ZANY and zest.

A TROUBADOUR FLAMINGO party.

DrWadata
DrWadata
Nov 1 · 17 min read

Editor’s note: Well, that didn’t take long…

If you’ve read my most recent update to this channel, you likely recall that the good Doctor recently did not return home. Good riddance, if you ask me, not that he ever would… In any case, He hath returned with many a madness in tow.

So.

Not much has changed, really. Apparently he passed out on-location somewhere after a party with a friend in from Italy, an older man from Bologna by the name of Blissett. He insisted, like an overgrown child (and, might I emphasize, a bit of a buffoon) that I make no small effort to compile on this channel his notes from the soiree, which he insists capture not so much the events of evening in any sort of literal accounting, as might a sane individual, but rather how they felt. At least, such is my interpretation of the good Doctor’s immature little song and dance.

Here am I, ever his fool, typing away and trying to make good sense of nonsense and trying to make digestible his immature, cynical, drunken idealism while he’s already back with his bedroom door shut, sleeping off whatever demons he set loose the night before.

I do wonder what type of crowd he’s gotten himself wrapped up with this time, that pragmatic revolutionary, that clear-eyed orgiastic devil-brain in a lush’s cape…

-AH


Zany and zest…

a

TROUBADOUR FLAMINGO

party.


(Pictured: top hat on fire)


It’s not a book, it’s a party — and you’re invited.

Every chapter a scene, sometimes more.

Every verse, a character, sometimes less.


…and we’ll start with guest number three…


“He felt the curl of the skin on the top of his head as it melted.”

-Overheard at the party, by guests unknown.


Welcome.

There’s a room with red walls where the white noise is perfect. It’s loud enough to drown in, and quiet enough to scream above, as the laughter and gasps sometimes dare to do. Every face reminds you of one you’ve surely met before, and every pair of eyes belongs to a delightful new stranger genuinely relishing making the same out of you and yours.

You’ve been here long enough to feel eased into the evening. You certainly don’t feel you’ve overstayed your welcome — the night has just begun. You weren’t late, you weren’t early; you were expected, but not assumed. You were welcomed with the warmth of second strangers eager but not desperate to play their parts in a story worth telling tall tomorrow afternoon.

You’re on the same team.

You know these people just enough, and they know you just as well.

You all want to know more.

Tonight has all the symptoms of one of those nights where you don’t feel like…

Where tomorrow doesn’t feel like an eventuality.
Where tonight doesn’t feel like a loan.

Where an evening is a mile of minutes that can be divided into infinite equal portions of space, and time can sink between those infinite spaces like tiny specs of glass down the crevices of a broken kaleidoscope.

You feel well-rested like you haven’t in ages. You feel drunk like giddy, you taste wine like a contented exhale on a cool summer night.

My friends…welcome.

* * *

There’s a room where an old man juggles little balls of fire. He stands in the corner off mostly to himself, but in a way that doesn’t make you feel lonely. His concentration is on the fire — each mass of sparks grazes his oven mitt hands for only an instant before he sends it orbiting around a space above his head again.

No one “oohs” or “ahhs” in here — we’re all too relaxed, and why be rude? Juggle your anxiety, juggle your stress, juggle fire — we all have our preoccupations, and it’s neither worth ignoring nor worth stressing over, though the talent with which he wields his flame is surely if naturally noted and appreciated.

Perhaps the fire juggling catches your eyes, and perhaps you realize you’ve been staring. In such a case, he takes your interest in his hobby of passion in kind, and he nods like a crisp white envelope newly sealed. In such a case, perhaps you emote a nod back, and just after you’ve so done and wandered off you wonder absentmindedly how you might have expressed this…

Past the juggler along the walls are small stands protruding from the walls, each holding a little teacup or a small dish resting on its perimeter. Except there are no dishes, and there are no teacups — only tiny black holes condensing matter into nothingness.

A long woman with a robust adam’s apple is laughing in the key of A Minor just in front of a few of the black holes. And perhaps, suddenly you are laughing, and in such a case she laughs with you.

