06-20-2013, 06:33 PM
Lights - (DJ Halcyon Father's Pride Remix)
June 16th, 2013
Stay with us. It is already inside you.
And that's how her day begins: coming into conscious sitting up in bed, heart racing and breath short. Even after she's cognizant it takes her a few seconds to actually gain control of her body and calm her breathing down. All the while Lil Wayne throws some of his always-irritating word salad rap from her nightstand:
"Throw dirt on me, and grow a wildflower/but it's 'Fuck the world,' get a child out her
Yeah my life a bitch, but you know nothin' bout her/been to hell and back, I can show you vouchers"
(She chose it, for the record, because she claims that ol' Weezy is the only thing that can annoy her into actually waking up.)
With a sigh, she runs her hands through her hair to get it out of her face, then reaches over and taps on the screen to make the alarm go away. It takes a couple taps, and she mutters something foul about unresponsive touch screens under her breath as she fumbles to get the damned thing turned off before it gets worse. Silence finally falls and the next thing you know she has her half-full Rockstar from the previous night in hand, swallowing down a couple of mouthfuls to banish the headache already creeping up. Lena is what you would call a caffeine junkie, and she would be the first to admit such. On the plus side, she doesn't sleep much. That's especially a blessing these days.
After that, her daily regimen begins. Her legs swing out from the bed so she can sit up comfortably. Early morning (which, for her, is 11 AM) is the Selzentry. It's a fusion inhibitor. Light blue, oval, three hundred milligrams. It's swallowed down with more energy drink. She grabs her cigarettes (bad habit, worse for her) and pads over to her computer. Getting showered and dressed; these are things for later. First, she has to check her email.
Lena's apartment is what could charitably be called "messy." There's a good reason she lives alone (you know, besides all the other reasons): if she had a roommate, they'd have an aneurysm. The New York girl isn't unsanitary necessarily, she just believes that life is way too short to spend all of it cleaning. She lives for the moment as much as possible and the moment isn't conducive to organizing her sock drawer, making sure her desk is free of cans or—you know—throwing out take-out boxes in an especially timely manner.
Besides, she doesn't have a particularly good history with roommates anyway.
Bare feet pad across the carpet and by the time she sits in front of her desk she's already exhaling a cloud of smoke. The burning cylinder is set in an ashtray as she opens her email. Most of them she ignores for now (sign my petition! Facebook page notifications! Do you need Cialis?) and others she does quick responses to. Some contain audio files from other DJs she knows from New York…new tracks for remixes. It's almost fifteen minutes and halfway through listening to the second track on the "Newly Added" list that the email comes in.
To: h4lcy0nfl0w@gmail.com
Subject: Tonight?
Hey Lena. Just a final confirmation that you're on tap for the Pride party at the club tonight. Please reply back, you didn't follow up yesterday and I want to be sure.
"Oh gods, that's tonight," she groans as realization of the day hits her. She has very little desire to go, but she already committed. To be fair, she'd been psyched for it when she got the booking because a) she loves to work and b) she loves Pride events. It's just that since then, she'd had a bit of a dreamscape journey and…well, that had kind of sucked her excitement out.
She'd also failed to notice what day it was. She normally didn't work a lot of Sundays, as they are a lot less busy than the other nights of the weekend. This Sunday in particular was even lower on her list. Father's Day was a day of reflection for the Ecstatic. By "reflection," we of course mean "staying home alone and shutting out the world amidst throwing new remixes together until she didn't have to pretend the way was over." Father's Day was an empty enough day for her for most of her life, but it had never bothered her all that much. Not as much as perhaps it should have, at least. Some people have a lot of trauma about growing up without a father, but not Lena. Rather, it was what that did to her brother that really bothered her. Adam always managed to find a way to get in trouble on that day. When she was six, he got in a fight that would be brutal for high schoolers, much less a ten year-old. When she was eleven, Adam ended up in a hospital after plowing the neighbor's sedan into a telephone pole with a blood alcohol level of .10. He left home as soon as he got there. And when she was twenty…
The cigarette is stubbed out in the ashtray after a last drag. Yeah, Pride and Father's Day is definitely too much for her to handle together. Still, she did make a commitment and in her line of work, you can't just blow those off. Especially last-minute and especially when you're still new in an area. She'd managed to get steady work because DJ Halcyon is a known name in the club scenes in New York and she managed to use that to some effect here, but all it would take is one bad incident for people to start shit-talking her, and that would torpedo things. So she sends out a quick reply saying she'll definitely be there, then slips her headphones on to pick out a rough setlist. Showering gets delayed just a little bit more.
