The thing I most hate since stepping behind the media curtain and becoming a journalist is that I can no long look an at image of a beautiful woman without a veil of cynicism.

Because when I fall down the street drunkenly, crashing against a plane-glass window of a shop, and look up into the flawless gaze of some model… well, I know what was done to her. I know how the pigment of the iris was inched up a couple of notches. I know how the cheekbones were raised with a skilled photoshop hand. I know how even the tiniest blemishes of the skin were smoothed to an unblemished sheet of skin. I know that everything that's been thrown up, above human size, has been deliberately constructed to lie to us about the potential of human beauty. It's not like that. It's never like that.

The thing I most love since stepping behind the media curtain and becoming a journalist is that I can no longer look at an image of a beautiful woman without a veil of cynicism.

I know it's not real, so it frees me. I'm not distracted by these lies scaled up on the high street. Beyonce isn't really that hot. No-one's really that hot. And so… as I scan my eyes around the dancefloor, there's a half dozen people that hot there, in that moment. Some skinny five-foot thing with a ludicrous cap and no sense of poise and decorum, throwing her gangly - and at that height, that's some feat - body around as if the skin's a prison and she needs to break out, right here, right now. And in the smile and the movement and the moment, she's more beautiful and precious and anything. And because I know the statements of aesthetic perfection are an impossibility, there's never a second-guessing part of me playing the dick.

So. Tonight was my last night at Resurrection. Resurrection's gene-pool travels all the way back - by the hands of DJ-emperor Ian - to Club Fusion, beneath a shitty hotel at the edge of the town where my pop-hymen was fucked away. It's great. It's terrible. And that's the point, and if you can't stand the contradictions, do fuck off. Logic's a small enough cage to hold you.

And, for most of the evening, I was pretty much lost. Yes, every time I glanced towards the dancefloor, I couldn't help but smile, packed full of people in love with whatever was playing, at least for this one night stand. Even to the songs I despised. Especially the songs I despised, because it's not really about me - it's taken me a while to really grasp that about pop music, and being able to identify the pure joy in other people and relate it back to *my* own pure joy and take pleasure in *that*… well, you can see the continuum. Even if you despise it, you're a nihilistic self-centred shit if you hate crowds for the mere fact they're crowds.

(Christ - at 2.a.m the girls stumbling out of the club, shouting the Killer's "I've got SOUL! But I'm not a SOUL-DIER!" break what remains of my heart in two with pride for my species.)

But I'm lots. It's not me, and I know it. I have no friends here anymore - well, I do, but I'm not able to actually reach out and treat them as such (There's an exception - and he'll know it, but it was a very non-club conversation, so stands outside of this ramble. You know who you are). And I'm downing expensive alco-pops for no other reason than… oh, I don't know. Like mountains and they're there? That sounds fake, even to me.

Okay - try this: Because the drink gives you a chance to commit and express to something inexpressible. That I was a supplicant in a great temple, and my sobriety was an offering to whatever God's out there to give me a little enlightenment.

Eventually, an intercession comes. It's an old acquaintance, who I've known for about eight of my years in the town, and she's been a friend of friends throughout, but never really know. The conversation, from my position, is my artfully constructed bullshit - a miasma of amusing, distracting lies that I throw up around me. So she stalks among them, cuts a couple and tells me - for no reason other than that she feels like it - the two choices in clubd-dom that await everyone. You sit still in your seat, and die, or you go and dance, and live. Well - she didn't phrase it as such, but I understood all too well what she meant. I'd given it myself, upon occasion.

So I went out and followed, wandering off to try and commit rather than deciding I was a substitute before even trying out for the team.

Kicks off truly in my head when Ian drops Common People at 1:50. At first I fall into my usual role, and play to people. And eventually I decide that's inappropriate, and reach out, inwards, and somehow find that deep vein that let me surf I Am The Resurrection for its period, and disappear, arise into pop, and become ether. Eventually, I hit ground again and play against my friends, at which point SOUL and SOLDIER rhymes arrive and its time to go.

And I don't care.

Earlier in the evening I had the thought - when The Clash's Rock the Kasbah was followed by the Prodigy's Outer Space, that the kids on the dance-floor were as far away from the period that the Prodigy recorded that as I was when I started clubbing away from the Clash's.

And I don't care.

Jim tells me "3am sentimentalism can go fuck itself", then logs off. He's got a point.