Wallflower

Entertainingly crazed Eric asked me, over at his blog, if I was planning on attending the latest MoMA MiXX Dance Party. Of course he knows I'm not before he even asks the question. I didn't even know what a MoMA MiXX was and now that I do I sort of wish I didn't. MoMA's site says it "pairs major artists with world-class musicians or DJs. At each dance party, both the DJ and the artist will spin a set of music that has been influential in their lives and work...." There are pictures of groovy young people gyrating with, one assumes, great and joyous abandon.

This sounds uniformly horrible. It sounds like something dreamed up by befuddled executives around a large conference table in a refrigerated, windowless room deep in the bowels of a glass-enclosed skyscraper. The executives are all over sixty Baby Boomers who want to be in touch with the young people because that's where the money is and they lament that the museum attendance statistics are filled with people just like them only lower class. But it so happens there are some young up-and-coming energetic ass-kissing clowns in the vicinity of the table, the kind of clean-cut chuckleheads who ran for Student Council President back at Vassar, and they have the brilliant inspiration as to what will bring the hip people in: BiCapitalization and TuRntAbLeS! The elderly executives have, deep back in the lizard brains, genetically-encoded memories of their forebears sitting around much the same table and dismissing such things as jazz and that Elvis fellah, and, not wanting to make the same mistake, agree to open up their extravagantly expensive boondoggle children's science museum-cum-curio shop for the underage rabble.

Perhaps these events are well-attended. Perhaps not. It doesn't really matter to me because I'm incapable of experiencing joy. Especially pre-digested joy.

The simple fact is I was never much into that kind of thing. I never wanted to hang out with the cool kids. Although the schools I went to -- high school and college -- were not the kinds of schools you see on TV or in John Hughes movies with cliques of cool kids and jocks and chess club nerds and so forth. Both of my schools were entirely filled with the chess club nerds. None of us were cool. It took a lot of pressure off.

But I heard of cool kids at other schools. Friends from home went to those places. Party schools with legendary scavenger hunts and orgies of drunken revelry broken up by the constabulary. Fireworks, firearms, and firewater.

Even when I was invited I didn't want to go to parties with the cool kids. I used to think it was because I was superior to those people. I had more important things on my mind than meaningless sex and recreational chemicals. I was going to do great things. I was going to discover scientific principles and create daring works of original art. I was going to discuss philosophy and aesthetics with the most sublime intellects of our time.

In short, I figured on one day owning those losers.

Now, as I near the completion of my fourth decade on this planet, I realize that I am not, in fact, superior to those people. I may even be inferior. I don't go to the cool parties because I don't like them. That's it. I just don't enjoy them. The music is too loud. It's too hot and crowded. And I don't know how to interact with other humans.

And I'm never going to own anyone.

So if MoMA MiXX Dance Parties are what the cool kids are doing these days, I hope they enjoy themselves. They'll have to get on without me somehow.