It is time for our annual plug for National Novel Writing Month, which began yesterday, and it is not at all too late to join in! By whatever strange twist of madness, I’ve made my living writing (also sometimes just typing) for a few years, but before that, the first time I ever tried to do something serious with writing was for NaNoWriMo, back in its second or third year or something. Naturally the “novel” itself I was working on was a miserable failure, but it led to making friends, and getting encouragement from writers, and actually was key very directly in moving from amateur to slightly less amateur. Why not start a novel today? What do you have to lose but your cool attitude of standoffishness? (And several dozen hours, maybe some pulled-out hair, etc.)

The face of youth in Knifecrime Island is pasty, sad and squints a lot, reports the Daily Mail: “They have thousands of online Facebook friends and use social networking to text, blog and Twitter their every thought. But Britain’s 16 to 24-year-olds — the so-called Facebook generation — are lonelier than any other age group, researchers found yesterday. One in three said they were bored with their lives, compared to just eight per cent of pensioners, and 28 per cent complained that loneliness was making them unhappy. Worryingly, more than a quarter revealed they turned to alcohol for comfort, and half admitted to using junk food as an emotional crutch.”

This is remarkable news, particularly for anyone who was ever a teenager before Facebook, an era when life was never filled with boredom, alcohol was politely declined due to worries that it might stunt development or lead to bad behavior, and diets were mainly healthy meat-and-vegetable affairs. The most significant difference, of course, has to do with the loneliness: Prior to Facebook, everyone going through their teen years felt completely loved and understood by all around them. There were no periods of self-doubt, no nights spent quietly sobbing in the bedroom with the lights out sick with the aching conviction that life was miserable and one would never encounter another person who even remotely shared the same interests or concerns. Damn you, Facebook, you have ruined the most wonderful time of all!

Photo by CrazyFast, from Flickr.

10 Songs About Drugs In Ascending Order Of Their Dangerousness To People Who Use Them And Society As A Whole

Related: Alcohol Is The Awesomest, Deadliest Drug

Have we mentioned the completely devastating takedown in the NY Review of Books of the documentary Waiting for Superman? That’s the film that follows some youngsters through the DEVASTATED WASTELAND of our public schools as they yearn to enter a for-profit system that… won’t serve them any better, but will make some people a lot of money! (The piece also serves as a good primer regarding the system of lies and distortions used to advance these schemes to privatize and make a fortune from education, by means of charter schools.) It is a fantastic bit of writing and we really encourage you to read it — it’s zippy and brief and a great fact-check of a truly dark and manipulative piece of propaganda.

Congratulations to the city of San Francisco, whose team of men who play with balls did a better job of throwing balls and hitting them with a stick than an opposing team of men who play with balls from Texas. Later this evening, in non-ballplaying related matters, Texas and all it stands for is expected to crush San Francisco and other cities where the cultural underpinnings are those of tolerance, compassion and a belief in the obligation one has to support fellow human beings who have done less well by life during hard times. So I guess it’s kind of a trade-off.

Photo by Troy Holden, from Flickr.

by Natasha Vargas-Cooper

After John McCain closed out the Sharron Angle rally on Friday, her campaign coordinators played a bit of amateur propaganda. Pictures of foreclosed houses, stock photos of agonized couples looking at stacks of unpaid bills, a chart of unemployment rates, all flashing by quickly to a soaring soundtrack. At the crescendo of all this pictorial despair appeared the image of First Lady Michelle Obama. In it she is reclining on a beige chaise lounge in a sleeveless violet dress, one hand cupped along the side of her neck, revealing her diamond wedding ring that matches her teardrop diamond earrings, and above her is the big word Vogue, the issue that claims: “The First Lady the world’s been waiting for.” No other item inspired such audible, ferocious ire.

The gymnasium never quite got filled up at the Harry Reid/Michelle Obama rally today at the Canyon Springs High School in North Las Vegas. (The crowd did, however, feel better about the media.)