Deciding on a setlist is a lot harder than you might think. It's one of those things that helped Lena get ahead in New York; she had an almost instinctual ability to bring songs together so that they not only fit musically, but thematically. She could give the songs the right ebb and flow; she knew when to slow things down and then speed them back up. She could evoke love, excitement, joy or even sadness in her music.
Of course, it was because of her connection (even when she was younger) to the Lakashim. It was her way to connect to others; to share her energy and know that no matter who you were or where you could be found, you were connected to everyone else. Through passion and joy, love and anger, hatred and fear. One person's emotion is everyone's. One person's life is shared by all.
She starts to feel that again as she lets ATB's euphoric, trance-heavy beats flow over her. It's "Humanity," a song that speaks like a personal mission statement for her. It's about surrender to a higher calling as opposed to a higher power. About finding that connection in each of them and living through it.
"You touched my soul, my very being/you made me whole; now life has new meaning
Got a second chance, you can see the change in me/and as we dance you wrap me in humanity."
To be fair, it takes her a couple run-throughs before it's fully sunk in. But she's got the lesson learned. She can't keep herself alone and isolated. The dance doesn't work if it’s a solo one. She needs people to belong to. Her community at Pride, the club scene in general. Maybe even a group to talk to for…the thing. It's been a while for that.
And, of course, her fellow Awakened. She stayed on the sidelines before that night. Part of that is circumstance (she hadn't met anyone else before Sid told her about the cabin) and part of that is choice (she didn't want to look like the outsider forcing her way in once she had arrived and no one had reason to trust her yet). Neither circumstance nor choice can stand now.
The beat is calling, Lena. Stop being a wallflower and get on the fucking dance floor already.
She smiles a little bit at her the little self-motivating voice in her head and saves her playlist. She yanks the headphone plug out, letting the computer revert back to speakers, and lets the first song kick off as she swallows down her Lexiva (protease inhibitor, pink, 700 mg) and heads to shower.
"And I'm not sleeping now, the dark is too hard to beat
And so I tell myself that I'll be strong and dreaming when they're gone…"
June 16th, 2013
Stay with us. It is already inside you.
And that's how her day begins: coming into conscious sitting up in bed, heart racing and breath short. Even after she's cognizant it takes her a few seconds to actually gain control of her body and calm her breathing down. All the while Lil Wayne throws some of his always-irritating word salad rap from her nightstand:
"Throw dirt on me, and grow a wildflower/but it's 'Fuck the world,' get a child out her
Yeah my life a bitch, but you know nothin' bout her/been to hell and back, I can show you vouchers"
(She chose it, for the record, because she claims that ol' Weezy is the only thing that can annoy her into actually waking up.)
With a sigh, she runs her hands through her hair to get it out of her face, then reaches over and taps on the screen to make the alarm go away. It takes a couple taps, and she mutters something foul about unresponsive touch screens under her breath as she fumbles to get the damned thing turned off before it gets worse. Silence finally falls and the next thing you know she has her half-full Rockstar from the previous night in hand, swallowing down a couple of mouthfuls to banish the headache already creeping up. Lena is what you would call a caffeine junkie, and she would be the first to admit such. On the plus side, she doesn't sleep much. That's especially a blessing these days.
After that, her daily regimen begins. Her legs swing out from the bed so she can sit up comfortably. Early morning (which, for her, is 11 AM) is the Selzentry. It's a fusion inhibitor. Light blue, oval, three hundred milligrams. It's swallowed down with more energy drink. She grabs her cigarettes (bad habit, worse for her) and pads over to her computer. Getting showered and dressed; these are things for later. First, she has to check her email.
Lena's apartment is what could charitably be called "messy." There's a good reason she lives alone (you know, besides all the other reasons): if she had a roommate, they'd have an aneurysm. The New York girl isn't unsanitary necessarily, she just believes that life is way too short to spend all of it cleaning. She lives for the moment as much as possible and the moment isn't conducive to organizing her sock drawer, making sure her desk is free of cans or—you know—throwing out take-out boxes in an especially timely manner.
Besides, she doesn't have a particularly good history with roommates anyway.
