I've often found happiness like that while thinking about the streets underneath Los Angeles. On the inside of a hundred different clubs there are lost minds finding a little, losing a little something, the give and take condensed like powdered milk. I still remember the tight leather miniskirts and thoughtless cocktails slung across chipped teal bars.

It isn't the people, isn't the music, or even the atmosphere, but the mission statement of it all: a locale to forget and to be. The steamy entrails of cigarettes lend an alluring quality to beaming multicolor strobes. I part my eyelids and mystique seduces me, embodied in the sexiest brunette daemon striding forth with purpose. I enjoy corruption. It's like monopoly with live ammunition. The hotels are unnecessary for the less patient. I prefer chess in most cases.

Night life fascinates me, everything about it. The mild tension and expectation build up like a weekly serial. Inevitably things will go wrong, people will be lost, drugs squandered on some bastard who couldn't pack/line/think right, but it's the great recycling bin of youth. You never get out what you put in, but usually that doesn't matter. You went out, did something, maybe even devised a new story to torture an aquaintance with long after the horse is beaten, buried and blessed. I always wonder and dream about that world. The energy itself is like vodka. You need an agenda chaser with it, like a good book or some flour power.

My evening haunt yesterday was my old high school again. The feeling was the extreme opposite: the disheveled quiet of Pinot Grigio...

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