseep. It feels really good to wake up and stretch into that ache. I’ve also been working long hours, which often means my shoulders are screaming “Get a life!” by 8:30 PM. I’m so sore that capoeira yesterday was relaxing. That’s in part because I’m not so good. Anyway, here I sit, sipping coffee and contemplating why party people scare me.

True to the organic purpose of this blog - here’s yet another entry entirely devoted to stuff that puzzles and surprises me. How I surfed over to gawker this morning I do not know. I think I followed a link from Kottke.org. I’ve spent at least half an hour browsing through pictures of random people at parties and clubs in NYC, LA and Sundance. And what I get is a vague feeling of unease. I don’t think it’s a “moral”, judgmental unease - in other words I don’t think that the drunken, scantily clad, often hostile or horny-looking people in those pictures are doing bad things that the rest of us wouldn’t. Quite the opposite. And the truth is that I like it anytime that people do what they want. It’s all about the beauty of the intention, rather than the act, per se. In the moment when people act on their true intentions, that’s often the most beautiful demonstration of anyone’s humanity. And I really like that there is some sort of communal ritual (I’m such a nerd) that, in principle, can allow us to share uninhibited good intentions in a context of community. All well and good, even if in reality any given person at a given time is doing something wild and crazy because they want to (totally cool) or for some other reason (totally sad).

Anyway, I think the real reason party people freak me the hell out is because they are people. They are people freed of some of the normal societal restraints on self-expression and so what I see is more people-ness. And people freak me out.

When I was a little girl, in bed in the dark waiting to fall asleep, I was never haunted by visions of fantastic monsters, supernatural terrors, or wild animals. People were the scariest thing I could imagine. The intelligence and utter unpredictability of people. Following my circa 1984, 9-year old logic, if I were to meet a brutal end by, for example, being torn limb from limb by a pack of wolves - that would be scary and unpleasant. But a similar fate, physically, perpetrated by another human would be 1000X worse. I didn’t know why, but I knew that was true. Years later, I decided people are scarier because of the malice. But, that’s too simple. The truly terrifying thing is that, as another human, I think - I’m afraid that - I could fathom - empathize with - the feelings and thoughts behind the violence.

So, yeah, I’m pathologically terrified of being ripped limb from limb by a pack of smoky-eyed, bra-less party-girls.