Actually, after the mariachi band, after two congresswomen did some impromptu phonebanking on stage, after a doctor friend of Harry Reid’s read a letter about the Senator’s commitment to Democratic social policy, after a 20-minute dance session conducted by the panicked, stalling twentysomething staffers to Miley Cyrus, the crowd had actually thinned a bit.

After a near two-hour wait, Harry Reid announced the arrival of “Michelle Obama! ‘The Closer!’”

The crowd of senior citizens, rank and file union members, college age volunteers, and a few families that pulled their kids out of school to see the First Lady shrieked and stomped their feet with excitement. For a few moments, the gymnasium rumbled with applause.

Reid’s speech, recited just minutes before (it had a list of various votes he had cast in the interest of the “families/working people” of Nevada, accounting for “16 tax cuts!”), was instantly blotted out by Michelle Obama’s gravitas and self-introduction as “Chief Mom.” In a prim black dress, with her shoulders rolled back and big open face locked on the crowd, Mrs. Obama talked about her childhood as a daughter of a water plant worker. She went to talk about how it instilled in her a commitment to hard work for the sake of a family’s ability to thrive.

“That’s what this is all about after all,” she said, “The American Dream. Barack knows it. I know it. And Harry knows it.” Reid nodded from his folding chair.

Mrs. Obama evokes the moral authority of a no-nonsense mother. “This is exactly what Barack promised you,” she said, a little edge in her voice. “He promised you change. And change is hard.”

Mrs. Obama’s speech seemed unscripted and was well received. It was also an amorphous bore of a thing that could have been delivered anywhere. The universal themes of struggle, hope and change have resonated in any venue, from a Milwaukee union hall to the Ladies Auxiliary Club in Bel-Air.

There is something extremely specific happening in Nevada and the First Lady and the Senate Majority Leader more than glossed over it today. The speech they gave was just like every other swing-state speech, an attempt to shore up wavering loyalty.

The economic despair of Las Vegas that once was relegated to the margins of the city during boom times has long since spilled out. The swaths of foreclosed subdivisions are totems of the dramatic downturn in the national media but they are just miles away from today’s rally. This is at ground zero, essentially; they are in the country’s foreclosure capital.

And this is Las Vegas — where tragedy always makes itself quite at home in the culture. On a nearby low-rent but not destitute boulevard lined with thrift stores and greasy spoons, there was a line of about thirty people. Given that it was noon on a Monday, one could easily mistake the crowd for tourists. They also looked like the sort of folks who line up for show tickets to the Rat Pack tribute show in the Copa Room at the Plaza, or for a bus tour of the desert outlet stores. They were all careful to stay under the shade of the storefront’s awning that read: WE BUY YOUR GOLD!

Natasha Vargas-Cooper is in Nevada through the election — you can reach her via Twitter.

by John R. Bohrer

I knew Christine O’Donnell before you did. And by ‘you’ I mean ‘people in general.’ (And by ‘knew,’ definitely not like that guy that didn’t sleep with her several years ago.) I knew Christine O’Donnell because I drive to the Eastern Shore of Maryland a couple of times a year and I had seen her advertising on the first day of fall, 2008. Anyone who pulls off of US 95 onto Route 1 has a vague impression of the names of Delaware’s political candidates. Their signs are everywhere. But O’Donnell’s was the only one with the candidate’s headshot on it.

Her hair was curlier then, fuller and wavier maybe, and she looked really great. It was right before the exit 4 off-ramp toward the Christiana Mall. I remember it like it was yesterday.

O’Donnell’s sign also stood out because of what she was running for: the Senate. Against Joe Biden. The guy whose signs need only say “BIDEN.” In fact, that particular day I was headed to a talk on the 2008 campaign where Biden was originally supposed to be a panelist, but something had come up, and now he was on the TV every other hour talking about Scranton.

The economy was collapsing and John McCain was only a few hours away from suspending his campaign in an erratic move to retake the high ground. Things were looking pretty good for Team Obama-Biden (“O’Biden,” as the linguistically gifted would soon call them).

