That one time I had a song written about me.

Spring Quarter 2010 Sophomore Year of College

He was kind of tall. Almost gangly, but you wouldn't know it for the way he stooped and hid behind the shyness of his voice. We'd had a class together the previous quarter, Parasites, but nobody knew he was there. He was a guest with a host, a ghost.

Maybe three of us in the entire class noticed him in the back corner. Even for the online assignments on a social networking site called plurk, he was scarce. His posts, few and far between as they were, were regularly and systematically erased because the most successful parasite (or houseguest) leaves its host with no traces that it was there.

I was drawn to him. I could feel the red thread of fate unraveling the slack necessary to pull us together. 

So I crossed the gap. I read and commented on his posts. I made eye contact as direct eye contact as I could when he walked past. I invited him to share a meal with me.

"So I ate beside [Teddy] today. He's a quiet, awkward soul and underestimates the power he has within himself. I'm so drawn to that. He offered to teach me guitar, but then immediately said he wasn't very good. I asked, and he's played for 10 years."  - Excerpt from personal journal, March 10, 2010

I suppose it helped that at the time he was hopelessly infatuated with one of the two other people in class who'd taken the time and energy to notice him, my friend Kai. We went together to watch her perform at the Naked Truth on Stereotypes.

We got to know each other. We became friends.

When he graduated after winter quarter, I stopped seeing him as much. He was still in town but lived far beyond even my walking prowess. Still, we kept in touch; exchanging emails and continuing an impossibly long conversation thread on plurk.

Late in March, he sent me an mp3 file via email. There was no caption, no commentary. The only way it related to the conversation we'd been having was that at the time I had just started an Independent Study Project (blogged about and mostly contained here) on a postmodern examination of music and society. Just 912 kilobytes, the song was a cover of "Holland, 1945" by Neutral Milk Hotel.

The quality was crap, recorded with a webcam on a shitty computer. But despite that, it was beautiful and powerful. It bit more low key and folksy single-man-with-guitar than the original.

"You have a completely different kind of energy when you're singing than you do talking in person. The closest I can think of to describe it is to compare it to the feeling I get when I'm dancing. Everything else drops away. There's just me and the music and - and it's like making love, by which I mean creating love. I dunno, it's not really something you can put into words. If you have any other music recorded and feel so willing, I would love to hear it." -Excerpt from personal correspondence March 22, 2010

 This was soon followed by two songs he'd written for past loves, a cover of Daniel Johnston and a song he wrote for/about me.



Three minutes fourteen seconds about me dancing.

Danny you dance all through the room.
Danny you dance like nobody's looking at you
And it's beautiful. And it's beautiful.
And it's beautiful.
Danny your hands move where you want them to
Danny you know this what all of us want to do
Because it's beautiful. Because it's beautiful.
Because it's beautiful.
Though it's beautiful.
Though it's beautiful.
It's beautiful.

The lyrics are so simple and drawn out so much in the song. I listen to this, and I want to live up to it. I want to be that beautiful by forgetting about the world for just a few minutes and dancing.

In a later email he told me how I was one of the only friends he'd made in college, which I found sad and beautiful at the same time.

***

We still talk occasionally. Exchanging emails and catching up. About two months ago, I joined him in partaking of conveyor sushi with his girlfriend. We don't talk as often as we should and if he got that job in Portland is now quite a bit less easier for me to find than when he was in Bellingham. 

At the idea of him writing a song about me I'm touched and a mite flabbergasted. It seems... strange somehow to realize yourself as a muse, as inspiration, the uncanny feeling of a writer being written about.

You can listen to the song on my tumblr: http://acelessthan3.tumblr.com/post/27448822390

In which Danny rambles semi-coherently.

Tonight is the AS Awards Banquet. It's a chance for all the crazy folks known as Student Employees of the Associated Students of WWU to celebrate all the hard work we've put into making this year great for all the students of Western.

It's going to be great fun.

I would rather be home working on an essay, or cuddling with my boyfriend, or as would most likely be the case, at Ritmo Latino Salsa Club dancing (it is Monday after all).

Don't get me wrong, I love recognizing people for the great work they do, and I love that our organization works to make people feel wanted and appreciated. But I don't really feel like I' ready for a banquet just yet. I have one big event on the way still: The Third Annual Condom Fashion Show. It's Thursday, and the event is kind of my baby for the school year, so I won't feel like I can truly celebrate the end of the year until it's actually over.

But rather than make this a post about how busy Danny is, because I've learned how to manage my time this year, I'm not actually as busy as I think I'm perceived to be and I know many people who are far busier than I am (busy people tend to congregate and be involved in at least one thing with each other so that we know all the other busy people).

Instead, I want to talk about stones.

I recently got a piece of amethyst when I was wandering downtown giving out donation letters.