An overstuffed gorilla slaps you on the back good-naturedly; he tussles your hair and little puffs of foam fall to the floor like silent warm snow from a rip in the seam in his shoulder. Perhaps you turn too late to catch his eye; perhaps he’s already padding off in a lumbering gait to another group of partygoers. But in such a case he’s sensed your welcoming smile expressing your gratitude for the physical connection and the intimacy of welcome, and in such a case perhaps he even winked in return, and you felt it but did not see it.

After all, it’s a party…


There is a room in this place that’s just one room over from a different room that’s right across from this one and it’s jazz.

Perhaps you walk into it, but they say passing through the frame where the door should be feels more like wading into a scene, or perhaps you’ve just assumed. As preening cats saunter airily into and out of this space you notice that their rags are dripping with bebop and you gird yourself amiably to get a little splashed.

In this place, chatter rollicks and rolls like a tangled yarn of soft maroon tumbleweed on an easy breeze; it exits through Sartre’s many parted lips and through myriad sexy smirks; it carries an intoxicating, dank afterbreath of tannins and côté du rohn.

A loose note saunters out of the high-back of a wooden soapbox with faux-menacing swagger and the wink of a magician reassuring the more astute children that really much of everything is an act after all, and all in good fun.

Ah, the lies we tell ourselves and our children…

Next in lightly coordinated succession comes a two-handed chord — elastic and springy; one end ties itself around the tickled side of your heart, the other’s hooked on a bassline. The line tugs the chord as it goes for a walk and you feel the rhythm in your chest like a rude staccato as it leads you on a zigzag tour of duty through a packed warm room. That taut, aggressive swagger-line weaves your head eyes and feet like a gaggle of excitable tourists on a pleasant strut through little rotating circles of fascinating human creatures exchanging whimsical gasps and exaggerated belly laughs.

The bassline tugs on and, very likely, you can’t help but chuckle, as perhaps you nod to agree and raise an eyebrow to object with a wave of merciless welcome and the clink of a dry drink in a wet glass.

Perhaps in such a case it isn’t worth wondering where the glass might well have come from, let alone the liquid.

The bass is getting hotter; as you rub your puffed out chest with an easy sweat your head nods ever more eagerly until everyone is certain that we’re all on the same page.

A drummer slips you a high hat and a hard one, and perhaps you’re on your way.


There’s a room where something sour has just been tasted by all involved.

Eyes in pairs (and even one relieving itself from its partner behind an itchy and dangerously violet eye patch) each seek out disparate corners of this space to hide from one another. The little tips of lips in the corners of each other’s mouths quiver and dip; breaths dive to the floor and cover themselves with invisible rugs.

A person with white bleached hair and bloodshot eyes is frozen in theatrical shoulder shrug. The thin skin on a lip gets bit by its well-meaner. Ghosts politely beg their pardons and make their escape toward the bar, though everyone knows that there isn’t one (just a kitchen, of course, perhaps you know this.)

But it isn’t personal, whatever has or happened here — you can know this almost intuitively. And in such a case as this, perhaps it’s best to keep moving, to smile to say you aren’t privy to any reason to slow down and so you don’t…


There’s a room where the house lights are off and little rope lights have been tossed haphazardly on wooden beams all around the ceiling like someone very much wanted to seize the horns of randomness and tear through all hell with a stethoscope.

People paired off in twos and threes imitate the drastic love scenes from their fantasies of porn from the mid-1980’s. Perhaps you sense a hand rolling slowly like lightning across a thigh made up of dry skin and razor burn. In such a case perhaps you don’t stare, but then again you saw it, so perhaps you did after all.

A young couple in matching top hats, smooth cheeks and twinkling eyes above pale youthful lips above dapper penguin suits with fantastical tails, they implore you with matching cocky yet charmingly-self-effacing grins to please take their picture. They insist it be perrrrfect, but their camera has no flash and the lights are off, and anyway their camera isn’t a camera, it’s an ancient black cat that wields a resolute emotional apathy towards the concept of linear time.