There’ll probably be an open Senate seat in Delaware soon, I thought. Maybe I’ll check out this Christine O’Donnell. What with her excellent pictures and all.

As I recall from my investigation, her 2008 website was primitive and short on substance. There was enough there, however, for me to tell that she was way, way out there on the right.

And so I never really gave her a second thought until the spring of this year, when I heard she was challenging Mike Castle, the Republican Congressman and former governor who had a Biden-esque aptitude for Delaware vote-getting.

Now, I have a special affinity for Mid-Atlantic politics, specifically that of the Delmarva peninsula. I went to college on the Eastern Shore (the same no-name institution that made Bill Clegg turn to crack) and I have a lot of friends from around there. I’m also something of a political junkie — I get more calls around major political events than I do on my birthday. On the night of the 2008 Iowa caucuses, I was the one who broke it to my (decidedly feminist) aunt about the Des Moines Register poll that said Hillary Clinton was likely to lose. She didn’t say it outright, but I’m pretty sure she was furious with me for the next two months.

So I keep an eye on Maryland and Delaware politics as a matter of friendship and general curiosity. And Christine O’Donnell’s quixotic candidacy was fascinating.

At first, she seemed like a sure loser. I mean, look at who she was running against. You do not beat Joe Biden or Mike Castle. If Delaware politics was Fight Club, those would be the first and second rules.

But then we had the mighty primary shakeups of 2010, where the Sharron Angles and Rand Pauls were not only coming out of the woodwork, they were chewing through the crossbeams. And the idea of Christine O’Donnell becoming a contender — not even winning, I mean, just being competitive in her primary… well, it didn’t seem so otherworldly.

Still, she was getting absolutely no attention. In late July, David Broder, the dinosaur of DC bigfoots, went to Middletown to write about how in a year of partisan savagery, the First State’s U.S. Senate race was nice and civil. Broder laid it on real thick. (“To cure your cynicism, just visit Delaware.”)

Not only did he deign Castle the next senator, but he talked about what a breath of fresh air it was all going to be compared to the rest of the mouthbreathers in the Republican caucus.

And brazenly enough, that’s exactly what Castle wanted him to write. Especially when he was feeding Broder lines like this: “I don’t plan to be part of the opposition. I think I can do more than oppose.”

Wow. I sent the clip to my friend Joan, with these comments:

I’m surprised that Castle’s rhetoric is so accommodating to Democrats when he still has a primary challenger to deal with (Christine O’Donnell, who ran against Biden in ‘08). [This was July 29, back when you had to remind people that there was another Republican running against Castle, let alone that her name was Christine O’Donnell.] Broder doesn’t even mention her. Wonder if it will inspire Sarah Palin, who has been endorsing lots of female Republican candidates, to back O’Donnell?

Ah yes, Palin and her ‘Mama Grizzlies.’ Surely O’Donnell would qualify, even though her official campaign headquarters was, oh, her house.

Well, a few days later, Palin waded into a Mid-Atlantic Republican primary… in Maryland. Former Governor Bob Ehrlich had said early in his comeback campaign that he didn’t want or need Palin’s help. So she endorsed his novice challenger, who was younger and had even less political experience than O’Donnell did. In all likelihood, it had nothing to do with the young man’s credentials; it was a move of pure spite.

But still, I thought to myself: ‘Wow, Christine O’Donnell is even too wacky for Sarah Palin.’

That’s not to say Delaware can’t get kind of crazy. Not a whole lot to do around there. Most people have already forgotten where the town hall screamfests of 2009 got going. The cable channels were sending camera crews to podunk constituent forums (repeat: CONSTITUENT FORUMS) because some psycho stood up at a, yes, Mike Castle town hall and, after shouting and waving her birth certificate in the air, had the entire room on their feet reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.

