Lose your mind and dance

Most folks who know me at the UW know me as a 24/7 political activist, a hyper-opinionated Daily columnist and all-around troublemaker for the established order, but that's only part of who I am. I'm really a fun-loving guy. If it weren't for little things like nuclear terror, ecosystem collapse and the corporate sell-out of democracy, I'd spend my time fixing bicycles, playing slide guitar and growing organic tomatoes.

One of the multiple personalities that comprise my disturbed self is musical. In addition to the slide guitar (with which I once, for three years, earned a decent living playing on the streets of Seattle), I also play drums. Not drum kit, but hand drums. Mostly I play conga.

I've been drumming for eight years. Actually, I've been drumming my whole life, if you count hands slapping on knees. One thing I'll never forgive my mom for (I forgive you, Mom) is when I was 11 years old, she told me I could have any musical instrument I wanted. I said I wanted bongo drums. She bought me a melodica. A melodica is a little toy keyboard you blow through, kind of like a harmonica with a fingerboard. I was not happy.

Yes, yes, I can see clearly now -- my poor mother was already bending under the strain of raising four boys (I love you, Mom). She chose not to subject her psyche to the incessant pounding of a demonically possessed pre-teen working out his existential angst on a bongo drum. But I coulda been the next Buddy Rich! Well, none of you know who Buddy Rich is. I coulda been the next Tommy Lee! Well, Tommy Lee is a joke. Anyway, I coulda been, but mom set my percussion career back by 20 years. Did I mention I love my mother?

Finally, as a mature adult responsible for myself, I bought a conga and enrolled in a drumming class through the ASUW Experimental College. A group of students got together and formed an Afro-Cuban percussion ensemble, which stuck together for a couple years. We did a regular gig at a thing called "Let's Dance!" which featured local percussionists doing live drumming for a paying audience. The bands got to work out their acts in front of a live audience, and the audience got to dance to live drumming. It's right up there with sex as the most fun I've ever had.

Just about the only time in my troubled life I've ever been able to turn off my brain for more than a few seconds has been during extended periods of dancing or drumming. Think, think, think -- all I ever do is think ... if I don't stop thinking, I swear I'll crack up. But when I get to the third hour of drumming or dancing, the mind goes elsewhere, the body goes into ecstasy and the pure flow of cosmic life energy burns through the soul, leaving the earthly human cleansed and (temporarily) sane. Hey, I swear I wasn't on any kind of drugs, and I'm not just saying that because Mom is reading.

So life gets crazy; time goes in all directions but I can only go in some. Since I went back to school five years ago I've been focused on trivial things like globalization, war and the UW Board of Regents -- not to mention classes and schoolwork. I haven't spent enough time in unstructured ecstasy with other humans, making music and bouncing off the sky. But recently I've been getting looser, remembering who I am, and reintroducing myself to the drum and the guitar.

I've been getting together with a friend who sings beautifully, teaching her some basic drumming skills, working out some songs, getting ready to take our stuff to the street. By the time you read this, we will have performed last night at an open mic on Capitol Hill.

And last weekend, another friend had a going-away party. She asked me to bring my instruments, and one thing led to another. Folks were dancing to some riot grrl punk, someone picked up my drum, and people turned a bunch of woks and spoons into instruments. Then the stereo got turned off, but the music kept going. The drum got passed around and ended up in my hands, and pretty soon we were working out, communicating, drumming and dancing, sucking in huge lungfuls of sweet energy, turning off our incessant brains, letting our bodies do the thinking.

It occurs to me that maybe my two (and more) lives and personalities aren't so separate after all. Perhaps dancing and drumming and making love are more than just distractions from the "important" work of averting planetary disaster. I began playing guitar originally so that I could write and sing political songs, but that's not the connection I'm talking about. Maybe if Dubya and his uptight crew -- or bin Laden and his uptight crew -- would loosen up a little, lose some of their restrictive clothing and ideology and lose their minds once in a while, the rest of us would have a lot less to worry about.

In any event, it sure helps me. Maybe a group of students should look into starting a "Let's Dance!"-type gig in the HUB ballroom once a month. If you're interested, send an e-mail to my editor at The Daily, opinion@u.washington.edu, and he'll pass it on. See you next week.