If You Listen Closely, You Won’t Hear a Thing

I hate this place.  It’s crowded, hot, and noisy as all fuck.  Sweat is dripping off my body, and all I’ve done is walk through the door.  People are gathering in throngs around a central, raised area.  What’s happening there is unbeknownst to me.  I’m not interested in whatever it is that’s captured everyone’s attention tonight, I just want something to drink.  After elbowing my way through a group of people that are packed together like refugees in Haiti, I finally make my way to the counter.   I kindly tell the lady that I’d like a beer, and much to my chagrin, she can’t hear a word I’m saying.  Hell is a dance club.
I like to consider myself a reasonable man.  I take opportunities to try and experience new things.  So when a couple of my friends invited me to go to a club in Killeen, Texas, I thought it might be a neat experience.  Mind you, I’ve been in dance clubs before, but never American dance clubs.  In the year or so that I was in the Republic of Korea, I donated plenty of my time(and my paycheck) to the clubs.  And the one unifying thing I found about every club I was in was how much I fucking hated it.  The beer is too expensive, the music is too loud, and the mood is too intense.  I’m the kind of person who would much rather find a quiet little hole-in-the-wall bar to relax and have a conversation with someone at a reasonable volume.  And yet, I found myself thinking that things would somehow be different.  Through some convoluted, somewhat drunken thought process, I was able to convince myself that in America, dance clubs would be clean, well-to-do establishments with people who thoroughly enjoyed intelligent conversation and valued independent thought.  At the very least, I believed that there wouldn’t be any women there who wanted nothing other than for you to buy drinks from them.  It’s only been a week, and I’m beginning to suspect that I’m expecting way too much from Killeen.      Perhaps it’s because I’m naïve, but I was hoping that the clubs in Korea were merely a bastardization of Western culture.  Turns out, they’re pretty much dead on.  If you sub out the juicy girls of Korea for the walking shot sellers of America, you’ve pretty much got the same damn thing.  American clubs are just as loud, just as smoke-filled(in Texas, at least), and even more crowded than their Korean counter-parts.  It’s impossible to have a conversation without shouting.  The speakers are blasting the latest Lil’ Wayne song so loud that you can feel it rattling your bones, and everyone who is anyone is out on the dance floor dry humping each other to it while the rest of us stand around and watch, wishing we had someone to go out and dry hump but too diffident to perform simulated sex acts with someone who is probably way out of our league anyway.  And as I stood there, cradling my beer for fear of it being spilled on the next person who irreverently runs into me, I began to understand why Al Qaeda hates everything that Western culture represents.  This club isn’t meant to be a bastion of knowledge, and its patrons certainly aren’t here because they’re in need of intellectual stimulus.
And that’s the whole point.
Suddenly, I’m starting to piece it all together. I’ve realized that the lack of intellect is the entire reason people go to dance clubs to begin with.  In every day situations, people have to articulate what it is they desire.  They need to come up with a way of saying things that makes them sound intelligent and respectable.  They go to their jobs, where they’re expected to act like young(or not so young) professionals.  In the household, in the work place, etc. these people have to have a degree of humanity to them.
This is not the case in dance clubs.  Dance clubs are a place where hormones run wild.  Everyone wants to be one of the people out on the dance floor, where they’ll undoubtedly  be molested at some point in the nights proceedings.  No matter how much they’re ridiculed, everybody secretly desires to be the couple in the dark corner making out like the world’s ending and this is their last chance to get laid, because it means that there is someone else out there that understands them.  And it means that this understanding was reached(presumably) with a minimal amount of conversation.  This, at our core, is what everyone wants.  We want to be understood and to be loved, if only for a night.  Dance clubs provide this opportunity–no matter how fleeting–for a nominal fee.  One could posit that dance clubs are the fast food industry of hook-ups.
This, of course, creates a bit of a logic fault.  How can someone be loved in the space of only one night?  Perhaps a better analogy is that dance clubs can be offered up as being the drug dealers in the industry of hook-ups.  Because in the space of one evening, being loved is equivalent only to feeling loved, these clubs provide people with a place to feel loved, even if they aren’t truly being loved.  It seems indeed like a fleeting opportunity to find any basis for even a friendship at a place where you can’t so much as hear someone tell you their likes and dislikes, much less a place where you’d find your soul mate.
And yet, not more than twenty minutes after this thought crosses my mind,  I find myself engaged in a thought provoking–albeit ear shattering–conversation with a woman about different forms of art.  She is a painter, and she agrees with me that judging any artist by one piece of their work–be it good or bad–is the equivalent of giving someone a job based solely on one look at their resumé.  She also agrees with me that this kind of one-stop judgmentality is the only reason for M. Night Shyamalan’s massive success.  It all goes to show that life is full of irony.