High Tech and Low Life

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I woke up within an inch of an eye-killing shard of broken glass.

I couldn't remember what had happened last night, my only guide was the insistent drumming that still hounded my ears; the phantom limb memory of a night in the club before my sentience was cut short.

The room was a study in greys and dust. I had no point of reference but the glassy light of the street on the other side of the broken windows. Daytime. It looked so pathetic.

Was I wounded? Did I throw up in my sleep? Why did my spine and balls ache as though from sex, repeated kicking or both?

The radio had been playing the whole time, it just took me those long minutes to notice it. I heard accross the tinny static, a brightly limping bump of beats long dead. Some ol' jazz musician's voice yiped the words to tunes using slang words nobody even remembers anymore.

"You gonna need me someday," the hep cat's voice growled. I hit the ground as my body aborted its first attempt to stand. My hand hit the glass with a silent shock of pain. Blood. It was the most colorful thing in the room.

The rest of my sensations came back after that, as though unlocked by the magic key of laceration. My skin crawled with the mixed drum 'n bass madness of the night before. Like a kid in the pool too long, the music was still there. I had become some kind of biological mixing board, adding kicks and loops to the old-timer songs without thinking about it.

And I couldn't stop listening.

For the first time it felt like I had reached some kind of true enlightenment. Outside the sky was a polluted hash of carbon monoxide and UV. Inside, my head and the space behind my eyes scratched as though scraped by a thousand rusty coat hangers.

But the beats kicked on. My sentience building itself brick by brick as the DJ flashbacks danced with "Pennies From Heaven" before spinning "One for My Baby" into a cathartic ambient groove.

I started to cry. It was the first thing that made sense all morning.