The Roxy Post-Mortem: Dancing to Oblivion

Yes, that's right, I went to The Roxy.

It all started out very innoculous, I was chatting with Garrett last night, when I saw a high school classmate's name listed as one of the performers to appear at The Roxy. I haven't seen her in almost a decade, so I roped Garrett into going.

It was like a surreal comedy brought to life.

Here we are two people who don't dance sitting in the middle of a dance club. It's too dark for Garrett to read my lips or my haphazard ASL, so we communicated via pad and text messages. A particular highlight was when I thought I saw B.D. Wong dancing shirtless, but upon closer examination, 'twas not him.

However, this is all beside the point.

Being at The Roxy that night was a bit of a sociological epiphany for me. You see, I can't quite wrap my mind around the logic of going there. You pay $20+ to enter (general admission was $40 this particular night), you have bottles of water starting out $3 (perhaps even higher), and it gets so crowded that you can barely move around. Why would someone subject themselves to this on a weekly basis?

The rationale that I've come to believe: These people are living purely for now.

Savings be damned, some people just want to forget that the world exists. Life is brutal today, we are bombarded with news of how dire the economy is, how the war in Iraq is a quagmire that no one seems to know the way out of, how the GLBT community is still treated like second class citizens in the US, and just basically how imperfect we all are when measured up against some impossible media ideal--especially if you look at gay media.

When I was making my way back to my apartment afterwards, I was thinking that I was going to focus on the absurdly thin twinks flailing their bodies across the dancefloor, the steroid abusers shuffling from left to right, and the Freudian hysteric Will & Grace-esque couples. Yet, as I type this out now, I realise that perhaps this is their one time a week where they feel at ease with themselves.

I often say that there is a lack of personal responsibility in today's society, but there is also a lack of self-love. It seems like the hardest thing for many of us to do is to wake up in the morning and say "I'm right as I am." This is not to say that we are no longer works-in-progress, but occasionally we need to realise that while we are works-in-progress, we are still marvelous things behold.

As marvelous things, we sometimes curse the sun that our lives have not become the stuff that William J. Mann novels are made out of. It always seems that someone else has got that special ingredient that makes their lives appear seemingly sparkling in comparison to our own seemingly humdrum existence.

So we dance, we spend beyond our means, we do drugs, we drink, we become nihilists. Yet we forget that in someone else's eyes, we seem to have it all.

The answer, as I see it, is not to be happy beyond your wildest wishes, but instead, to be serene. If you can, take a moment today--and every day, indeed--to just remind yourself of what you do have and what you are, instead of what you lack both externally and internally.

Then you'll know, that if you have made it this far in life, there is no need to dance off into oblivion.