better than glamour: / midnight rain falling softly / upon the black earth
~|~
I attended the Social Star Awards at Marina Bay Sands tonight. Though certainly enjoyable it felt somewhat alien to my own field of experience: this social scrum of media and celebrity, filled with people trying to convince one another that what they’re doing is awesome and amazing and worthy, a world of hype and manufactured excitement hiding something blasé behind the toothy camera-ready grins. It was certainly worth going, and I have no doubt that all of this matters somewhere, somehow. This is where careers and connections are made, part of the great entertainment engine that brings colour and delight to our everyday lives. I love pop culture, and it was good to be a guest there. But at the end of the day I was happy to remain a guest: this is a world I like visiting, but it is not my own world.
And walking home later along the quiet midnight roads my world came back to me, like a dog stretching in greeting and waiting to be petted. At night my vision is poor but my senses of smell and hearing feel sharper, and I walked through a world alive with the scents of rain and grass and earth and flowers like sweetened green tea upon the night air; also rubber and petrol, and urine and beer, and exhaust fumes and something that smelled like origami paper taken fresh from the packet. And through it all the rhythmic click-click of my footsteps on the pavement, and the rustle of canvas, and faint music and vehicle engines dopplering along. Now and again a cat, minding its own business. Beneath my feet the cracks of everyday wear in the ground, and in my head the first lines of what might one day become a blues poem:
I’ve been walking for miles over concrete and asphalt and tile.
Yeah, been walking for miles over concrete and asphalt and tile.
The heat of the day rises wet like the ghost of a smile.