November 15th at 7:50 PM

When you go to a show or a concert, especially if the musicians performing deserve respect and admiration, your give your complete attention to the stage.  If the music does what music should do, then the audience becomes a community, an entity bound by the sharing of common experience, distinct but never separate from the performers.  The same thing happens at a good theatrical production, or even when you're watching a good movie at some guy's house with friends of friends who you've never met before.  When art or comedy puts you in that kind of stasis within a social context, you become one with the group.  The only people who try to resist this kind of bonding experience are never the shy ones; they are rather the people who are genuinely afraid to let go of "me".

I was in a bar on Saturday night, and all around me twenty-somethings stood holding and sipping and passing beverages. I sat and talked with Jonas and Neal, and sipped my Guinness, but throughout the conversation I kept glancing through the crowd at the faces and the bodies, listening for the different kinds of words and laughter that came out each mouth.  And I saw all of the people engaging in the same activity, but they were doing it all without doing it together.  The game keeps going because individual, self sufficient-entities feel most comfortable interacting with other individual, self-sufficient entities.

I like shows better than bars.  But either way, I end up going home alone.