High Lonesome Wednesdays

See the manic trumpeteer blasting and blorting his melody at 1 a.m. and inducing brooms to hit the ceiling below. See the great assembly on the rostrum in the Blues Club, with its dancing and its tunes bouncing off the walls and innervating knees so that they keep twitching. See the overcaffeinated row of three tables where scarved and hooded figures half-sleep in the sounds of pandemonium. Or how about the twitching dancers in front of the rostrum? Where are the panthers that leap into the rooms and predate the hell out of this impromptu party? Where are the excessively long tables piled high with newspapers where I tried to write a poem which ended up spilling onto the table and made me blush and leave really quickly? Where are the box sets of "essential listening" CDs for the modern iconoclast? They are high lonesome Wednesdays. Try drinking until you can't feel feelings any more. Try swallowing your jealousy at the mandolin player whose fingers are like hummingbirds, or your inadequacy at the nasal twangy harmonies they manage to extract, which are like gossamer feathers compared to your bullshit affected throaty rasp. This attempt at Cohenesque prettiness is declared over, with mixed results, as usual.

Consider: "The handful of hotel guests were still there, alone again, except now they were confronted with a hundreds-strong armada of hipsters overhead, arrayed shoulder to shoulder, staring silently down. But intimidation was not the point; we were staring down at where we had just been, and also across at one another, two hundred artist-spectators commandeering an atrium on Forty-second Street as a coliseum-style theater of self-regard. After five minutes of staring, the ring erupted into precisely fifteen seconds of tumultuous applause—for itself—after which it scattered back downstairs and out the door, just as the police cruisers were rolling up, flashers on."