I thought it was kind of pretty and picked it over the other pieces of amethyst.

Unless it's food, I'm not usually prone to these kind of impulse buy for myself, but I was in a store called Stone Moon and it felt right.

For the first few days that I had it, I carried it around in my pocket. I worried (2c) it in my left hand until about two days later I thought I lost it.

Did some laundry, and like magic it reappeared. I wire wrapped it and have been wearing it as a necklace ever since. I'm getting rather good at that.

Amethyst is supposed to ward off insobriety and increase psychic abilities as well as enhance dreams. I'm not completely sure how I feel about that, but it's pretty and I like wearing it.

First Loves...

My first love in college wasn't some boy. It wasn't a class, it wasn't a subject that made me reconsider my understanding of the world, no, my first lasting love in college was salsa dancing.

I have Charlie to thank for it. She's kind of my sister, and the most central part of my BellingFam. It's because she dragged me to Ritmo Latino Salsa Club the very first time that I started dancing.

My moves aren't the cleanest, and I tend to add a flair that's somewhere between hip-hop influences and swing, further muddling the lines between salsa and Danny, but I have fun with it. I own the dance floor no matter who else is out there, no matter who my partner is, and no matter what song is playing. Ritmo Latino is one of the places where I've always felt unconditionally safe and loved, where I've seen growth much in the same ways I see myself growing with the Power of Hope and Acts of Kindness Club.

Salsa to me isn't just something I do. It's something that resonates to my core. The rhythm rocks me, moves me, centers me in a kinesthetic euphoria. It's contagious and I've never heard anybody tell me that they didn't have fun dancing with me, usually quite the opposite. Even some of the other leads that I've danced with, while slightly chagrined in their masculinity to be pulled out onto the dance floor with such an outspokenly queer boy, always laugh and continue to dance.

So this is also love to everyone out there willing to dance with me. This is love for everyone who has danced with me and everyone who has yet to dance with me. This is love for the music, love for the people teaching me, and love for the people I'm getting to teach right now as one of the student instructors.

February 14, 2011

My day started at about 9am, though in all reality it began yesterday as I ran around town preparing for the day to come.

Chocolate. Hundreds of small kisses taped to pieces of paper declaring that the reciever is loved. I handed them out, smiling and dancing, a veritable whirlwind of positive energy. "Valentines," the word lost its meaning to me when I realized that we barely know anything about St. Valentine. I called them "Dinosaur Rememberance Day" chocolates, the terrible lizards substituting for the consumerist conglomerate of hearts and flowers.

People laughed, but I think they were secretly terrified. There's an instinctual level of our brains hardwired to fear even prehistoric threats to our safety. I shouldn't be frightening people, but unsatisfied, I continue with my haunting reminders.

A crowd, mostly in red, gathers around a view of the sky.

They dance with me, a wild, crazy dance that asks a question. What is love? There's something almost pagan about it to me. A flash flood of bodies brought on by the wind, by the rain, by the date. We converge from seemingly nowhere, cameras materializing out of the aether to capture us in this abandon. Four and a half minutes we are in solidarity. At the drop of a hat we disperse.

I find myself alone save this clinging February cold. So I embrace it, pull it toward me with a half step and a twirl, my arms flung high then low, convulsing in almost epileptic fury. I feel the eyes of passersby on me, but ignore them. I am not theirs. In this moment I belong to the music, I am another medium through which it expresses itself, my body possessed.

An eternity later I'm grounded again by the weight of a ticking clock, the music exorcised by the metronomic repetition of the face perpetually attached to the wall.

Brought back to reality, I find myself drawn once again down to the ROPs. The VU, my third home away from home, populated with dedicated, smiling bodies. We're slaves to the system seeking solace in each other as we attempt subversion, an infection of ideals put in stasis by the bureaucratic powers that remove our politico. Our opinions exist outside, but so long as we represent this space and act as agents of the organization.

So we left. Off hours of course, but mobilizing a small crowd and preparing the makings of a speech in under two hours we set out for the courthouse, intending to be denied an application for a marriage license. Two consenting, unrelated adults over the age of 18: check. Fifty-eight dollar application fee: check. Dressed nice: for me at least check. Camera crew to record expected refusal of application: check.

Our entourage captured the entire thing: me standing kind of thunderstruck with no room to get a word in edgewise as Outspoken statements fly. An article covering our activism appeared only to dematerialize with nary a word more.

We have to address the legislator, not the county auditor in order to change the laws concerning marriage of "same-sex" partnerships in Washington State.

Afterwards in the quiet of the drive home, I listened to the sounds of a broken stereo, its noise the music of rotating wheels and 30-40 mph velocities in a metal box. Dinner, fried rice that I carried with me all day, back in the ROPs as I finished my office hours.

