The Party (part 1/2)

(brief allusions to bodily fluids, a prevalent theme of existential anxiety and discomfort, as well as passages pertaining to a distorted perspective of imposter's syndrome; reading discretion is lightly advised)

“A self does not amount to much, but no self is an island; each exists in a fabric of relationships that is more complex and mobile than ever before.”

Jean-François Lyotard

It was a party I was invited to attend that Friday of the first week of July, and examining how poorly this strange crowd weathered through the trouble soon precipitated by my arrival, which was an integral if deceptively remote component to how this party became such a terrible pandemonium of spontaneous and outstanding havoc.

Let me explain what happened, though hapless it does look like I am as if I was cohorts with a sinister devil who, spreading its tenebrous wings higher and higher than the loss of holy illumination within that night, the price of oversimplification toward the details of the story is of course not a bad bargain to have with the devil's parlay.

I knew that I could have stayed home, but sometimes it was too thin of a comfort to limit the horizon through compulsory isolation.

I had resided in this town for six years, and it has inflicted upon my existence a small heart that even happiness is a paltry transience, not unlike uncontrollable bouts of flatulence, or how the kidney goes bad but it hurts less after the subsequent numbness spreads throughout your distended limbs haphazardly, and then again, it could all be as simple as a flaccid member thrown to the winds of chance: having been alone for such a long time has brought me to my feet, and how finally I am bound to release myself from my cloister as if I were to leap across my social ineptitude, straight into the proverbial limelight, and then perform an impromptu dance, unfettered, until I would collapse beneath the judgment of this alien sense these people, or so I picture within brief, successive reveries with closed eyes and a laborious sigh drawn from a clearer premonition soon dissuades such ruminative gulps of narcissism maligned, even almost starved until my own countenance wades itself into inelastic glowering as the expression this type of elated thinking evaporates the tentative optimism left inside nearly formless, like a dense form singlehandedly reduced by elemental phases.

There exists in me a fear that does not die, and that fear emanates from something inside me that does not have destination for mercy to carry my body, my money, my protection within the death of myself and the future I am willing to take a chance on.

I want to be noticed in having no background, I need to be used by the right people, then who cares if I was formerly the wrong part for them to improve the designs, but I have been successfully installed in this residential listing while employed to a part-time position that is enough for me to work instead of familiarizing myself with new people, similar to the people I surround myself with on this night.

And one of us is something preposterous, heuristically menacing everyone within listening range.

One who has the time for the sublime uselessness of the external world when put to the test of analogous placements rigorously demonstrative of how our attempts to imbue the world with a technological altar to their perceived achievement for harnessing the material contents of an otherwise static reality where even the contemplation of the air’s quality could be what elevates an embarrassment in bodily containment to be praiseworthy, even to go as far and describe the little bit of air pollution was as if someone set fire to the sky, but that the heat and light burned a lightyear away from our planet until it was unfettered from the earth, and the earth simply abandoned to this allegiance with corporeal waste it attracts to be a quality of life improvement for any creature eyeing survival, however, it is important to remind one of the crucial uselessness for life to be approached as anything except that seldom unreflecting collapse into myriad illness(among merciful death, a fanciful afterlife to be glad that at the end of the visitation, she begins rotating the outsized novelty hourglass from the youngest years one survived to that year in the present that does not amount to much, truthfully).

It was at this sordid point in my life where I would be susceptible to the allure of a party.

This escape into the authentication of the ephemeral and all the creature comforts of having the blankness of face value to be the lure for another's obsessive fascination, the chance to put behind this person I know has done wrongly, enough that it was either leaving behind this perplexing and lonesome interiorty, this egregious defect in having been not only an individual, but one who has been astray to the point of obscene expulsion from all previous designs I had bent all else before the sole succor that I would peel off all traces of my former selves to become a part of: the consensus, absolute justification for all that was established as lost so that I could surrender this joke so many refer to as an individual, whereas it is the death of the self that has redeemption in the collective, that mass of numerous people without faces or names, welcome me among their own as we all enter an absorbing bliss of the congregation’s favor.

