I rolled up to the gig with a car full of borrowed or arguably temporarily stolen speakers and a fat grab bag of cables from home, wasn't sure what I would need exactly. I ripped the turntable out of my home stereo system with great effort because I foolishly put the receiver on the top shelf between my tape deck and my 5-disc CD player so you gotta awkwardly reach behind it to get the RCA out. I didn't bring a microphone because I'm yelling during my sets a lot less than I used to, although that's a good schtick, maybe I should get back to it. Had maybe 35 LPs on me, a lot of disco singles that nobody else likes but I absolutely adore. Started carrying things in from my shitty car through the rain, threw the speakers on stands and squeezed into a borrowed table - a bit too low for three hours of spinning, if I'm being honest - and then suddenly realized I neglected to bring the laptop on which I had carefully prepared a five hour playlist of rarities, remixes, and b-sides, five minutes to go before I was supposed to start playing music. Fortunately the spot had good WiFi and I am a shameful power user of Spotify so I grabbed the dongle from my CRV and started downloading tracks to a new playlist I was making on the spot. No one seemed to notice and no one seemed to notice that all the non-vinyl tracks were in mono because of the cheap dongle and no one seemed to notice that I played 33s at 45 once or twice and I did the damn thing and earned my dirty little venmo payment. Later I heard from a few different sources that I did a really great job.

The problem with my friends' food is that its too good, too plentiful, too delightful - I always eat more than I ought to and have the best time doing it. "More than I ought to" is generous - I eat her cooking without discretion, as Jonathan Richman would say, "I eat with gusto - damn, you bet!" So having been tasked twice now with trying to get a dance party going right after she's served one of her fancy meals I can definitively say that it is no easy task. However she does also tend to get her diners good and liquored up on the friendliest of beverages, plus this place is a hotel, so fewer of us had to drive anywhere after the party. It started as any good party does: no one in the room but me and the 19-year-old bartender, both of us noncommittally bopping along to the Francois Kevorkian remix of "Solid As a Rock" by Ashford and Simpson. Soon enough 12 or so of the hotel guests and other intrepid eaters caught a wave and we all had a good time as the BPMs climbed higher and higher. The two folks who made us dinner were running around and jumping off the stage, where did they get the energy? It is surprisingly easy to keep going when the music is loud enough - something about the volume seems to rattle you awake and long after I climbed down from the booth my brain refused to shut down, like when you've forgotten to close a program with an unsaved file. I was halfway dreaming about half an hour later when I heard music coming from the bar - I guess they kept dancing without me.

I am no true DJ and yet I keep booking gigs both private and public. Part of that is where I live - we seem to have that small town thing of not having enough people to cover all the needs, plus it can be expensive to live here, so a lot folks in my community have multiple jobs, multiple gigs, multiple things they're always doing. You see the same faces filling many different roles. Part of it is having the bare minimum skills to gracefully provide music for a function. But I also think that I've spent a long time unconsciously honing a skill that is essential to DJing - subtly convincing a gathered crowd that what you're doing before them is cool, notable, meaningful, or otherwise worth engaging. I have played my own music on instruments in enough hostile rooms over the many years I've been singing or playing guitar or making weird zones in public to know some important secrets. Act confidently. Try to look somewhat cool. Tell them what you're gonna do, then do it, then tell them when it's done. When people ask you what your band is called don't answer them with something that ends in a question mark. When people ask you what your music sounds like just fucking say something, don't prevaricate. But the greatest secret of all - and the thing I so deeply want to impart on the bands I run sound for sometimes - is that you simply must enjoy it. Fully and earnestly, that is the trick. In this way DJing is quite easy for you simply stand there digging the scene while more or less artfully playing recordings of songs you like. If you like the songs, the dancers will like the songs, particularly if they're been helped along by mercifully dim lighting, a disco ball, drugs, etc. But there's a powerful magic happening despite the simple formation of the words in the spell because nearly everything about being alive in the 21st century is actively conspiring you into thinking that dancing in a room is stupid or unproductive or in bad taste. Enjoying things in the presence of others - and truly enjoying their presence, too - is one of our few remaining radical acts. A happy dance floor with a mediocre DJ sweating through his purple windbreaker blasts the forces of evil apart into the dust of a thousand vaporized goblins. Now go on and flip the record, buddy, they wanna hear another heater.