Two Eight Seven: Dance Floors

I always loved being on a dance floor. But I think we've reached the stage where I won't risk that here. I'm not about to risk the mockery that's reserved for anyone past his early thirties who takes the dance floor. Oddly, I'd still dance all night in Europe (excluding Britain). That may be because standards for dance floor skill are much lower in France and Germany than in. say, NYC or LA. Or because one assumes that Euro club culture is less appalled by age-disparate couples. Or just because I might not be able to understand the mockery when it's in the local dialect of Foreign. Nonetheless, as much as I miss dancing, I think that stage of my life is done.

I will miss it. I think of girls like Liberty or Levin or Jill in New Zealand and think of dancing at rooftop bars in distant cities. But that won't happen again. To be seen on a dance floor at my age--- even dancing to music I love, even (or especially) dancing with a young companion, leaves me open to mockery. I'm not at a stage in my life where I can deal with that.

If there's anything positive to be said about my life this spring, it's this. 

Someone left me this message:

"I just want it noted (preferably in the preface to your book, when it's published) that i thought your posts should be a novel before it was cool to do that (scroll down your comments). an epistolary novel about an aging roue with a wasted phd, stuck (for hinted at but never fully explained reasons) in the deepest south, stewing in the heat, spinning and re-spinning his stories out over the aether and late into the night about a debauched but well-traveled past ... until one night a voice answers back, a sharp hip-boned girl of inappropriate age from an impossibly hip city on a different continent. they go back and forth, flirting, testing each other, telling their stories, but there are cracks and neither he nor she (nor the reader) know if they are what they present themselves to be. she says she's bored and wants danger, real danger, but is afraid she doesn't have what it takes to go all the way. he wants to be dangerous again, really dangerous, but is afraid of the same thing. they talk themselves into an assignation, he forces himself out of his southern lair to make the trip to new york (montreal? prague?), and texts her the room number at a boutique hotel ... he's pacing the room, waiting, drinking ... she's hours late, will she show? is she real? or (a cold, sinking feeling) could it it be someone from the past, from the time of those unfortunate misunderstandings? and then there's a knock on the door ... i'd read it, is all i'm saying. "

I'll be living on the energy in this for a long while. It's like survival food to a lost Antarctic traveler.