burning

So there was this bar in Taipei called Roxy Rocker, and downstairs at this bar they had a little glass room full of vinyls you could pull out and spin, and then a big lounge with the bar itself and a DJ in a booth who took written requests.  Sometimes they played them, sometimes they didn’t.  It was great.

One of the DJs there was a beautiful, Nirvana-plaid-wearing Taiwanese girl, with big headphones and a perpetually sleepy look.  After all the bland, “我愛你,” chest beating, big hair blowing, music-video-ready nothing that passed for popular music in Taiwan, finding a local who knew that good shit I was getting out of Brooklyn at the time was a trip.  She played Animal Collective one night, long before Merriweather Post Pavilion blew them up, and I fell instantly, madly in love.

It was through her I found this track.  That sexy bass line drew me dancing to her booth, where it was deafeningly loud, so I asked her what the song was via hand motions and scrap paper. Later, when I stumbled back up there wasted to give her my number, I didn’t have the Chinese, the time, or the native capacity to explain all that I was trying to hand to her.  I couldn’t take the top off my head and show her the radiating prism of light that was my secret world.  She never called, because obviously, but it hurt all the same.

There’s so much that could have been, so many universes, so many futures, dreamed up in instants then torn apart and scattered to the winds.  So many reasons we don’t connect, so many reasons things don’t happen.  You can’t take it personally.  You cannot take it personally.  Do not take your rejections personally.  I know it hurts, but, stop, just — stop.  Fuck.  Let’s dance like wild things.

“Caught in a motion that I don’t want to stop…”