The Week That Was

Just a dispatch from the re-whirl. So much is going on that's good, it's almost impossible to know where to begin or end at any given moment.

The training is going very well. Less than a week and I'm feeling and seeing results, most of all in how I'm so full of energy that I can barely sit still most days. When I think of the money I am spending on a personal trainer -- and the money I could have spent on months of therapy in its place -- it amazes me how fast things have turned around simply by getting off my ass.

I went out on Saturday night to a party at Beth's apartment, around the corner from ours, and just dripping with Americans and such. It was really fun, and kinda hard to leave. I had to head over to The Week as promised to meet some friends, among them Thomas and his boyfriend. It was a very fun night, given the fact that I ended up going alone -- no Vini, no Elaine, no DC friends -- and was wondering how the night would turn out. As it happens, I met up with the guys, and met some of their friends, and the music was really great. I wasn't at my usual altitude, but I was traveling nonetheless. And on nothing but a few glasses of champagne and a whole lot of water.

It proved to me at least that I can have fun just about anywhere, so long as I am being me -- and I'm feeling good. In fact, it was a strange experience being on the dance floor on Saturday night, and being so far away from where things left off in that clubbing identity I didn't realize I had. See, I thought I was a free agent, more or less, in my clubbing world all the time. That it would never really matter where I was, who I was with or what I was doing -- it would always still be me and the whirl. But that wasn't the case. Maybe it was true way back when I started at age 16, in places like Limelight and Tunnel, or Spyze and Paris New York. But after a while, the act of clubbing had become something so much bigger for me.

It was the one place, anywhere in the world, where I could summon all the ghosts and spirits of times past, present and future, all the hopes and yearnings, joys and miseries, and push everything towards some kind of catharsis that would leave me exhausted, satiated, and at peace when it was all over.

This meant that in times past, like in the 1980s, it was simply about finding a place where I felt I could be me, whoever that was. In college, it was a place where maybe I could find love. In my 20s, it was merely a set for a dearly wished-for erotic adventure. Later on, it was where I'd hoped to find some kind of social niche, a place to belong amidst the turmoil of my life and career. And finally, around my late-mid-30s, it was a place to let go of the world outside, and to bond with my dearest friends and the bigger tribe that would be whirling around us, be it at Nation or Blowoff in DC, or be it in any one of a dozen clubs in a dozen cities around the world.

So, as I was dancing at The Week on Saturday night, I realized that this was probably the biggest part of me that went away over the last year. It went far away. I'm not sure whether it's even really back or not. It's like it was my kid, and it went off to college, and now while it's the same kid that's come back I don't know if I entirely recognize it or not. And it's gotten all haughty, kinda scruffy and self-possessed, and doesn't want the usual milk and cookies. So I'm wondering where we go from here together.