Perhaps you forgot what you were doing, since the Top Hats were never speaking to you, and they never handed you a camera anyway, but in such a case they only glance at you in an off-handed sort of way so as to wonder why you’re framing them at all. Perhaps you can’t recall. Perhaps they pose all the same, and you grin as you nod. The flash comes without warrant, and everyone agrees that whatever it was you’d all sought to do here had surely been accomplished. You shake hands eagerly with everyone, and the little roped lights begin to strobe and tick as the strangers rub carpet and lick little patches of sulfur sticking out of the oak-colored walls like electroshocked fur.


There’s a room where gentlemen of all genders chat politely while a piano hums in a moderate distance.

An old woman holds court here. She stands in a circle of yellow light cast from nowhere in particular. She tells tales that are tall and fables that are middle-sized. Her yarns are thick and itchy, her anecdotes drive you up the walls. She’s seen them, and she’s met him, and she knows the score before the game’s been played because every game was of course already played to victory many moons ago.

Someone taps you on the shoulder. They smile, and their joy glints like a newly polished teacup made of brass. Perhaps you start to laugh, and in such a case perhaps so do they, and then perhaps you’re both laughing until at last so is someone else. A few more chuckles, and now perhaps a hurricane — you all realize at once that it’s all really quite contagious. Someone rushes in a frenzy to open a window but before they can reach the Western Wall and be reminded that all the windows are naturally at least seven feet plus all of eight inches off the ground they’ve already doubled over, and in such a case as this perhaps after all there’s no turning back.

The room pulses with it — with this giddy contagion. She wipes her eye with a pink finger delightedly and asks what on earth you’d all been laughing about anyway, and perhaps you just laugh and laugh until your stomach hurts and suddenly you recall that her hand had been on your shoulder for longer than you can remember. Perhaps you blush. Time takes a break, and perhaps you encourage it, still chuckling, not to hurry back, as she and you clink glasses that you hadn’t recalled you were still holding.

I…” and he says something.

Perhaps you aren’t sure what he’d said, and perhaps in such a case you’re somewhat surprised and enthralled to realize you’d said something back.

Perhaps this happens more than once. In such a case, perhaps it happens more than twice.

The piano sounds like the moon, and the chatter looks like music as the room swells and stretches, stomachs sore and eyes all glittering with the most honest form of release that perhaps you’d ever seen: a moistness in the corners that no one throughout the thrust of human history has ever yet learned to fake.

The older woman concludes, and everyone applauds and bows, and perhaps you can’t quite recall how you and they had all wound up in the center. The story was hers, just as you were theirs, and all of it was a tale that had more than just begun but was far from ever after.

Perhaps you express, “excuse me,” finish your libation’s most current incarnation, and chuckle with momentum as you carry yourself onward to another place.


* * *

You look comfortable. You’re dressed to mame, and your smile will leave a mark. When you walk by a smell lingers, but not an odor. You split your infinitives with a pen knife you keep in your breast pocket, you pun with a wink of deference. The zone is all around you, you weave through it like a native.

* * *


There’s a room where you can’t tell what time it is.
All the clocks are wrong and they’re everywhere.

The light is coming from one of those out-dated sorts of bulbs that makes everything a little yellow and there are no windows, and no reception reaches your technological devices.

Someone is napping on the couch; they never wake, their body unable to sense the physical signs of night of day of exchanging of shifts. People speak at the volume you would use on the inside of an office conference room filled to its reasonable polite capacity. The voices never swell nor dim, they simply persist. The conversation always feels recent, like small-talk or polite preamble.

Perhaps you glance at a clock that says it’s 5pm. In such a case perhaps you seek to wind down the conversation someone had just begun, and perhaps they had just seen a watch face proclaiming the time 7:50am and felt inclined to seek momentum in your interaction. Perhaps you sigh, eyes distractedly glancing around for hidden hallways in the private places that hide in our peripheral vision as they wonder all on their own what other sorts of stories they might this very moment be missing as time zigs and flutters in all directions, none of which seem directed at you…


There is a room that’s almost empty.

One or two people, perhaps they’re middle-aged, each perhaps having come or simply now standing alone, waft through slowly in a humid emotional breeze that feels sticky. Perhaps a part of you wonders if you were mistaken, and this room was unintended for party goers, a portion of someone’s life for some reason guarded from you, if only lightly.

