We’re dancing aren’t we?

We’re dancing aren’t we? One of those wild dances. The ones where you have to dress up in feathers and colorful suits and prance around like you’re all crazy and shit. One of those dances, right? Hell, if I had known better, I would have brought my cowboy suit and all. Shit, I could have brought in the whole western front if I had known we were gonna do a dance. Yeah, you heard me, the whole western front. Mom, Pops, the neighbors, and the whole goddam sheriff’s squad. I could have brought them all here if I had known we were gonna do a dance.

And that’s what we’re doing, right? One of those crazy-as-hell dances where you skip-to-the-loo-mah-da’lin and then hop around and act all giddy as if you had just won an all-expenses-paid trip to the moon and back, or maybe one of those new instant coffee machines. These are the dances where little girls from town come and don’t dance at all. All they—the little girls now—do is stand around and watch the pretty boys dance with the older women (who, might I add are only dancing with the boys because their husbands are too drunk at the bar).

But those women, they enjoy dancing with the boys because they’re simple creatures who never bother to indulge in anything complex like life, love, happiness and all that other bullshit. The women whisper and yell words to each other on the dance floor like, Oh! How cute this one is! and Oh! My! Nancy you’re going to have to steal this boy away from me tonight!, as if the boys they were dancing with had no ears at all! And all the while the boys are pretending not to hear any bit of it. They don’t want to come off as proud, but more importantly they’re thinking that they don’t want screw up the dance by becoming distracted and having a misstep happen right over their partner’s toes. So the boys keep focused the only way they know how: by putting on their manliest of manly faces, frowning and acting as nonchalant as possible despite the fact that their palms are now as sweaty as the backside of one of those sheriff folks I was talking about bringing before after they’ve been chasing some crook for 10 miles—on foot. In the hot western sun, no less.

Dang, that sun sure is beating down. And just look at those little girls from town, strolling in one by one as they hear the music from afar. They’re asking their mothers if they can have a drink so the mothers buy them some lemonade. It’s the sourest lemonade any one of them has ever tasted. Tastes like shit they think, only having heard the so-called correct use through television and their neighbor’s foul mouth (little girls hear more than you would assume). But to hell with it and the girls all eventually gather in one corner and mumble to each other about how hot it is, how lovely (and tasty they say) their sour-ass lemonade is, and how pretty the pretty little boys are who are dancing with the older women. And they giggle and laugh and point, and occasionally one of them has the courage to get up from their seat and grab some more lemonade.

But where was I? Oh yeah, this dance. We’re doing that now aren’t we? Good, because I’m ready. Except I’m not wearing any suit or donning any feathers or putting on any special hats. I’m here to dance, that’s all. So go ahead sweets, take my hand, pull me up from this chair and slowly walk me onto that dance floor because that’s really why I came. I came to dance!