where is the balance in the universe, I ask you?

For the spring equinox, after a little fruitless tramping about downtown in search of alum, I went uptown on the metro with Lunar Moontooth to hangout at an equinox party. It was ok for a while, you know, when we arrived the party had already just started and there was a small circle on the church basement floor chanting around a candle. When we came they broke up the chant and they invited us in to have some food with them.

There was a miso based soup with extra quinoa in it and a variety of dips made from lentils and there was some flatbread and there was a box of factory stamped cookies all wrapped up in seven layers of different plastic. And after all that we sat down and started playing the drums in a circle and some people played the guitar and some people yelled into the microphones and we just basically played music and let it go wherever it wanted.

And I guess all the riffs being played were these kind of pseudo raga things on the guitar and I guess most of the chanting tended to be this kind of undirected wailing inspired by Native chanting and singing and everybody was riffing and wailing and drumming and the rhythm never really locked itself into a groove and it just got me thinking about the places that we ex-Europeans seem to want to go when we are getting in touch with our spirituality. It just seems like we always feel that we have to appropriate the rituals and riffs of others because of a paucity inspiration that we can draw from our own heritage … or maybe the problem is that when white people get spiritual about their own past it always ends up with everybody putting on a brown shirt and jackboots and marching up and down the town square yelling shit about gassing all the undesirables.

And ok, I admit that I took the guitar for a while and I was playing Indian riffs, too, and plus I play the goddamn sitar anyhow so who am I to talk? Perhaps I should have learned to play the lute instead. But then in another way, and you all know this, the idea of a pure heritage is a joke anyhow. Nobody comes from anywhere and, especially in a place like North America, the cultural influences of the entire world collide and break apart and reform in new ways and some of those ways are awesome and some of those ways are just fucking awful.

Jazz, for all its African influence, would never have been anything without European instrumentation and structure and without Yiddish music mingling with the African rhythms and so on and so on. The equinox jam may have been a flake fest, but I guess it had every right to exist.

Nevertheless, it was too much for Moontooth and she got up and put on her boots and marched out. A few minutes after this, deciding I liked her more than the jam, I got up and went to see where she had gone.

There were all sorts of stairwells escalating in different directions in the building and I followed one up and found myself in a kind of residence full of shared bedrooms with unmade beds and tangled clothes over chairs and a prevailing stench of unwashed socks and then there were and half washed dishes in dark communal kitchens decorated with tack boards filled with brochures for local events and a whiteboard with all sorts of names on a chart lined up with all sorts of domestic duties those names were supposed to be doing that week. It was creepy and ghostly to be there and the odd energy of the missing residents troubled me and I left, stepping over a mountain of shoes and boots left in the doorway.

Another stairwell led me to a long hall with a series of closed apartment doors in it and this hall with brightly lit with florescent tubes and smelled overwhelmingly of spaghetti sauce. There was the noise of TVs coming from behind the doors and a few people talking and I went down the hall, out the fire door, down the rattling fire escape and back in the front door of the building and then there was Moontooth in the front hall, reading up on some jumble of posters taped and tacked up in the front hall.

It's too noisy down there, she told me.

Upstairs, I said, there's a hallway that smells like spaghetti sauce.

We went up and as we did a muscle bound man in a green army tee-shirt with a long ponytail down his back came out and intercepted us in the hall. Could he help us? No, we were just exploring. Well, he began to explain, with a sense of apology that was underlined by the solemn expectation that we should leave, this is a private residence, and it's unnerving for us to have people come up her unexpected. We just like to walk through open doors, we told him. Well, he said, if you want a tour, you can call so-and-so. Do you want her number? No, we don't, we don't care about that, we just want to explore. Well, he said, it's a private residence. Do you smell the spaghetti, we asked. It's not spaghetti, he said, it's popcorn, maybe?

And then we were gone into the night, we went up a few blocks to the chess café and ordered a few hot brown drinks from the girl behind the counter who was only sixteen looking but could have been the star of a Thompson Twins video is only she'd been born in a different era with her dangling chequered shirt and her asymmetrical haircut and her too large broad brimmed hat hanging down askew over her eyes. All sass, too, she was and she joked with us and gave Moontooth a free hot chocolate.

And we set up a game and I lost a bishop almost right away and demanded a restart and was refused under all circumstances and from there it sent ok and I controlled the middle and chipped away a lead and I even think I was steps away from a checkmate with Moontooth's queen toppled and most of her other strong pieces clattering around in the plastic bucket beside us while at other tables intense knots of old beardy men hunched over games, yelling with delight and anger at each moved piece and –you know they actually get into fights with each other over this shit—said miss sass from behind the counter. It's amazing. It's amazing to watch the combatants slamming their hands down on the playclocks…but Moontooth and I play slow games and we like to think things out.

And I was almost winning, did I mention that? And then the lights dimmed and they closed the bar. They closed the bar! I was winning. How often to I actually beat my perennial chess partner in chess? Where is the balance in the universe, I ask you?