Bare feet pad across the carpet and by the time she sits in front of her desk she's already exhaling a cloud of smoke. The burning cylinder is set in an ashtray as she opens her email. Most of them she ignores for now (sign my petition! Facebook page notifications! Do you need Cialis?) and others she does quick responses to. Some contain audio files from other DJs she knows from New York…new tracks for remixes. It's almost fifteen minutes and halfway through listening to the second track on the "Newly Added" list that the email comes in.
To: h4lcy0nfl0w@gmail.com
Subject: Tonight?
Hey Lena. Just a final confirmation that you're on tap for the Pride party at the club tonight. Please reply back, you didn't follow up yesterday and I want to be sure.
"Oh gods, that's tonight," she groans as realization of the day hits her. She has very little desire to go, but she already committed. To be fair, she'd been psyched for it when she got the booking because a) she loves to work and b) she loves Pride events. It's just that since then, she'd had a bit of a dreamscape journey and…well, that had kind of sucked her excitement out.
She'd also failed to notice what day it was. She normally didn't work a lot of Sundays, as they are a lot less busy than the other nights of the weekend. This Sunday in particular was even lower on her list. Father's Day was a day of reflection for the Ecstatic. By "reflection," we of course mean "staying home alone and shutting out the world amidst throwing new remixes together until she didn't have to pretend the way was over." Father's Day was an empty enough day for her for most of her life, but it had never bothered her all that much. Not as much as perhaps it should have, at least. Some people have a lot of trauma about growing up without a father, but not Lena. Rather, it was what that did to her brother that really bothered her. Adam always managed to find a way to get in trouble on that day. When she was six, he got in a fight that would be brutal for high schoolers, much less a ten year-old. When she was eleven, Adam ended up in a hospital after plowing the neighbor's sedan into a telephone pole with a blood alcohol level of .10. He left home as soon as he got there. And when she was twenty…
The cigarette is stubbed out in the ashtray after a last drag. Yeah, Pride and Father's Day is definitely too much for her to handle together. Still, she did make a commitment and in her line of work, you can't just blow those off. Especially last-minute and especially when you're still new in an area. She'd managed to get steady work because DJ Halcyon is a known name in the club scenes in New York and she managed to use that to some effect here, but all it would take is one bad incident for people to start shit-talking her, and that would torpedo things. So she sends out a quick reply saying she'll definitely be there, then slips her headphones on to pick out a rough setlist. Showering gets delayed just a little bit more.
Deciding on a setlist is a lot harder than you might think. It's one of those things that helped Lena get ahead in New York; she had an almost instinctual ability to bring songs together so that they not only fit musically, but thematically. She could give the songs the right ebb and flow; she knew when to slow things down and then speed them back up. She could evoke love, excitement, joy or even sadness in her music.
Of course, it was because of her connection (even when she was younger) to the Lakashim. It was her way to connect to others; to share her energy and know that no matter who you were or where you could be found, you were connected to everyone else. Through passion and joy, love and anger, hatred and fear. One person's emotion is everyone's. One person's life is shared by all.
She starts to feel that again as she lets ATB's euphoric, trance-heavy beats flow over her. It's "Humanity," a song that speaks like a personal mission statement for her. It's about surrender to a higher calling as opposed to a higher power. About finding that connection in each of them and living through it.
"You touched my soul, my very being/you made me whole; now life has new meaning
Got a second chance, you can see the change in me/and as we dance you wrap me in humanity."
To be fair, it takes her a couple run-throughs before it's fully sunk in. But she's got the lesson learned. She can't keep herself alone and isolated. The dance doesn't work if it’s a solo one. She needs people to belong to. Her community at Pride, the club scene in general. Maybe even a group to talk to for…the thing. It's been a while for that.
And, of course, her fellow Awakened. She stayed on the sidelines before that night. Part of that is circumstance (she hadn't met anyone else before Sid told her about the cabin) and part of that is choice (she didn't want to look like the outsider forcing her way in once she had arrived and no one had reason to trust her yet). Neither circumstance nor choice can stand now.
The beat is calling, Lena. Stop being a wallflower and get on the fucking dance floor already.
She smiles a little bit at her the little self-motivating voice in her head and saves her playlist. She yanks the headphone plug out, letting the computer revert back to speakers, and lets the first song kick off as she swallows down her Lexiva (protease inhibitor, pink, 700 mg) and heads to shower.
"And I'm not sleeping now, the dark is too hard to beat
And so I tell myself that I'll be strong and dreaming when they're gone…"