The next few hours escape my memory, the word spelled correctly but somehow looking wrong (a trick perhaps of the liminal gods who rule my fate), though I know they existed online. Was I perhaps upstairs, in my usual perch overlooking the lobby? No, I joined a Cirque down in the Underground Coffeehouse. The name has always bugged me. The building is built into the side of a hill, there is no underground to be in.

He read House of Leaves, I among other things, started this post. Johnny Truant is a child, a child who dropped out of high school and has sex with pretty much every woman he meets, but he lacks passion. He talks about these many encounters in detail, but the details are dry, sanitized in their crassness. They have no meaning. Jesse laughs, winces at the deepening shadows.

Duty calls and I am off again, this time for a night of dancing, a night constituted of a chunky mixture of tomato and spices roiling around an open room for two hours. I sacrificed my vest to the gods of Latin rhythm, baptizing myself in sweat to be reborn. Salsero.

Home, I concluded with sent messages and open inboxes across many miles. Self-satisfied and a kind of happy. Something about this day felt right.

The tip of my right, index finger is numb from accidentally getting slammed in a door on Sunday.

Song and Silence

Sometimes when I dance, the world goes silent. All that exists is my body and the movement. There are no words, no thoughts, it's a trance-like state and I find that I'm at peace. I'm experiencing the moment not as me, not as a thinking being, but as a nothing. I'm invisible to myself and to the world.

And then I pause and everything comes crashing back. I'm filled with sound, with thought. My reprieve from the world is intruded upon and interrupted.

People spend hours at a time meditating to experience that relief, seeking that cessation of noise, immunity from the infection that Burroughs called Word. In those quiet moments, the inner monologue is absent.

It's rare and takes practice, and for this to occur naturally often requires some kind of interruption upon the interruption, an overriding noise to replace that which has become the background of our existence.

I'm reminded of this because of my experience at HigFOM (the Higginson Festival of Music) this weekend.



What happens when music overpowers lyrics, when what we hear no longer has Word operating within it? Is there still meaning and by that I mean the kind of subjective meaning we use to describe the thoughts and emotions and words used in our day to day existence?

For example, one of the bands at HigFOM, Mission Orange, introduced one of their songs as being about "hiking on Mount Baker" or something to that effect, but when they started playing, the drums and guitar and feedback completely covered up and drowned out any vocals that would have conveyed that message.

You couldn't hear what he was singing at all and it seemed ironic to preface the song with a description. If I'd come across this on the radio, I don't think I would have been able to discern anything relating to being on a mountain.



In other words, the intent is there, but the meaning is lost amongst the sound accompanying it. It interrupts the transmission of the message. And this interruption provides us with silence of the mind.

And I got lost in the song, pulled in and whirled around by a maelstrom of sound. Soon I found that if I let this continue, it tore away at my mind. There was only the music.

Here then is an example of music as a release, as an agent of the momentary nirvana that teases us with a glimpse of bliss, for music in this capacity gives us silence.

But there is also danger in this. As much as it can be a tool for empowerment and enlightenment, the way we envision a monk or other Eastern practitioner reducing thought and expanding mind, applied differently, this ability of music becomes a tool in the power of economy of the mind.

In emptying the mind, it is made vulnerable. Is not the blank sheet easiest to fill?

A Poem is an Act of Creation

Dance With Me
We are all searching.
We are all dancing,
left 2, 3, right 2, 3.
Circling and gasping as life burns through us.
Celebrate it and rejoice.
Show the world what it means to move.
You are not beholden to anyone except yourself,
so expand. Grow.
Like the Christian god said, "Let there be light."
Let it shine forth so I can see it.
Let it spread.
Let it be what it was always meant to be.
Ten million candles glow with the light of a forest fire.
If we each to our own selves be true I hate to be the one person standing in the way.

Entwine

I was up early this morning (though it was sleeping in compared to what time I wake up normally) and decided that this kind of cloudy, overcast Sunday morning would be perfect to write a poem or two. It's been a while since I've slowed down enough to tangle words like this. I think the result is a little sketch, but in its own way was cathartic and soothing.

For the record, yes, the girl who punches me in the shoulder is you, Charlie. And while you're everything I could want in a dance partner and friend, I think we both know what I really mean at the end there.

Read on and enjoy.

Entwine

To borrow the words of Billy Idol,
I feel like "I'm dancing with myself,"
I'm searching for someone who can keep up with
the ratatat percussion of this four count step
But
I keep getting lost in the music.
Circling, spinning, dip and twirl.
Frustrated, distracted by that face in my mind.

We almost fall.
There's no one to catch us
as the secondhand stops at 3.
A knockout beauty stands in front of me.
I apologize profusely.
She playfully punches me in the shoulder.
Refocused in that moment I lead us
onward, upwards, down and out
We show this world what it means to move
while inside I'm still searching for the perfect partner