Within two minutes, that lady had stripped David Broder’s moderate, non-opposition Republican superhero of all control and composure. So if she could whip that room into lockstep, I figured there just had to be some O’Donnell freaks around there somewhere. Still: nary a blip from the national press.

And then Lisa Murkowski lost in Alaska, which was another unexpected jolt from the tea party defibrillator. And it just so happened that of all fifty states, the only major Republican primaries left were in New York and… Delaware.

Now Mike Castle was spooked, and it turned out the band of geniuses running his campaign thought the best line of attack was an ad that essentially said, “She Can’t Even Pay Her Bills!” which is an OK strategy, except, you know, DURING A RECESSION.

While I’m sure it was a big hit with three credit industry executives in Wilmington, it was perhaps the most tone-deaf attack ad of the year.

Not that O’Donnell’s people were any smarter. The media caught onto the race about a day after people affiliated with her campaign tried to start a rumor that Castle was locked in a gay love affair. Seriously.

It was rank amateur crazy like that that convinced me no major conservatives would ever embrace her. The Tea Party Express just wanted to hassle Castle — to throw an inside pitch for 2014, when the Biden seat would be up again.

And then. Five days before the primary, Palin sent her blessing — the answer to PRAYERS, according to Team Christine (because apparently when you pray to God, you’re really praying to Sarah Palin).

Then Jim DeMint endorsed. And then Castle was kaput. And then O’Donnell was bewitching the nation with her message of human-brained mice and the pitfalls of self-stimulation. The more that I looked at her, the less she resembled that striking image I had seen on the side of the highway two years earlier.

It was then that I knew. Oh poster-girl, you belong to all of America now. Here’s looking at you, Christine O’Donnell 2008. We’ll always have the exit 4 off-ramp.

John R. Bohrer spent his summer obsessing about bit players in American politics, Rod Blagojevich (predicting the holdout verdict down to the count) and a book about RFK, 1964 to 1968. He’s still doing all but one of those things.

by “David Shapiro”

tonight i am DJing a loft party in midtown for halloween and on the subway ride here there was a zombie sitting next to me playing solitaire on her iPod nano, a samurai trying to secure his sword to his belt by tying it up with excess fabric, and two Nicki Minajes with pink wigs and pink eyelashes dancing on those poles on subway cars that you hold on to so you don’t fall down when the train lurches. right now i am in the loft setting my computer up and one of the organizers is off somewhere getting me a cable to connect my hard drive to my computer because i forgot mine at home. they hired security guards for this party and one of them is standing about a hundred feet away from me by the back door, arms folded and feet spread apart, already in position even though nobody is here yet except the staff. my friend angelica who came with me is picking some choice candy for us out of the big candy bowl near the bar, i told her i don’t want any of those off-brand hard candies or assorted-color tootsie rolls that i only see around halloween, you know what i’m talking about

all day i thought about wearing a costume for this and me and angelica walked around downtown looking for something good but i couldn’t find anything. angelica is Brigitte Bardot. i can’t wear anything extravagant on my head because i have to keep taking off the headphones and putting them back on, or anything cumbersome on my arms because i have to use them a lot, so i am just wearing a hunting shirt and if anybody asks i will say i am a hunter but i hope nobody asks because this is a lame costume. i was also thinking of dressing my mac up like a PC for halloween, sort of like how people dress up their dogs, by going to an internet coffee shop and peeling those stickers that say INTEL INSIDE or PENTIUM IV or MADE FOR WINDOWS XP off a computer tower and sticking them onto the bottom left corner of my macbook, below the keyboard, but then we didn’t pass any internet coffee shops so i didn’t do that either

i have never been an enthusiastic halloween celebrator and in college my girlfriend loved halloween and always wanted it to be an amazing day and it was always a disappointment and was a really unpleasant day so i started to hate it. so now i have a grudge against it but tonight i will try to make peace with it. i guess halloween is the first leg of the Holiday Relationship Marathon and if your relationship is showing signs of stress tonight then you might be at like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf status after Thanksgiving. or maybe not and it’s true love, who knows. mike says the best thing about holidays is that they make you thankful for days that aren’t holidays

