Down Against It

The name of the group Jock was reviewing tonight was Malaysian Malaise and he didn't much care for them. The usual bunch of solemn art jesters in lurid purple or magenta t-shirts, tinkering with electronic pedals and devices, summoning what they perhaps felt was some deeply religious and ecstatic current of drone. The whole thing was too self-aware and codified to really carry any weight.
Jock watched elements of the sparse, rapt audience with subdued disdain and then took a long drag on his beer. Beer was a funny thing. Oftentimes a man could harbour a profound yen for the stuff and then, upon acquiring it, recall that it tasted helluva bitter. Yet oddly compelling. Then two or three beers later the taste was re-engaged to the familiar flowering of stupefied pleasure in the feckless recesses of the mind.
Malaysian Malaise turned slowly to their respective amps and then abruptly shut them off in tandem. Silence and then a smattering of enthusiastic applause from a fervent few.
Jock took a few minutes to finish his beer and then rose from his seat near the bar. He had been commissioned to conduct a brief interview with Maya, the only female dronette amongst the other droners of Malaysian Malaise.
He located her in a room which was lit and decorated in the style of a classroom amidst vintage analogue phaser pedals and tangled patch cables. In the background the drifting sounds of Double Jonathan, the next band onstage, became apparent.
Although she had the appearance and surface demeanour of a neurotic hippie chick, Jock discovered Maya to be a warm and alluringly luscious lassie. He wanted to linger near her indefinitely but sensed a gradually accumulating evasiveness on her part. Desperate to stem this, he offered to buy her a beer and went off to the bar. When he returned with two bottles of Brahma he was sad to find she had dispersed. He sat alone in the empty, overlit classroom and quickly drained both bottles. Then he returned to catch the end of Double Jonathan's self indulgently abstract set.

Pulsing glimmers of euphoria in the deep, howling, blackened void of the universe.

Jock caught a bus home and sat near two irreverent kids with slim fit jeans and asymmetrical haircuts. One held a freshly gripped skateboard deck on his lap.

He preferred to dance at home, alone, his socks shuffling on the carpet. Such was his preference.