Austin Heap

I just want to be lost. Not in life though, otherwise I’d be all set. Music is where’d I’d like to go get lost. It’s that world the club scene used to create for me. The world where everyone was happy. Happy with themselves and the others around them because they too were happy. Even when that wasn’t the perception I was getting, my world was always perfect. Me. The music. The DJ. Friends. It used to be a place where I could go, as I liked to say, re-center myself; find that all-important balance that, for me, requires weekly adjustment.

Never needed any substances to amuse us, just a well developed and marvelously designed set. Even when that didn’t happen it didn’t matter. I was happy. Years later — and God only knows how many nights at the club later — the unavoidable reality that clubs are really just boxes with good music and shitty people set in. No one cares about you there, not in the slightest. Most of the people that frequent the club scene everywhere I’ve been are really just frequenting a place they enjoy being whilst taking drugs or consuming alcohol. Same people. Same drugs. Different night. Different DJ. That’s it. Most of my close friends have also lost that spunk for dancing they once had. Now we ‘pre-game’ as to more effeciently allocate our money between cocktails, the door fee, and the night’s taxi ride back. I sit here listening to a set I recorded on November 11th, the first one where I don’t stop bobbing my head, and I feel calm, at rest with myself. The pure euphoria I fell when I mix is so evident to me when I hear the recordings later. It makes me glad to have once experienced this and to bring it back without tearing apart the technical mistakes. I’ve reached a very comfortable stage in my skill; inversely related to the stage I’m at in life. My only real solace in music has become the production I share with no one, and the lovely time spent spinning at home.

Home. Definately a funny word. I act like Bentley College is my home when, God help me if it is, I really dispise the place and most everything it embodies. I’m going back to Ohio again and — quite possibly — for the last time. No, not the very very last time ever in my life, but after this it’s over. No ‘my room’ on Manderly Court, just a guest bedroom in some house that, as my Mom says, “will always be mine,” or something fuzzy like that. I don’t have a home right now. I just travel from state to state, building to building, meeting to meeting and I’m just going through these horribly useless motions. There’s no one place I can go to and really feel like I’m home. I have my headphones on right now as I fly to Dullas to catch the actual plane that’s going to Ohio and, honestly, this is just as home-like as my barron dormatory or my defunct art project that used to be my room during high school.

I often get asked how I ended up at Bentley College. Much to my dismay, I conjure up some random answer that generally apeases people’s thirst. It’s either because of that fabulous GPA I left Olentangy High School with or because it was the one school (out of the whopping two that I applied to) to accept me. Babson was the ‘better’ alternative, but not even the press could buy me off the wait list. To this day I don’t know why I’m still there…it’s a really pathetic excuse for a college. Oops, we’re a university now. But that’s the core of Bentley. Everything there is about image. I may have already blogged this, but when I was asked to speak on a panel about political activisim on campus, one of the faculty asked me why the school offered liberal arts classes. Simple: image. Seriously — do the faculty actually believe that 99.9% of the kids there give a shit?! Since this panel was staffed by some of the best professors at my school, many of which I know outside of class on a more personal level, the answer I gave was generally expected. The exception to that being the reaction from the faculty member who asked.

Earlier this month I posted a little one-liner wondering why I didn’t go to a school where kids pulled intellectual pranks. Pranks that the faculty got a kick out of, that were respectful, and brought different parts of the local community together for a common good cause. It’s really disheartening going to a school where people seemingly have no intellectual draw. People don’t have political ideas outside of the box they’re presented. Beyond politics, there’s still no desire to communicate on an intellectual basis unless there’s some type of mandate for them to do so like, say participation points for a class’ final mark. What’s the motivation in going to class when the subject matter is mundane, when others in the class haven’t done the reading and probably skipped the optional homework. There’s no challenge, or I’ve neglected to present myself with them, at Bentley College. It won’t take a pure miracle to get me through my last semester, close to it though. I’ve got fair assurance that it’ll be the same, shitty classes with the same, shitty professors reading off PowerPoint slides that came with the same, shitty overpriced books the school bookstore (aka BN.com) just resold — and reproffited off of — to me.

