Rabbit Droppings

The room goes dark except for the lights over exposing the boys on stage.  The guitarist starts and the drummer soon follows with deafening rhythm that makes my heart feel it’s beating off time.

As the singer starts screaming into the microphone I look out over the audience and see the boys pacing around in the center like pent up animals like I remember them doing when I was young.  Then I see one start to whip his arm around in a circle and suddenly both arms are spinning just barely holding on to his sockets like a child playing windmill.  He goes on thrashing like this for a moment and finishes off with a wild kick into the air.  I giggle a little in spite of myself.  As a visiter I feel it’s wrong to pass judgment on this over excited young man.  But then as he moves out of the middle another boy comes in and does the same thing and soon there are multiple boys whipping their arms around frantically- far enough apart not to punch each other in the face.  I laugh out loud as I look out at the windmills and back up to avoid getting punched in my own face.

Not everything new is old I realise, these kids have a dance move that we did not.  Seemingly inspired from capoeira or some strange hybrid of skanking they have- The Windmill.  And it’s not for the faint of heart, I imagine historians wondering why this generation had such a high rate of dislocated shoulders.  But further than that it makes the dance floor far more dangerous than mosh pits of yore.  No longer the circle of people pacing around and bumping into each other aggressively; these flailing arms and legs create new dangers of black eyes and broken noses being not an anomaly but almost a certainty if one were to stand too close.  I know this is a pit I wouldn’t brave, it’s my first uttering of “Kids these days,” and ushers me that much closer to old age.