going there

ill give away one of my secrets
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chaos is survival

i was at a djembe show last weekend after getting some free tickets (industry), and the craziest thing happened.
everyone in the audience was given a djembe drum so they could learn to play along with the performers, and everyone more or less played at the right times. except these couple of dudes in front. they played whenever they wanted,  swatting at the djemebes with their clumsy american paws in direct competition with the performers' cheery island songs. there we sat, our eyes beaming in delight with that familiar childhood feeling you get as you watch decent performers in costumes sway and clap and mime the gestures for you to do "after them, one more time now!", and then there were these dudes.
the house manager, poor soul, gave the lead member of the Bad Boys in Front a couple of chances until his tantrum shaped the perfomance before our sore djembe hands. what im about to explain is, as my friends have since pointed out, pretty vulgar for an exit from a drum circle. Bad Boy goes from whisper to yell in one drunken swoop while telling the manager to get her face the fuck out of his face!!! the performers one by one stop playing until the soundtrack of the room is just filled with this guy swearing at us all, enjoying it a little bit with his arms raised and his middle fingers shooting toward the nosebleeds of the 100 seat theater. the rest of us are wildly banging our djembes in protest. he drunkenly lurches his heavy body out of his seat forward at the amiable MC and unshirted men in island garb that are populating the set, but before he reaches the steel drums, the performers rush out to back stage. multiple employees find a way to hold him back - holding him by every limb, separately - as an elderly lady volunteer usher tries to talk him down from his little toddler fit. screw you all, he says, you all should go to hell! :)
they remove the man, and we all start clapping, our adrenaline pumping like a thousand djembes.
what a bit of chaos, right? when's the last time anything like that happened in a theater, such a prescribed ritual experience? this was absurd - thrilling! - and we all got to riot on our djembes for the next hour and a half, so excited that we got the chance to see it. what a show, what a night!
we felt like the luckiest people alive, in that audience - and that's just it. we were alive. "oh, wow, something could have happened in there!" the uber driver says on the way home.
you're insanely right. we live in an insane world. 
luckily all of the instruments and humans were spared, but i guess what i tasted, what we as an audience experienced together, was a burst of survival. that animalistic rush we feel when something is on the verge of going terribly wrong but then nothing really happens, or we narrowly escape, and all of a sudden you can feel where your heart is in your chest and you think: great odins raven, im safe! whether that's straight downhill on a mountain bike or sailing a giant gust, or in a djembe concert,
the body all of a sudden feels itself alive. it does a gut check, a role call for all its parts working in order. there's a rushing current of energy as your senses awaken and assure you this is real, you're real, this world is unfathomable but you've gotten yourself this far, at least.
just as we enjoyed watching them, these Bad Boys enjoyed being naughty on purpose. we're so drawn to chaos, and to other people's chaos, that we couldn't look away. there's an inherent satisfaction in leaning into what we think is madness, an unleashed moment, and harnessing it by putting it into words. and even by *giggle* gossiping about it later.
chaos is the taste of survival and the constant state of it.

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