Most of the people that I thought would be life friends aren’t really around — largely my fault though.

Candice, I wish you could see the clouds from up here. They’re so beautiful; striking an unreal shade of turquois as they reach out beyond the sky’s horizon into the Atlantic.

I can’t help but wonder how many people are living a life of lies. I mean this in so many different ways besides the obvious. If not to other people, even in the slightest of ways, than to themselves. Every break I have some kind of revelation and the last one was about rationalization. After all, there is no need to rationalize the truth. It’s more of an interpersonal process, I believe, that we as social beings use to make the decisions and actions we take have more weight, even if only in our minds. When I sit and watch the people pass, I really feel like I see insecure people everywhere I look. In their demeanor, conversations…in everything. Then again, one tends to see attributes akin to themselves more so in others.

Lucky it is that as a child we were all afforded the opportunity to be blissfully ignorant. Clutching their orange juice, they walk next to their parent taking in all the mystery shot at their eyes and ears. They’ve experienced too little to see the world for what it is. That quickly fading ignorance and switch to a never-ending quest for knowledge is part of my pain. Besides those who choose to remain ignorant, also know as apathetic once you’re an adult, it’s hard for me to say because I feel they’ve far passed the stage where anything and everything holds mystery. My Mom has said many times that if I keep reading that I’ll become depressed. She wasn’t right, but close. The more I learn, the more I find that I’ve yet to delve into, the larger my list of things I can’t fix grows. This certainly holds true in respects to Bentley because the damn place seems so complacent with the status quo.

The stereotypes out there scare me. I don’t want to be any type of gay man that I’ve ever met. Don’t want to be the one addicted to drugs, stuck in the club scene. Abhor the uber-scandelous nature of a lot of gay men I see. Not really liking the I’m-gay-so-I-became-an-activist thing. Maybe I’ve never met a gay man or woman that really seemed like they were justly happy in life. Not that I wouldn’t say the exact same thing for any straight person I’ve run into. I don’t like what I see in too many people, including myself, and that’s weird. Jon, I think, is coming to alot of these same realizations. We discussed a lot of what I now write during the wee hours of this morning…less the details because he’s been my best friend for nearly three years. One of the things he said is that it’s really hard to sit down and go through the reasons why one is unhappy with their life, doing drugs, or thousands of other things running the gammut.

Since I can’t really speak for everyone else outside of my observations, I’ll use another revelation story to illustrate this point in regard to my life. I forget when exactly this was — sometime before Thanksgiving this year — but Ricardo had swung by earlier to hold me up to an earlier made commitment to go to one of his friends’ birthday party, finally meet some of his non-Bentley friends, and just relax. Ironic as it is, he’s normally the one telling me to quit working, quit reading. Jon and Tom had recently purchased some maryjane with extra high THC levels…hydro they may have called it? Anyway, the unnamed birthday boy wanted a copy of my Andain remix, so Ricardo parked illegally outside my dorm while I ran upstairs to burn a copy. Since I had yet to taste this crazy good weed, assured that just one hit would do the job, I took up the free offering and got pretty high. On the way back, Ricardo had to run into CVS to grab something, so I sat in the car. Wondering why I was high. Why I fealt the need to be high. Why I went out of my way to get high before meeting a people that already respected me, wouldn’t judge me, and wanted to meet me. One thing I bounced off Jon this morning was the conclusion I reached in that CVS parking lot: people do drugs because they hate themselves. I believe that drugs are an escape from reality. I also believe that your reality is what you make it. If drugs are an escape from reality, a reality that I concocted, what is it that I so fear or hate that drives me to these escapes?

I grew up being told that I’d go places and I always had the proof to back it up. I could persue the cubical life, or the life of a marketer (my major)…but those both seem wrong. Programming for what? What good or change has that accomplished when my time has past? Marketing, hah! From a book Ricardo sent me this summer, The Corporation, I’d like to use a quote from (if I’m correctly recalling) the head of marketing for McDonalds. In discussing the ethical issues surrounding marketers and the work they do, he said, “oh I know I’m sucking Satan’s pecker.” Nix that option out. Corporate America just seems like one big shit hole to me.