Tuesday, 08 October 2002 | Mosh

It feels as if my head is plugged in and there's a current running through it, quietly humming like my computer. Lisa and Wolfe had been talking about taking me to see Mindless Self-Indulgence for weeks, telling me stories, like how, at the last show, the band exited the building through the front doors and finished its set on top of a van.

The lead singer, whom the crowd kept calling "Jimmy," had a double hot pink mohawk, wore a white suit with a black tie and a long white skirt, and sometimes sang holding what looked like a stuffed wolf. (He actually looked a little bit like Ryan, apart from the hair and the height.) His voice oscillated between falsetto and a more natural singing voice, and his facial expressions and gestures looked fluid enough to have been choreographed, but I knew otherwise. The band clearly was insane and unpredictable.

The mosh pits weren't just cluttered around the stage, but scattered around the floor and watched over by those in the balcony that circled the room. It was impossible to completely avoid getting knocked around; mostly I stood with feet parted, as I would on the subway during take-off and landing, with no bar to hold onto. By the time the show was over, I'd involuntarily moved fifteen feet from where I'd started.

Lots of people who looked eighteen, lots of spiky hair and spiky belts, spiky jewelry. I got a little worried when a guy with five two-inch spikes protruding from his face jumped around near me, due to the nature of the most pits. Lisa noted that it adds a new dimension to a show, when there's a chance you might get injured during the course of it.

Immediately after leaving the venue, I stopped at a grocery store to buy some water, in an abrupt transition to normalcy: rows of neatly stacked food underneath bright lights, people in warm sensible sweaters standing in line, quiet. *