There’s a metalhead spraying smut on the Cadillacs parked out front. It’s too cold for the doorman to be out there watching. He looks the other way anyway, and the coat check girl has turned his head tonight.

Inside it’s hot hot. Or that’s the name of the song, or the dance that the girls are doing in a line under the neon moon they’ve hung from the ceiling. The percussion mix on this tune sounds like a bucket of loose staples, or a marching band, depending on how much you are partying tonight. Everyone’s partying hard, cold weather, you know, so I guess it’s the marching band. Still, I hear the staples.

Halfway through the song a fight breaks out in a corner of the dance floor. Everyone keeps dancing, only a few move aside, just enough to evade the falling bodies as the boxing morphs into wrestling. The bouncer has to leave the coat check counter to intervene, and he is not happy. He pops one of the guys and slits his nose. Blood on a white shirt, a Japanese flag. A bartender hops the bar with a rag and wipes the floor. Charlie, the DJ, seeing all of this, edges up the volume leading into the chorus, recapturing everyone’s attention until the hook hits – he floors it, volume to 11, fire the confetti cannon. Euforia. Strobes, massive sound, free bodies under a neon moon. Neon moves.

 

-Danny Grosso

Continuing the expeditions of Jeff MacNelly, James Kilpatrick, and Eugene McCarthy, with apologies.

The Deficit Hawk

When new legislators once came to Washington they were often found scanning the skies above them, on the lookout for the Deficit Hawks. Coincidentally the purposeful people’s defender and the scourge of the ambitious drafter of bills, the Deficit Hawk preyed upon the dreams of taxers and spenders. Many a newbie found that the policies he or she campaigned on were rendered untenable by the sharp pencil talons of the DH. Dozens became one term legislators after having to face a re-election constituency  without any enacted bills to account for the time in the public trough. the Deficit Hawks had become the police force for the governmental bottom line.

Alas, the once the sharp sighted cops have now gone blind. The political evolutionary cycle has taken a toll and selection has deemed the eyesight of the DH superfluous. Indeed, after the GOP gave up its affectation with the entire DH species, the creature’s gifts were ignored, and unused, creating a situation ripe for sensory atrophy. Like a deep sea fish, or subterranean crawler, the need for keen eyesight ebbed away over time, and now one sees new legislators ignoring the skies and instead staring downward at their smartphones.

 

-Danny Grosso