Superstar

So the other night I'm at the club throwing back vodka and chatting up bartender Jen when I feel a tap on my shoulder..

It's a busy Saturday night and the place is jammed. The crowd is made up largely of strangers -- most coming out to be a part of the big event that the owner's put together for the night. As a result, there seems to be a much higher quotient of the kinds of guys who like to high-five everyone around them and say "Fuckin'-A" every five seconds paired with hordes of white girls who are unknowingly rocking that whole "muffin top" look that happens when you wear pants that are supposed to slim your waistline, but instead squeezes your stomach to the point where your midriff pushes up and spills out over the sides like dough in a baking pan -- a look that is only made worse when paired with the combination baby tee/off-the-shoulder blouse that your BFF should never have let you walk out the door with in the first place.
And this is all before they start dancing with glowsticks.
One of the main things that gets me in trouble whenever I write or talk about Endo is that I tend to focus on the fact that the people who work there are really cool and that if you hang around long enough you're bound to trip into some sort of crazy experience that couldn't happen anywhere else.
But what I always forget to mention is the music.
See, the original idea behind Endo Exo was to bring the kind of experience to Jacksonville that mirrors the things you'd see in nightclubs in Orlando or Miami's Southbeach. In fact, what happens a lot of times on weekends is that you'll get a lot of out of towners in there from the nearby riverfront hotels who love the place specifically because it's got that kind of vibe to it -- fancy drinks, flashing lights,
And hour after hour of techno and house blasting in your face.
Whether you want it or not -- nearly every weekend at Endo promises an endless array of guys on the stage wearing trucker hats and Southpole shirts who constantly bounce around balancing one headphone between their shoulder and their ear while they endlessly twist knobs and push buttons that seemingly have no effect on the song at all.

I can't tell you how many times people have called me up on a Saturday and said, "Hey are you going out to that club you're always talking about tonight? Let me know because I'd love to come with you" -- Only to have them turn to me five minutes after we get there with this look of horror in their eyes while they lean into my ear and shout,
"Is this the only kind of music they play here?"
I guess after all the years I've been going there I've just sort of tuned it out. I'm there to see my friends, get blitzed, and dance embarrassingly with total strangers. Once in a while they'll have a DJ that I find interesting, but to say that I'm any great fan of techno or house music itself is a flat-out lie. If anything, I find the overall repetitiveness of it to be kind of annoying, even in all it's variant forms and sub-genres.
..Except drum n bass.
I don't know what it is about the sped-up drum machine loops, squeaking synthesizers, and sampled science fiction movie quotes in that style of music that makes me feel like it's actually any different than the sped-up drum machine loops, squeaking synthesizers, and sampled science fiction movie quotes of other types of electronica, but for whatever reason whenever Endo gets a half-decent drum-n-bass guy it usually catches my attention. I think it has something to do with the way I perceive it to be more aggressive than it's dancier cousins -- but even that theory has it's flaws.
All I really know is that when I drive to the club blasting something like    in my car stereo -- I'm much happier when the is DJ in the booth is spinning something that sounds like more Squarepusher or Konflict than what you normally hear in the place, which is usually like:   
Especially when it's on a weekend, because that's when the rave kids come out.
Maybe in other cities it's a more normal sight -- but it's actually pretty rare here in Jacksonville to find the kind of comedy gold that can only be acheived when girls in corsets and glow-in-the-dark bodypaint with the purple and white yarn braided into their hair hang out with muscle-bound guys with dreadlocks and tank commander goggles who can dance the robot.

The Jacksonville club scene is normally more filled with guys who look like they got kicked off I Love New York in the early rounds and girls who squeal audibly when the DJ mixes something by Guns and Roses in between the latest track by Timbaland and any song that they can do group dance moves with their girlfriends that they've practiced in their backyards earlier in the week:
So anyways, I'm standing at the back bar at Endo when I feel this tap on my shoulder..

I turn around to find a guy staring at me with a hopeful look in his eyes. He's a little shorter than me, kinda heavy-set with a dark beard and sort of a Gilligan hat on his head. He's wearing a t-shirt, cargo shorts and flip flops, and over his shoulder I can see a girl in a multi-colored sundress who is clasping her hands together in front of her chest, staring me right in the eye.
He looks at me for a second, and then says,
"I can't believe it's actually you!"
I'd never seen this guy before in my life, but he seemed really excited -- so I smile and shake his hand anyways. He grips my hand with both of his and does this half-shake half-hug thing that I have no reason not to go along with, even when his girlfriend started jumping up and down and clapping her hands at the sight of it.

I don't know -- weird shit happens to me at Endo all the time, and by this point in the evening I'd already done a handful of Grolschlager shots with the owner, (who always likes to start off his nights with that sort of thing) -- which is to say nothing of all the other Windex-colored drinks Matty had been feeding me since I'd shown up -- leaving me in a state where I was more than happy to best buddies with anybody, regardless of whether I actually knew them or not.

And yet there was still something about the whole thing that seemed a little weird, especially when he offered to buy me a drink. Because it was at this point where he looked me in the eye and said,
"I just wanted to like ..personally thank you for coming here tonight. I mean, you don't know -- we drove all the way up here from Orlando for this show, and to have the chance to actually be sitting here and having a drink with you is like.. Oh man, this is.. This is really great!"
Put yourself in my shoes for a second here. You're sitting at a bar accepting a free drink from a total stranger that you've never seen before who's just more or less revealed to you not only the fact that he thinks you're one of the more renowned drum n bass DJ's scheduled to play tonight, but that out of all them -- you're his absolute favorite.

Do you:
    a) Shrug your shoulders and tell him you don't know what he's talking about -- you're just some guy at the bar?

    b) Kindly explain the mistake to him, and then proceed to lean on your friend the owner to set him up with an introduction to the real guy he came out to see?

    c) Accept the drink, put your arm around his shoulder -- and then proceed to tell him how this club is one of your favorite places to perform in Florida, and then accept free drinks from the guy the rest of the night in exchange for stories about life on the road, and the crazy things that happened to you the last time you performed in Atlanta?
[Listening to:    Distorted Minds"We Can't Stop" ]

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