Tales from the Dark Side: Motherless in the Mother City, part I

So there I am once again, caught up and sweating (I move when I dance so, yes, I sweat) amongst a plodding, waffling mass of distracted legal-aged teens all urgently forcing drinks down their horny little throats.  Desperately they’re trying to stay upright, battling to overcome a terrible intolerance to whatever narcotic they’ve scoffed. They drug as a means to an end—an awkward, insatiable desire to disappear. It’s not too crowded and there’s ample space hereabouts, but the uneasy, restless pilfering of territory is like being surrounded by a relentlessly shifting mob of the itchy undead. They’re plagued by a cursed disease that just won’t let up, moving without getting anywhere, clinging onto the last and final wisps of reality before they disappear into the soft-focus, black gloom where nothing matters and no-one cares. I can’t tell if it’s undiagnosed, untreatable ADD, or simply a generational twitch, but these little fuck-wads are incapable of sticking to a rationally defined spot anywhere on the dance-floor. Instead they swerve and sway and fall like lumbering lumps of skinny, soft-brained paranoia, quivering and jolting between fellow dancers, their sudden, unmotivated movements relating neither to the music nor the mood of the rest of the club. Venal, schizophrenic and borderline-comatose, these brazen, carefree pups fill the room with their unmanageable, unconscionable surplus hormonal rage, firing loosely on all cannons without a single target in sight.

The room throbs and pulsates with the mimicked outward symbols of a good time being had by all—flustered smiles, jiggling bodies, hugs and embraces, and of course the rhythmic swaying, like solo sex with clothes on—but that’s all surface styling, a cover-up cloaking the absence of mind, the lack of awareness, and the consciousness deficit that’s grabbed hold of a generation of clubbers, caught up in a love affair with their own overblown sense of entitlement.

A bunch of privileged, self-important pricks. Random, undiagnosable, and certainly untreatable, they wage war—an avalanche of foul-mouthed attacks—on anything and anyone around them, their uncouth and unmannered freedoms won by forgotten generations of serfdom we’ve been only too lucky to be born out of. A century ago we’d all be working in the fields, herding sheep, or spending an entire decade as artillery fodder on the military front. Now there’s a generation that acts with all the rigor of a bovine herd, conjuring up barely enough wit to slur commands at the barman or strike up instantaneously forgotten friendships with equally absent revellers snivelling on the dancefloor.

A brattish pseudo-teen throws a disgusting fit in the bouncer’s face when he warns her that smoking is banned and she should take her habit outside—but she’s too sick with self-importance to realize how lucky she is to have the endless supply of daddy’s cash to gain entry to this decadent and privileged space; she throws down her burning cancer stick and frothily zaps him with her middle finger. She’s got it all: endless drinks till 4am, a string of well-oiled DJs, and sound and lighting that would bring tears to the eyes of millions who live—not too far away—without electricity or running water. With her thick, putrid mascara dripping beneath her heavy, pouting, racoon eyes, she’s a picture of virtuoso avarice, steeped in the misery of a lost generation’s heinous affair with bad drugs and alcohol so sickly sweet even the smell of it induces diabetic panic. It won’t be long before she’s forgotten about the no-smoking chastisement and is once again fumbling for a lighter and screwing with our oxygen supply. I can’t help panic at the thought that one day she’ll have kids of her own, out there terrifying mild-mannered bouncers.

To be continued…