Perhaps in such a case you find yourself for some strange reason not wanting to appear to flee. In such a case perhaps you slowly let your eyes and fingers trace the few old hardcovers and dusty Blu-ray boxes laying around in reaching distance, absentmindedly piecing together through the honest sense of touch a life or lives lived through this private space — a world so naked it must be honest; a clue to a mystery no one was ever asked to solve.

Someone coughs, and perhaps you think too long about whether or not you should say something out loud, offer a blessing. In such a case perhaps the moment passes and you haven’t said anything.

Perhaps it’s been long enough to leave the room after all.


“I dreamt last night I was a marshmallow.”

There is a room in this place filled with storytellers of the Old Guard. The last and solemn few, perhaps, to recognize our reality for the flimsy excuse for a tale it tends to be, and readily offer all who seek it an alternative to think about in any season.

This room is dark, but there’s one lone, hot floodlight that shines most brightly in the northwestern corner of the room. A young woman stands there, where the lone light shines brightest. Others stand around her, and all the people in the room form loosely what would look from above like little radiating ripples of concentric life emanating from the corner.

Someone stuck a piece of wood through my heart, says someone in the second or third semicircle out from the corner. The heat made my crust harden and grow dark, but inside I felt all gooey and loose, like a dribbling thing that couldn’t form to stick together…

Muted snaps crackle like jilted neon. Someone plucks abscent-mindedly at an old classical guitar in the key of A Minor.

Perhaps it all sounds like inane nonsense. Perhaps it strikes you like a melody you think you might have caught yourself humming once upon a time a very long time ago.

There are little fires everywhere, someone offers four rows from the corner, picking up the narrative, and we’re all at risk of burning.

In such a case, perhaps you recognize suddenly a familiar voice from very near — it’s your voice, and it sounds just like a recording, flipped inside out and a little dry, little pops of static dotting the space behind the sound, as you whisper from a rare patch of shadow leaning against the Western Wall.

“And as the evening reached its peak, I felt I’d been consumed.”

In the dream, perhaps, is what you might have meant. And the room full of jaded liars and pretentious dreamers nod at that with reassuring familiarity, and you ponder what it all means as perhaps you carry on.


There is a room filled with people, where no two people in the room speak the same language.

Someone frantically shrieks with their hands, their eyes sunken into the burning flesh of their forehead.

Another grunts rollicking consonants with careless flicks of their cheek.

It seems to be important, and perhaps you and a few others in matching t-shirts and bad cologne, hair full of gel eyes full of aggressive concentration, strain to listen harder.

“I do too,” perhaps you think you’ve understood.

“Fearless pirates of the Avalon,” perhaps in such a case is what you feel has been expressed.

Another nods gravely.

“Urgent scars demand the best,” and a shrug, and a few timid laughs, cautious eyes seeking out a narrative thread.

And then perhaps a theatrical pause is shared by all around you, perhaps you share in it as well.

Then suddenly, and with little warning, there appears before the heart and between the eyes a sword thrust through the debris of human understanding — the last desperate cries on the tongues of the many dead of babel; some dusty word once scrawled on the doorposts of Eden that for whatever reason no one in any human nation had ever taken it upon themselves to fully kill. An old, familiar, wordless sound.

Take a moment, and imagine a pleasing sound you’ve never made with your lips and your tongue before, but feel confident you could make right now if you wanted to. Perhaps it sounds like that.

And suddenly: Remember that contagious laughter from the other room? Yes, your old and trusted friend, in the context of a party such as this — it barges in unannounced, practically busts the door down in a burst of dirty gold hinges and smokey dust, and immediately takes to slapping backs and reciting names like a video game character with the turbo button held down, until everyone is fluently laughing again all over one another.

In such a case, with wet glass dry poison ever left at hand, perhaps for a giddy moment laughter is all you speak…


There is a room with no walls, a room of just a roof. It seems to sit halfway up a building you can’t recall exiting, hanging nowhere in particular like an empty rusting birdcage. A drunken jagged approximated rectangle, a patch of missing sky with razor along the Western edge, hangs above your head, even as the air of an evening filled with hidden stars surrounds you indifferently.