anyway the party organizer came back with the hard drive cable and i set my stuff up. the room is really big, maybe the size of one and a half basketball courts and it is maybe the biggest room i have ever played so i am nervous. there are halloween decorations along the walls, and couches, and there is a bar in the opposite corner of the room, maybe 125 feet away from me, and the DJ table is set up on what looks like a green screen stage except instead of a green screen, there is a white screen with fake blood splattered all over it. one of the organizers sent me a picture after he set it up this afternoon, he was so excited about it, here is that picture:

right now the lights are very dim and i am standing behind that table typing this. angelica is standing next to me and she is texting her friend Katy to come to this party. the organizer who brought me the hard drive cable is a pig for halloween and he put his pig nose on and looked at me and said “this sucks, i can’t do coke with the pig nose on!” and then he giggled and said “just kidding” but me and angelica were not sure if he was kidding. and then this other organizer came up to us and said “so people are starting to get here — could you start playing?” but it’s only 9:36 and i’m not supposed to start playing until 10:30! it’s like how sometimes i get to work like 25 minutes early so i can eat my yogurt and granola at my desk and then ten minutes later my boss gives me an assignment and i wanna be like “look i’m not even technically supposed to be here yet, just let me just enjoy my breakfast in peace!” but obviously i don’t say anything like that to my boss because this isn’t really the right time to get canned i think

anyway i was just planning to relax and not have to worry about picking songs for another hour because DJing for 6 or 7 consecutive hours is hard, like some nights you feel like you’ve been playing songs for a long time and then you look at the clock and it’s not even midnight yet and you’re like “fuck this night is gonna go on forever”, but the organizer seemed adamant, so i am playing Sympathy for the Devil by the Rolling Stones which is actually a great first song to play, i just realized that when Mick Jagger said “allow me to introduce myself, i’m a man of wealth and taste”, and also the song is topical now because it’s in the trailer for Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps

now there are maybe 6 people here, it’s 10:15, and some of the organizers are standing around the DJ booth and chatting. one of them notes that the strobe light next to me isn’t really strobing that much and someone else says “it strobes to the beat”, which is true, it’s not strobing that fast because i am playing a slower song, Mambo Sun by T. Rex

another organizer brings over a bag and lays it near my feet and i say “what’s in that?” and he says “an extra fog machine” and i say “damn i didn’t even know we had a first fog machine” and he picks up a little remote control off the edge of the DJ table, the remote has a switch on it, and he hands it to me and tells me to press down the switch and then fog starts pouring out of a little metal box on the ground near one of the speakers! he says “go nuts with the fog machine, we bought a lot of fog cartridges” and he points to the plastic bag and then walks away and i show angelica how to use it

i’ve never had a fog machine at my disposal before and i am wondering if there is any technique to using it, like do you want to keep up a constant level of fog or have foggy times and unfoggy times? obviously you don’t want to overfog and then people can’t breathe or someone has an asthma attack, but you don’t want to underfog because it’s halloween and like how often do you have a fog machine you know? ugh i hope no one is allergic to the artificial fog and i wind up sending them to the hospital, it would be like the opposite of that song Last Night a D.J. Saved My Life

also that reminds me that last weekend i visited elizabeth at her artists’ colony in upstate New York and we had a free afternoon so we went to the New York State Miilitary Museum or something like that and learned about chemical warfare in World War I and how soldiers tried to smoke their enemies out of their trenches and apparently there were chemical weapons that froze underground in the winter of 1917 that thawed out and killed a lot of people during the spring of 1918

anyway now it is later and there are more people here, the room is full but sparsely full, not like packed, but most people are standing by the bar and drinking and talking and i am playing Beach Party by Air France. it is still warm-up time. sometimes when i am warming up the crowd with songs that you can either dance to or chat to, i think of that scene in American Pie 2 where Jason Biggs visits the girl that he slept with in the first movie at band camp and she tells him, as a sexual innuendo about getting a woman aroused, that you “have to preheat the oven before you stick in the turkey, silly!”. i am playing A Sweet Summer’s Night On Hammer Hill by Jens Lekman to preheat the oven of dancing

