As Hans Christian Andersen used to say : “I’m going to the club and I want to get high.”

No, this sentence probably never entered his mind.

Much later in the same country a whole generation is out on the dance-floor stepping up to some hard-core beats. The bass and the drum and the drug are making them go bananas on a Saturday night.

I can see them jumping up and down. I have a jug of Carlsberg in my hand and a piece of paper with some words and weird graphics printed on it. The flyer for this evening reads, “Orgy for Egg - Lovers featuring DJ Subterranean and DJ Silent Island”. The DJ looks up; adjusting his headphones, he’s looking good. Two girls slip into the toilet together.

“Don’t you wanna have some fun?” one of the girls says to me as she bumps into me at the bar shortly after. She grabs my hand but I quickly pull it back. I don’t dance…and besides that I’m afraid of ‘crazy’ girls. She runs away; back into the dark room where she can move her body without being rejected. I think: Dancing is indeed a vertical expression of horizontal desires.

She is loved-up. She probably thinks she’s one hell of a dancer. Her body moves are straight out of some porn movie I saw recently. The drug is turning her into a wild beast. She’s doing all the moves her mother taught her not to do.

Tonight she’s not listening. There’s only the voice of some woman mourning on top of the beats. Faster, faster. Oh yes. Oh yeah. The love’n’desire center is chemically stimulated. Suddenly she feels attracted to the whole crowd.

She is not afraid to become the image of a Late-Modern 21st Century Scandinavian Dirty Bitch. She’s beyond birth control, female liberation and the ambitions of a moneymaking career. She’s hedonism. A Dionysian icon. She doesn’t care if the boys are getting confused in their pants. “Just party on, dude!”

She wants to be free. She wants to express herself beyond everyday reality.

The white powder is in her nose. Her lips are numb. Her hips are moving.

Her ego is transcending into Cosmos. She feels her hips collide with the Outer Rings. It’s a total elevation of her mind. She is in control. Sharp-minded and no paranoia. In her mind’s eye, she looks like one of the girls on the poster at the bus stop: An International World Wide Web girl.

Was I supposed to be the surf boy caught in the net ?

I go outside. I join a little crowd of disillusioned potheads around the corner. I light up my joint and pass it on to the four other males. They laugh at each other’s cynical jokes. There is an older guy among us, perhaps Irish, who takes a big lung and blows the smoke right into my face.

“We’re living in one of the most advanced societies in the world and still there’s so much confusion going round,” he says, with a serious smile.

I must have looked puzzled.

“I just want to go in there, grab the first beautiful girl I see and marry her. Get the house and the kids,” he continues, and passes the joint back to me. “All you Danes are so obsessed with sex. You’ve had free access to the world of pornography since 1972 and still you want more. This obsession with nudity is making you go bananas, but it’s not even the core of it. It’s actual the meeting, physical as well as non-physical, two minds, the old story of boy meets girl and vice versa. You want to meet up, you want to connect, but you can’t.”

“Why can’t we?” I ask, and I blow smoke back in his face. He coughs.

“In this institutionalized society with an efficient welfare system you’re kept alive. It’s easy to survive here, but hard to live. Instead you fill up your mind and bodies with drugs, beer and loud music cos’ you don’t have a fuck to communicate,” he says and sparks up a ‘normal’ cigarette.

I looked into his eyes and wondered : “What kind of truth is that ?”

A taxi, which pulled up near us, then interrupted the silence. It stopped and two men came out from the backseat and quickly started a fight. Because of a girl ?

Inside the club the music seemed even louder now. I was standing with a bit of a headache at the bar with the Irishman. He bought me a Gold beer and mentioned something about the depressive statistics for rape and divorce in Denmark.

“What difference does it make, surfing the Net for porn to being here, logged on to a three-dimensional porn site, when you don’t have any physical contact anyway?” He finished his drink and gave me a big hug and I felt utterly disgusted by the fact that perhaps someone thought that we had ‘made’ it together.

“You Danes are all the same,” he said bitterly as he felt I was backing off. “You want it, it’s there for you, laid down before your feet, but you can’t or you won’t have it in the end…why?”

I mumbled: “We must have forgotten.”

Copyright © 1999 jacob ørsted nielsen

Jacob Orsted Nielsen has been institutionalized in the State of Denmark for approximately 24 years. He is about to leave the world of 'being taught' and about to join the Danish Labour Force. He is currently working on a comic book with his fellow country-man Søren Mosdal for a French publishing house. He also co-edited a litterature magazine half entitled ZOE for the past 3 years. He is an exclusive member of the music duo Chicken & Banana which have brought a lot of noise into the streets for years. This summer Chicken & Banana played sound-effects records out into the backyard for approx. 250 sleeping Danish people in Copenhagen at 4 o'clock in the morning. At the moment he is deeply comitted to a Copenhagen based internet radio soon to go on the air and which you'll be able to listen to while you surf *spark-online.