I can recall that month with some trivial facts about my situation, and what created this vulnerable abomination pullulating inside my curiosity to the extent that against my own skepticism about whether or not the party was worthwhile, considering that I had little attachments outside my job; perhaps it did not need to stay in the proscribed range of smallness I was accustomed to living on.

Incredulous but not enough for me to be dissuaded from going there: after all, it was the tenuous promise of attracting friendly people, then possibly even meeting them later on to strengthen connections through a series of obsequious and calculated encounters one must endeavor at, or so I reasoned against my expectations for realistic outcomes that evening; yes, work at in routine diffidence until all of the social relations I gathered overtime would redeem me from this pathetic selfhood I have been kept alone with for so long that I am afraid that I was already sensing the hollow premonitory forewarning of imminent failure.

However, it was the invitation that I got which ultimately persuaded me to go above and beyond what was possible for myself.

Foolish designs, indeed.

Where was I earlier that week?

Through some manipulation, although strenuous the attempt to bring my concentration back into focus about the background minutiae concerning my whereabout during that summery month, it became clear that the invitation was something that was the perk of sharing cigarettes with this hideous man that was working alongside me at this job I had. I was tentatively employed part-time as a useless waiter at this golf resort country club, wherein there was the predictable amenities provided for this establishment such as booth tables, a dark wooden bar counterpane that sat five cushioned stools under its width of nine feet by a height of four feet within a thirty-eight by sixteen-foot perimeter contained within the building. Behind the bar (and the tables for the patrons to be seated and eat this larded batch of fried cheese confectionaries that singed the floor with scalding wads of indigestible yellow-orangish gunk), with its two desaturated television monitors that hung overhead, onscreen was a perpetual snowstorm of paid programming scrambled with the occasional professional sports event, there was the kitchen, the manager’s office, and then finally the backroom which opened a door outdoors to the garbage disposal unit. The hideous man was younger than me, and as our only dishwasher on staff, could be seen indoors always with the same heat-sustained rash reddening all over his pale face and arms under his apron and the articles of clothing he wore that was soaked whenever I saw him at work. I suspected that he never cleansed his attire for work, and was carrying the same dirty, wet and dripping outfit for as long as he went to work there.

The party was located at a massive warehouse; it was rented out by an idiosyncratic and poorly-dressed middle-aged but heuristically endowed host of this evening’s proceedings, named Clifton Satan Pinkerton, though his share for who was to blame for the unpleasant outcome of this dancefloor slaughterhouse drenched in the back of the mind as abattoir blues and puddles of color obscured as if by blunt traumatic force, - I knew of him cautiously before the event of correspondence had been commenced, through the next six hours I would have my suspicions about Mister Pinkerton’s gregarious surface personality enter the surety of witnessing his hopelessly desperate enterprise derail from none other than himself, the humility of having served himself his own catalyst for the overall decline of the party’s hospitality toward the early morning hours between 2 and 4:45am, Saturday.

Then, as the fluorescents of nocturnal dancers undulate in a sea of neon-rinsed strobe, pixelated pyrotechnics emanating across the forms of those partygoers pirouette their cascades of repeating, glacial motion syncopated to the pulse of the electronica music throbbing throughout this spacious area, this poorly aerated passage into dawn’s clearance would arise with complications that would invariably turn the celebratory air of the function awry.

It was too hot inside the warehouse for my memory to be of any help the next week following the slipstream of confetti, vomit, blood, urine, semen, disposable glowsticks, regurgitated alcohol, broken furniture slanted baroquely alongside the specular aura of menace and human secretions crowd the shadows of the departing guests as they flee from what at first glance appears to be a loud scream that was hurled toward my head as it recoiled to the side, searching behind my face with my eyes twinkling with the sight of the host becoming engulfed into a foaming rage.