after a few minutes, two girls come over to the dancefloor and start dancing and i am glad there are people dancing now. angelica notices them too and sees me smiling. whenever i am DJing i wish i could hand a trophy to the first people who start dancing because sometimes that’s a tough seal to break. it takes guts to be the first people dancing i think

one of the girls dancing is wearing round glasses and a shirt that says NEW YORK CITY so i think she is John Lennon because sidewalk vendors on Broadway sell a picture of John Lennon wearing that same shirt so i’m almost positive she’s John Lennon. angelica tells me that the other girl who is dancing with the John Lennon is Lady Gaga, which was hard to discern because she is wearing only a black bra with rhinestones and spandex shorts from American Apparel and spike heels. when i am thinking about how peoples’ halloween costumes might be indecent, it makes me feel like Ned Flanders. angelica points out that she’s also wearing black tape over her nipples. angelica presses the fog machine button

now it is 11:14. i played Ching-A-Ling by Missy Elliott which didn’t hit, and i realized what is wrong with that song which is the same thing that is wrong with Get Like Me by David Banner which is that the chorus is such a fucking jam that the verses just sound weak in comparison and you have to wait for the verses to end before you can start dancing to the choruses again, but by the time the chorus comes back you’ve already endured like 45 seconds of music that’s hard to dance to so you went to the bar

i play Southern Hospitality by Ludacris which is dark and thumping and then This Must Be The Place (Naïve Melody) by Talking Heads, the live version off Stop Making Sense, which is effervescent compared to Southern Hospitality and i hope people got a kick out of the juxtaposition of those songs but i don’t think anyone noticed. sometimes when i am feeling stressed out about playing a song that i am not sure will work, whoever is hanging out with me says something like “nobody is paying as close attention to this as you are david, don’t worry about it”

then a kid comes over to me and yells, because the music is really loud now because the room is almost full and it’s hard to hear in the back, “ARE YOU GONNA PLAY ANY HOUSE MUSIC?” and i yell back “NO! SORRY!” and he makes a sour face and yells “WHY NOT?” and i scream “I JUST DON’T WANT TO!! BUT THE NEXT ONE IS FOR YOU!” and he walks away and i play Candy by Mandy Moore

a few minutes later a kid who is dressed as an escaped convict in an orange jumpsuit comes over to me with a megaphone, i don’t know where he got a megaphone, and someone bumps him and he drops his drink onto the floor next to me and it splashes onto my backpack and i look at him like “what the hell dude!!” and he looks really drunk and his eyes are glazed over and he goes “relax bro, it’s gone”, meaning no use crying over his spilled cocktail, and then he starts singing along to Still Fly by Big Tymers into the megaphone but he is really drunk so he is slurring the lyrics and his timing is really off. i think it is unbecoming for a man to be this drunk in public, angelica says men who are this drunk are really creepy. i hand him the fog machine controller thingy to try to distract him, and plus i should be fogging more anyway, and i look around for angelica to try to fend him off because i am trying to pick the next song but he keeps bumping into me because he can barely stand up. he bumps into the table and the mixer and surge protector almost slide off the table

he holds the smoke machine button down for like a minute and i can’t even see the people in front of me and then one of the security guards comes over to me, perhaps tipped off by this kid drunkenly screaming into a megaphone, and says “IS THIS GUY WITH YOU?” and i yell back “NO! I DON’T KNOW HIM” and the security guard drags him off, crisis averted!!!

