working, drinking, dancing, life

Have you ever taken a while to process an experience?

For the few months I was working at a laneway bar in Melbourne, I would often end up crawling into bed with the next day's sun already risen. Sometimes my fellow bartenders and I would just hang out after closing up the place at 4 a.m. and have our post-shift drinks while chainsmoking and pretentiously philosophizing about life. That, or we'd head to an after-hours place where one of the other bartenders knew everyone. We'd watch the hardcore revelers dance the last couple hours of darkness away and then head out to face the glaring brightness outside.

Other times, I'd get to chatting with some straggling patrons who would succeed in convincing me to follow them to the after-hours indie dance club around the corner, where I'd invariably shimmy up a frenzy to the now-standard Peter Bjorn & John, Hot Chip and Arcade Fire tunes mixed in with classic Joy Divison and/or Smiths hipster anthems that would get me yelling, "i LOVE this song!!" to the misfortune of anybody within my immediate 5-km radius.

There was one night where I wandered around the city in search of some sort of after-hours dance party with a group of bar-patron strangers that was particularly memorable. Post-party, as we were heading towards the trams on our separate ways home, the early-morning sky was suddenly filled with tiny flecks of hot-air balloon silhouettes! It was quite the surreal sight, seeing so many hot-air balloons in the distance, slowly taking over the sky amidst the backdrop of the city's high-rise buildings. I wish I'd had a camera with me. Occasionally, the memory of that image still appears in my mind.

Now, memories like these make me miss my life in Melbourne.

It kind of looked like this, except there were many more balloons. Image "stolen" from here.