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Suitably chaotic, the meetings arrive like hail, a-periodic, intense, painful. With a hint of complacent relaxation.

Cursory familiarity, a pretense of profundity. She says, “I love this place.” She says, “I come here all the time.” She says, “It’s wonderful, full of character.” I say, “I didn’t know there were any drum-n-bass joints left in town.” She says, “I know, it’s awesome.” I say, “And LTJ Bukem is slated, I saw on the door.” She doesn’t say. She looks at me with blank eyes and a false smile.

I continue my slide toward the bar.

They say we associate with that which we wish to be, not that which we are. Do I associate with the dragon because that’s what I desire? To be carefree, playful, chasing my desires with intent, obstinacy, and abandon? Always looking for that pearl in the sky and sea, that which I cannot attain? And if so, then what is my reality, my base, my foundation, my purgatory, that which I am projecting from? The tiger? The pragmatic, do-what-must-be-done, nose-to-the-grindstone beast, fierce in his determination and unforgiving in his judgment?

Too much, too much. As usual, it is somewhere between there and here.

The music moves faster than your soul, your soul straining to accelerate, to match pace. It drives, a master behind a hundred slaves, pushing, whipping, without remorse, until exhaustion and collapse, at which point it dances on, not even rubbernecking past the scene of the crime.

I bob my head drowsily, one-eighth time, wallflower, appreciative, observer to the shapes and colors graphed in my head, an ephemeral cranial seismograph, trailing between my ears and dropping on the floor, and exit.

Enter “Random,” a gangly man attired in a blue sequined shirt, orange construction safety glasses, and a feather boa, glossing his self-conscious discomfort with a patina of alt-/art-something. All was as it should be, that is, carefully constructed chaos that is the antithesis of random.

My stomach growls, quietly, with annoyance.

And I know people named “Cast Iron Rat,” “Archlight,” “Noid,” “Falcon Red,” and other such improbable monikers.

If he had called himself “Pragmatic” or “Constructed,” – or even “Deconstructed” – I would have given him props. Even “P.M.,” as an abbreviated Post-Modern, as over-abused and in-accurate as it would be, would have sufficed. At least something orthagonal.

As it was, I greeted him with a heartily apathetic: “Oh.”

Or is it like wearing a an anti-irony shirt, without the kitsch?

No, I think it’s more like wearing the shirt of the band you’re going to see. Don’t be that guy, Gutter, don’t be that guy.

Is collecting things a physical manifestation of emotional requirements? Do we fill perceived voids of the psyche with artificial sets of paraphernalia? I believe I should be wary of hundred porcelain trinkets, every horizontal parcel occupied, no room for even a glass of wine. It is over, and arbitrarily so, but also, not. Again, limbo. Purgatory. That which is not hell, but that which is the denial of the ecstasy of feeling. I cannot throw her down on the couch and make unrestrained love to her – we may end copulating impaled on a ceramic pug or glass unicorn. As Cypress Hill says, “Ain’t goin’ out like that.”