it is packed and really hot now. i roll my sleeves up and i am sweating a little and my glasses got fogged up so i took them off and then put them back on a minute ago. the organizers said they would have around 400 people but i have played in rooms that fit 400 people and i think there are more people than that in this room. the lady gaga girl is still dancing like three feet in in front of the DJ booth. i wonder if she is on ecstasy because she looks like she’s, ummm, lost in the music as Lil Wayne would say. i am playing A Milli by Lil Wayne and everyone is rapping along. a zombie has his hands in the air. a female jungle cat, maybe a lion or a tiger, just took a pill out of a Tarzan’s hand and downed it with a clear cocktail. a girl with a neon wig on is grinding against Elvis i think. i play The Monster Mash and a lot of people do that dance that Uma Thurman and John Travolta do at the diner in Pulp Fiction where you stick your arms out like dinosaur arms and bend your knees and swivel your torso

one of the organizers comes up to me and says “there’s a line around the block!! and they just closed the doors!!!!” and i look at the clock and it is 12:39 which means i have been doing this for three hours and i have at least three hours to go. the Lady Gaga kept bumping into the DJ table and making stuff slide around and like ten minutes ago one of my cables got knocked loose and the music stopped and people started booing but then i plugged it back in and people started dancing again and now angelica is dancing in front of the DJ booth to keep me company and prevent people from knocking the cables loose

one of the organizers ran over to me and said “THE COPS AND FIRE DEPARTMENT ARE HERE! TURN IT DOWN” and so i turned it to half-volume and people looked over to the DJ booth and stopped dancing again and booed again and i put my hands up in front of my shoulders with my palms facing upwards and shrugged and tried to make it look like i have no control over the situation and then a few minutes later he came back and said “okay they’re gone” and i put the volume back up and pressed the fog button for like 30 seconds and played Like A G6 by The Far East Movement, people really liked that one, maybe i will play it again later because it is really the jam of the moment and i think people would forgive me for playing the song twice if they like the song this much

a small girl with a costume i can’t identify asks me to play house music, i tell her i don’t want to play house music and she gives me a look and i yell “NOT THE RIGHT VIBE I THINK! TURN AROUND!!” and she turns around and looks at the crowd and it looks pretty raucous, now i am playing Every Girl by Young Money and i sang along when Wayne said “I LIKE A LONG HAIR THICK RED BONE” but then didn’t sing the next line because i would feel weird if someone looked over and saw me mouthing “open up her legs then filet mignon that pussy” and she says “okay i guess i understand…” and she walks away and i play Whip My Hair by Willow Smith and people really like this one too, i am on a little roll here

i am really sweaty now and probably very dehydrated. i wish i could get some water but it’s hard to leave my station and i don’t know if they’re dispensing water anyway, and also this girl who just whispered “i’m a personal trainer” into my ear and then turned my head with her hand and winked at me keeps bringing me beer. angelica’s friend is now standing near us in the DJ booth she said the girl who said she was a personal trainer went up to her and said “stay off my turf!!” meaning stay out of the DJ booth i think. i tell Katy to fend her off because i am trying to pick songs. Katy goes, “do you know that girl?” and i say “yeah she’s my psychotic ex-girlfriend!!” and Katy goes “really!??” and i say “jk i’ve actually never seen her before”

anyway i hope the people on ecstasy here are staying adequately hydrated. man i sound like my mom! today my mom texted me “Don’t drink 4 Loko” because i think she read the New York Times article about kids having adverse reactions to that drink and i texted her back “okay i won’t”

the Lady Gaga comes up to me and yells “WHEN ARE YOU GONNA PLAY BAD ROMANCE!!”, which i like because it presumes that i will definitely be playing that song, and i yell back “IT’S STILL EARLY” and i point out that it’s 1:31 on my computer screen, and also i am not sure if i am feeling Bad Romance right now, and she says “FUCKING PLAY IT ALREADY!! I GOTTA CATCH THE FUCKING NJT TRAIN” and NJT stands for New Jersey Transit. a few songs later i play it and she shrieks

