I honestly believe that many of the best, most ecstatic and exciting and simply happiest moments of my life came on dancefloors. Though "happiest" isn't really the right word cos it was never the kind of contented comfortable feeling that I call happy, it was always something more sort of disturbed and disturbing - at least to me - than that, an intensely wild bacchanalian frenzied elation (or as near as a sheltered middle-class white boy from a village in middle England can come to that) - moments which magically resolved that contradiction in which you feel companionship with everyone despite being separated from your nearest neighbour by a wall of sound preventing all but the most basic communication - where I felt absolutely vertiginous excitement, almost a hint or danger (I've read people saying that this is a function of the bass on your insides - which is a disappointingly prosaic explanation but one that does sound plausible) mixed with - yep - ecstasy and so much more and all of it just so FUCKING INTENSE!
But the very nature of such moments is that they slip away almost as soon as they arrive. Even at the time I doubt I could pinpoint them. And once you get home and say "that was a great night" the moments are well and truly lost - of course you know it was a great night, but a few weeks later all you can really recall is that feeling of knowing it was a great night, but any real memory of the bits that actually made it great has long since vanished. In fact that's quite a common experience I think (I don't know if it's just me or if it's universal, suspect the latter); very often if I think about something properly I realise that I don't really remember the actual thing, but I remember the memory of how good it was (or bad or whatever). So I often know I had a brilliant time at x or y, but my own memories of it have become sort of second order or something. Memories of memories.
Does that make sense to anyone? Kinda like if you have a story you often tell then that becomes something you sink into almost automatically and can go through without having to think or have any interaction with the events that generated the story - I feel that my memory often works like that internally too, in that I do something and then afterwards I think back on it and ultimately it's the memories formed during that thinking back on it period which come to mind when I try to think of it later. But I'm digressing here sorry...
Thing is the dance-floor moments that were special to me are probably best lost like that cos they were only special to me. The moment itself was probably just one verse of a random track from the set during which I happened to be highest but it coincided perfectly with my mood and enhancers and the crowd and so on... in my experience the heart-stopping moments have never been when DJ BigName dropped his most legendary track, timed so that the overwhelming climax of the chorus hit at precisely the instant the curtains were pulled back and the sun peeked above the perfect Aegean blue of the sea, its rays hitting the golden mirror on the wall and flashing a message of love and togetherness to the heart of the dancefloor... etc etc that sort of thing always feels too stagey for me. Although in truth I've never really experienced anything like that and if I did it would probably overcome my cynicism.
(apologies that was absolutely all over the place, there must be something worth reading in there somewhere, just by the rules of statistics, monkey with a typewriter etc)
