House doesn't always mean a place

House doesn't always mean a place.

Last Sunday, sometime around 4am, I stood with my friend Cairy on a balcony that looked over a mass of 200 odd half naked souls dancing to heavy electronic bass. The people seethed and bounced and collided with the beat, and I was mesmerized. It had been so very, very long since I had seen that kind of mass - longer since I had been part of it.

"That's what techno music was really made for" I commented, my eyes glazed over in wonder and delight. I just wanted to watch.

"It's house, not techno," Cairy said. He was stagger leaning on me, the result of having drunk near inhuman amounts of alcohol. Words were fighting their way out of his mouth. "We have…we have to go down there."

"No way." We were actually trying to meet Skeet at the door, where he was waiting for us. We had been in the club for over five hours, watching the floorshow, drinking and laughing in a section away from the dance floor. We had lost Skeet in the crowd, and Cairy was so drunk he could barely stand upright, never mind dance.

"I have to get down there." He was beyond arguing with, and I had to admit I needed to get down there too. We went down the staircase and just…walked…stumbled…bounced a little across a portion of the sea of dancers and back. We didn't fit in on the floor - we were dressed for the chilly club, not for dancing, and so looked like two lost bikers in the middle of a few hundred of Atlanta's half naked beautiful people.

And while we were down on the floor you could feel the energy and the rhythm, not just from the music but generated by the people, having fun and not giving a damn about anything else in the world except this dance floor, right here, right now. We walked off the floor with other people's sweat on us, glowing much like…well, like when you're in that other situation that covers you with someone else's sweat. But we two had only been walking across a floor. It was beyond description by mere words.

When Cairy and I found Skeet again at the door, he looked like some strange elf staggering around our world quite by mistake. Even in the winter, the water hangs in the air here at all hours of the night. I was so tired nothing seemed real.

I'm glad Cairy and Skeet came into town. We really did have a lovely time.

And they helped me find pieces of myself I'd been missing for a while.

We found the neighborhood where I'm going to live as soon as I move back into town. This is also the neighborhood where I plan on living the rest of my life, if it's at all possible. The guys and I went out and found Little 5 Points again. Little 5 Points in Atlanta is a lot like the Village in Nashville or Allston in Boston. It's the funky-cool neighborhood of bungalow style houses built before World War 2, situated comfortably close to a healthy grocer's, a comic book shop, and a post office. These are the things in combination that make a place suitable for Elizabeth habitation.

There's also a lovely park nearby Little 5, and plenty of public transportation. So I've found my ideal spot for nesting - now all I need is a mere $300,000 in order to buy my house. Well, of course I'll rent there first. There were little signs in all the shop windows declaring Little 5 points a hate-free zone. I kept grinning and asking people how much they paid in rent as we walked around. I was flooded with lots of good feelings about the place.

Later, after Little 5 points and drinking like a fish and dancing into the dawn and laughing my ass off at Cairy and Skeet, who've been making me laugh since I was 14 years old - after that -

I started working towards the new plan, with a little help from my new job.

90 days - car (March)

180 days - 2 bedroom apartment (June)

300 days - Party at my place (end of August, beginning of September)

House - a music, a place, my new obsessive goal.