i feel guilty and like a pervert looking at the Lady Gaga girl, wearing just a bra and spandex shorts, even though she has been dancing right in front of the DJ booth for three hours. i went to a strip club this summer and i felt the same way, like at any moment a stripper would look at me and realize “whoa i am naked and this weird guy is staring at me” so i try to avert my eyes and i wonder what the Lady Gaga would think if she looked over and saw me looking at her. like i know her costume is made to look at but maybe it would be like she wakes up in a bad dream where she’s almost naked and people are staring at her except it’s reality. she would probably wish she was Barney the purple dinosaur or a refrigerator or something, instead of a girl in a bra. a chubby guy dressed as a football player standing against the wall looks mesmerized by her, his mouth is open a little and he hasn’t moved in 2 songs

one of the organizers comes up to me and says “YOU’RE NOT USING THE FOG MACHINE ENOUGH” and i say “OKAY SORRY I WAS WORKING ON THE MUSIC! I’LL FOG MORE THOUGH! I DON’T WANNA BE, YOU KNOW, A NEGLIGENT FOGGER!!!”, i think that’s a funny phrase, and he laughs and i smile and he says “AND ALSO I WANTED TO TELL YOU THAT MULTIPLE PEOPLE ARE GETTING NAKED ON THE DANCEFLOOR” and i look up and he is right. then someone hands me a visa card that someone else dropped and tells me to make an announcement about it, but then one of the organizers takes it off my computer when he walks past the DJ booth a few seconds later. if you are reading this, Melissa Grbic, i hope you got your card back and there were no unauthorized charges on it

it is 2:57 now. the Lady Gaga girl hasn’t left yet, still dancing the night away, even though she said she had to catch a train like two hours ago. everyone looks pretty drunk and there are people making out along the walls. i am playing You Can’t Hurry Love by The Supremes and the bass is rumbling. the girlfriend of one of the hosts is crying and her boyfriend is consoling her and i feel bad, it reminds me of my own sad halloweens, and also i text elizabeth to tell her i miss her but she doesn’t text back so i guess she is sleeping, or i hope she is anyway!!! and then angelica says “maybe that girl’s on drugs?” referring to the crying girl on the dancefloor. then angelica says that the Lady Gaga girl asked her if she was a lesbian!

another kid comes up to me and says “YO I KNOW YOU MAN” and i make a quizzical face and wait a second for him to explain and he says “I HELPED YOU WITH YOUR ECON FINAL A COUPLE YEARS AGO” and i realize that it’s this kid who helped me with a take-home economics exam in college that i ended up not doing that well on, but probably my fault more than his, and i say “OH HEY MAN HOW’S IT GOING?!!!” and he says it’s going well and then starts dancing again

now it is 4:27 and i think i have had maybe too much to drink but i feel okay. i am happy that people have been dancing a lot and usually when i DJ and people don’t like a song i play it sends me into a panic but tonight i tried to not panic and it worked. the organizers just paid me so i am free to go. at 3:54 i played what was supposed to be my last song, Will You Be There by Michael Jackson, but the room was still mostly full and people were still dancing hard so i kept going but now my head hurts and i am so dehydrated i am not even sweating anymore and i have been DJing for 7 hours and now i think it’s time to go so i’m gonna play Walk of Life by Dire Straits and then leave! also i forgot to mention this but to the dude who requested Justin Timberlake and the girl who asked for Daft Punk, sorry i never got around to playing that stuff but you guys were both making out with people so i assume hearing songs by those people wasn’t really crucial to your success tonight!! okay happy halloween bye

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“David Shapiro” is 22 and lives in New York City and has a Tumblr.

“My husband and I are appalled by it, we don’t believe in it, and I do not want my child doing it,” says Oklahoma mom Melissa Taggart, who is furious that her child was told to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in Spanish. During, uh, Spanish class. Okay!

McRib fever is “building to a frenzy” in advance of the fast food product being made available nationwide tomorrow. How much do you know about this pressed-and-formed meat-like product which, given its elusive nature up to now, may very well be made from mechanically separated unicorn carcasses? Catch up on your history here.