White Dress, Red Rabbit
What I like about having the list is that it gives shape to the chaos. Before this, everything just happened to me. Clubs appeared out of nowhere, locations flew through six group chats at once, DJs switched venues halfway through the evening and somewhere in between all that somebody would ask me where I was while I no longer fully understood the question myself.
Now there is a system. Structure. Tiny little calendar blocks calmly informing me where I will be deteriorating later that week. I had hoped organizing everything would bring me peace. That seeing my nightlife visually represented in neat chronological order would soothe me spiritually. Instead it mostly confronts me with the horrifying scale of my own operational failure. The list does not reduce the chaos. It documents it publicly. The only way for me to keep up with any of this is to run, jump, grind and enter increasingly hostile chemical negotiations with my central nervous system.
Take last Saturday. You already know how that night ended. What I did not tell you yet was everything leading up to it. It started at Sonance, which reopened. Again.
Now I say this lovingly, but the last time Sonance reopened they made us all crash so hard that afterwards even they disappeared themselves. Not metaphorically either. I mean literally gone. Vanished. Like the club itself needed a recovery weekend after hosting us. And let’s be honest, that says something beautiful about this nightlife scene too. Our collective power is absurd. Enough people show up somewhere and suddenly a venue either becomes legendary or collapses under the pressure of everybody wanting exactly the same thing at exactly the same moment.
So when the notice came that Sonance was back once more, naturally we all returned immediately like emotionally unstable raccoons revisiting an overturned trash can.
The dress code was white. Now personally I stopped trusting people dressed entirely in white a long time ago. White clothing always comes with strange unspoken expectations. Purity. Innocence. Cult membership. Virgin sacrifice energy. None of which are generally associated with me by people who have observed my behavior for longer than twenty minutes.
What is true however is that I buy clothing the way unstable governments purchase military equipment: emotionally, in bulk and with absolutely no long-term planning. My personality changes weekly and I like to remain operationally prepared. So yes, somewhere deep inside the archaeological layers of my inventory, I apparently still owned white.
The bigger issue was my camera. Or more specifically: the batteries, which were dying with the determination of a Victorian woman in a tuberculosis novel. Every three photographs the thing would simply give up on life again, which honestly made two of us. Sonance deserved better than the handful of pictures I managed to wrestle out of the evening before my equipment started negotiating surrender terms.
After that came Rote Hase, the red little fever dream hidden inside Valmoor where Dante was playing one of his sets. I told you before that the place works. It really works. Saturdays too lately. And a large part of that success is Dante himself, whose style somehow turns funk into something both smooth and faintly dangerous at the same time.
Friends appeared out of nowhere. Drinks multiplied independently. At some point somebody handed me something in a tiny plastic bag with the energy normally associated with offering breath mints. People I loved deeply gathered around me despite me no longer fully remembering how half of us originally met. Lines of white were shared with a generosity that was beautiful in a humanitarian sense. Pills exchanged hands. Bodies moved closer together. The room softened around the edges in the right way. It was one of those nights where everybody becomes the best version of themselves right before collectively making several terrible decisions.
It was a great night. At least until later, when somewhere around sunrise my subconscious decided enough enrichment had occurred for one evening and retaliated with psychological horror. But you already know about that part.
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This post is not sponsored or paid for in any way. I was also not blackmailed or tortured to write it.
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