Purple Haze ...

A pebble from the Chinese Solitaire, quite stubbornly held at my Canon's lens.

I walk up the stairs feeling the faint tremoring sensation, looking up, getting my ears to acclimatize with the roars; at the end of which I enter the dimly lit room, a small room filled densely with rolling thunder, a room filled with hazy smoke, into a frenzied and shaking crowd. In that first one tiny moment, as if hit by a huge boulder, my senses are blasted away into a zillion pieces by a deep reverberating explosion on the drums; and dragged savagely through thin electric slopes by a violently shrieking Guitar. As my eyes adjust to the darkness, I see the song dying down on the huge screen, over the hollering crowd.

Slowly my senses pick themselves up and squeeze back inside my brain, pushing and pulling each other. The screen clears to the next video. A huge drum set appears on an empty stage. Lars Ulrich, Metallica drummer, appears from behind and perches himself at his seat behind the drums. With his little sticks he starts pounding them, and makes me feel like being lifted off and suddenly dropped in the middle of a herd of charging wild Bison. Like a hundred canons firing together from a dreaded pirate ship, like I have kept my ears on the rails after a heavy goods train thats just gone past me. This is just drums, all drums, no song this, no other things, he is just beating the drums. He is making them tumble down like huge boulders of rocks in an avalanche, he gets them to pellet like mad machine guns firing indiscriminately, he makes them roar. I stand there, gently shaking, with a dizzy beating heart. He sits up there, long haired, engulfed in white fumes, like some thunder God with his little lightning rods commanding the clouds to roar.

And slowly the alcohol starts sneaking into my brain's control centers, making me sway more fluidly. I close my eyes and follow the lead Guitar. I let it fly after it amidst burning clouds, atop electric fences, on hot summer highways' fuming mirages, turning and twisting, swaying away, falling sharply and rising like a Phoenix and exploding. At times I catch a glimpse of my mind as it is flying past me, and it smiles at me.

I bang my head, I sway, I thump my feet, I sweep the air with my hands, and build up a cushion between my consciousness and its hosting physical artifacts, stepping on which it can push itself away from them, and stay that way, for some good amount of time. Slowly you sense your motor controls relaxing, your arms and legs following your orders with just a tiny micro second lag, like alien appendages you have painstakingly won over. It feels good to let go and still be conscious about it. It makes me smile.