I think that it was curiosity that brought me here, and then to my vaguest understanding, it was exhaustion that influenced me to stay around, if only surreptitiously at the sidelines of the scene, and watch the incredible things that culminate desultorily once circumstances allow the disparate coefficients of claustrophobic inebriation, jealousy and rumors exacerbated the host's outburst until it melted down the ostensible legitimacy protecting the man from his delusional inner nature; surviving this morning, here he is exposed to my mind in scant, elliptical detail: he was after all everything I had correctly predicted earlier that week, nearly identical to my latent premonition of his odious character: he was just another vicious male predator governed by sexual malaise and incensed by impotent displays of machismo always infinitely supplanted with objects of exorbitant price, as if the imagination of the reader was experiencing a profound difficulty so far in calling forth a fitting visual metaphor that would eliminate any sense of nuance in favor of a cumbersome endowment attached to this portly, gold-chain necked human wart.

He was arrogantly speaking in an argot fashionable among sociopathic men of eastern European descent who, feigning frugality when entering the West for a test of establishing a prosperous future following the respective collapse of their nation does self-fashioned men of this sort, whose crude etiquette and clipped locution define themselves at the outset as distinctly foreign(this employed in tandem to the irasible, flippant lighthearted swagger which imbued with their latency for aggressive behavior, emanates a menace between his eyelets less recognizable as the glare of a surly immigrant, and closer to the quiet, quick and powerfully feral primacy of a large-billed stork seeking a skull to strike against before scarfing down the remnants of his prey)yet enchanted the crowd gathered in the warehouse with a implacable mystification about his confidence among partygoers, possessing an elegantly laconic physical build who finds himself dancing arrogantly, peerless as though entering flight away from the riffraff below his insurmountable ego, then through a series of barks went on demanding service from one of the many sensuous cage-bound dancers shuffling amok onstage, contorted as the platforms they writhed in primitive displays of promiscuous hues change light filtration and shapes at the blink of an eye bloodshot and tranquil seeing that the host’s aggression amplifies exponentially the longer he is not replied to by these women who occupy the walls and wander in one place from behind strobed bars on their cages; indeed, I was lost observing this incidental shouting from across the warehouse’s cement floorplan, itself congested with fixtures of fascination and artificial fluorescence embedded to whatever surface the neon paint spread among the crowd themselves almost flaming with pantomimed movements uniformly tantric, creating a insinuation of foul play primed to erupt at any incoming second ahead someone finds the party and walks into this throbbing crowd and make out the host lose his cool amid the funhouse panorama of the evening's progression until everything reached the pinnacle of revolting textures and sounds, emulsifying.

Even Clifton sought the exacting redemption of the public that I want as well. Truth about our relationship with the past eliminates the illusion of the unknown that is so intense for people who are so attracted to the pomposity of someone that wants to make a name for themselves, a name that departs from the profile of someone that died in the shell that they were born inside.

Both of us were mirrors engulfing the extremities of characters we resorted on, in lieu of the fragile nature that tethered us as kindred animals of neighboring appearance.

I chose to dissolve into the word of mouth, whereas Clifton boorishly took this informational relationship with the namelessness of the partygoers, and instead annexed the compound's airwaves with himself the loudest mouth to have a face in between his syndicated loop of fragmented words, some learned and some of it native to his country of birth, all of it demonstrating a fluency in confusion where noise and the allure of fleshments kept the scrutiny of bystanders apace, dizzying panoramic faces fighting to emerge intact amid the revelry afoot.

Humanity flourished from dwelling inside the space of decaying appearance, a species who even now stood apart by an adaptation from the beginnings where the authentic haunts them, finally cultivating the thirst for newer surfaces to cover the inferior lifeform within.

A charlatan is an exemplary member of the human species, as those who dwell in their own skin under the weight of one's own futility for long enough will uncover the forgiveness of a malleable identity in yearning and fluid incarnation.

(To be continued)