Roll down the window and let the wind blow back your hair

Last night I saw the Blue Man Group: How to Be a Megastar show. I can't remember the last time I saw music in a large venue--maybe Weezer in North Carolina in 2001? Regardless, it was hard for me to fuse the music, the lights, the excitement with the fact that I was sitting. I can't even sit still at small club/pub shows. My leg, I just can't control it, it needs to tap out the off-beat. Sometimes the music grabs me so much that I start to shake. My fists air-drum on my tummy and hip bones. I've been known to bruise myself in the moment. Even on long drives alone, I smack the steering wheel in solidarity with faceless gods. I sing along dramatically, enunciating each syllable as if it is my last breath, and dare my traffic jam compatriots to stop staring and join me in my quest to drive out the ho-hum-ness and alienation of being so close to so many people while siphoned off in a small metal box.

This is why it was so interesting to me to sit in the stadium alongside thousands of other human beings and still feel so isolated. Did the crowd need a ringleader? Someone to attract the stares, the hateful daggers that attempt to thwart any rip in the social fabric? Would I have thrust my fist into the air with more gusto if someone two rows ahead enthusiastically cursed the sky and roared into the black, mechanical dawn?

Perhaps.

But, probably not.

The band, the songs, the words, the percussion all combined to make me uneasy; the images on the screens suggested that I was ever more in the cubicle in the stadium seating than in dull, grey office existence. The lights and sound mocked me, and I kept looking around anxiously to gauge the reaction of the crowd. The screens literally told us to stand up, shake our fists, twist our pelvises, scream from our bowels, bang our heads---and I complied. It's part of the experience after all, yes?

I still couldn't shake the awful feeling that everything we do is a lie.

This isolationist thinking will only leave me lying curled on a dirty bed-roll under a train bridge somewhere, huddling around a barrel fire, staring at my hands, the ground, the flames, anything to avoid eye contact.

Or can this be our only freedom?

What if complying leaves me twenty years from now, plastic-surgeried, manicured, bone-skinny, standing on high heels to emphasize my toned but not too muscular calves that have developed from the strain of white picket fences and corporate jobs and elevators to the fifty-second floor?

I'd like to think the folks under the train bridge would accept me even if I showed up grey-suited and green-faced, nauseous from routine and disgusted with what I have done and what I have failed to do. We'd have a laugh; I'd look around nervously and sip the offered coffee cup for the vital elixir that it is. I would feel the lines on my face dissolve. I would feel the relief of taking off uncomfortable shoes after a long day without a moment's rest.

There must be community.

There must.

It has to exist.

But can it combat our nonexistence?

I shudder and wait patiently, as I have been told to do.