It’s colored by speckled fading copper, the ceiling is, with little specs of rust that pool into puddles a few inches apart from one another while you watch. The missing walls aren’t colorless, but they aren’t anything else, perhaps you may suppose.

Perhaps you find yourself here unexpectedly. Perhaps you breath in, quickly but deeply, and the air is mild and sprinkled with a warm dry dew. Perhaps you exhale, slowly but also deeply, a cold visible stream of the past that takes its time as it leaves you, and not entirely.

In such a case as being in such a place perhaps feelings masquerade as smells, and melancholy nips at your nose until you sneeze.

In such a case, perhaps you hope someone will bless you. In time, perhaps someone offers to. A voice without a body that stays behind your back as your turn — a magic trick with no prestige; a rabbit and no hat.

In such a case perhaps you offer to the radio static breeze your thank you, and the nod of welcome brushes against your left shoulder in an impersonal sort of way, and you should hardly feel obligated to make eye contact with the feeling before it’s gone.

Perhaps you glance downward. A little puddle forms from the waste that drips from your left-most fingers.

Perhaps you’ll choose to take another breath before you make your way back to the party, but of course, that is up to you.


… and then, there was a room you absolutely cannot remember….

Perhaps you could swear you’d been there before, and in such a case perhaps you find yourself trying to bring back the memory like a seed stuck between your teeth.

You had been there, of course you had. You can practically be sure. There was a color, there were shapes, you can be sure, you might as well be sure, all of which still likely as not, still not as anything you can’t recall, if they’d ever been at all…shuffle now…


There is another room, perhaps you find it now…

…swaying in dark silence when perhaps you walk in. Music pulsing, the cats wear binoculars with sunglass shades over the eyes. Hipsters nod knowingly. Perhaps you cross your eyebrows, and in such a case, some stare, some nod, one lone voice screams, and screams, and screams. The room grooves on beat. Her silver hair is only a reflection. They suck in their hips and laugh below the speed of sound. No one can hear anything but the pulse, and she screams, and they nod and they nod, beat pulsing, everyone seems to understand in ongoing unison. Naked elbows rub up on bare bald cheeks and raw fingertips. Someone breaks in, a big red suit with a tail streaks through the room in a blur, and perhaps you think it’s time to carry on…


A series of sophisticated-looking hares are smoking pipes.

No, no of course they’re not.

Talk about how bulbous and fat one of them was, and another was so narrow minded.

That’s not right either…now how could that even be?

Well,

No party lasts forever…

* * *

AND NOW:

Our final descent approaches…

* * *

There’s a room that spins and coats your tongue with wax. Little shit street kids yank at your thought trains when they’re sure you’re not looking. Others view this uncomfortably, like it was you what let them in.a

ROom where the band jams in endless grooves that make your head nod and your jaw tick. The beets make your body tock. It’s infectious, and you feel raw and primal and naked sweat.

…balance…


Room you’ve been shoved to. A thick and tangled ocean of fists and fingers bursts you forward and recedes to the noisy shore behind. White and plastic infinitely repeating squares race toward your irises. You climb with the grip on your fingertips a cool basin surrounding a calm pond. You scream in belches. The calm of that pond is shattered abruptly, the waters turn pink and your body quakes.


There is room. Somewhere far off a top spins, because spinning gives a top its purpose. Every mattress you’ve ever met has your best interest at heart, if you’re interested in giving up on gravity.

HA! No, no you’re not…

NO…YOuRe….

knoT??

at last, those little voices

GOOO<<<MMEEE…..

…perhaps they say,

…butyoucamtrememberwhosaidit…

* * *

Hey now, try not to worry about it…

It’s a beautiful and bright new early morning, after all, and here you are!

You’ve survived this, and you’ve gotten away with that, and all of it is done now anyway, so why not live, seeing as how we’re being here anyway…

* * *

DrWadata

Written by

DrWadata

Your humble editor "AH" faithfully if frustratedly documents as the good Doctor whines and weeps and wines and winds his way through an indifferent universe.

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade