DIRTY KOZZMOZZ

"Memory card error" the display read as I squinted through the fog at the goddamned camera.
I took the card out, put it back and tried again.
I squeezed one more pic. Then the camera crashed.
Party over.

The party, incidentally, was Kozzmozz, and I was supposedly there to have a good time. I was also supposed to stay sober. The reasons for staying off the booze were plentiful and valid one and all. One reason mattered more to me though. I needed to stay sober enough to later write this report. It was a test of both my writing skills and my professionality.
I took the camera in as a gizmo, and to test it as a possible memory aid. The report was the main goal. I'd studied the line up and their bios. I'd thought up an angle to work. This was bizznez. The party was a major one, the dj's impressive to say the least. The venue, Vooruit, was a multi-tiered maze with 5 rooms and hundreds, maybe thousands of people at the least. It was an excellent occasion to take my reporting to the next level.
I had a theory about the current party journalism. The genre had been fused by hippyesque goodwill, moronic redundancy and pure goddamned amateurism into a solid brainless slab of extatic new-speak. Basically, I thought I could do a better job at it. I had the ego. All I needed was some easily faked talent.Staying sober was, however, rather essential, and would prove basically impossible.

For despite not being native to the fair city of Ghent I nevertheless have connections there. Thus I found myself in an Irish pub a few hours before the party, emptying several pints and eyeing the barmaid. Thus I arrived at the Vooruit beyond any hope of sobriety or professionalism.
Besides my journalistic delusions there was another reason I wanted to avoid getting wasted. There is this alter ego that will surface whenever I get really really drunk, baptised the Drunk Ninja because of its desperate, nonsensical escape stunts. It made it from my dark side into a web comic. Somehow from there it became the name of a shared photo blog I was planning. But the Drunk Ninja was a cold and fearless bastard and I'd broken with him in a brightly lit emergency room. Imagine my surprise when the camera caused yet another alter ego to emerge. Well, surprise might not be an adequate description. Try drunken stupor.

This new me was obsessive, living the party almost solely through the lens. In the space of 5 hours I took 151 pictures, most of them bad jiggly mood stuff, some just run of the mill party pics. Early on there were a few attempts at documenting the party rather than the partying, futile stabs at controling the monster. But pretty soon I found myself photographing cute girls, my friends, myself, the damned walls, even. Volumes of meaningless pics in the midst of a rolling, dancing mass of euforic people. Basic photography skills got flushed down with liters of beer: aiming the cam, shooting when there was adequate lighting, using the flash when there wasn't... gone. I lost myself in my drunken obsession with the camera.
Some of this I remember vaguely, in a fluid dreamlike way. The neverending climbing of stairs. The 'sperm of the gods' decoration. The apocalyptic lightshow. The crowd, dancing, laughing. And yeah, some of the music.
Most of it I had to derive from the pictures I'd taken. Had I been having fun? Some of the pics showed me laughing. There were photographs of places I don't remember going. When did I line up for more coupons? What was I doing alone in the Kursk room? In the hall? Who were all these people having such a ball? And why was that girl smiling at me after I agressively pushed a camera in her face?

But the point both photos and memories made above all was my insane dedication to the camera. 151 pictures, and an enormous frustration when it died on me. When the camera died, the maniac photographer had to die as well. And more than the emptyness that caused me to leave the party soon after, I remember the frustration of that broken monster.

Needless to say next time I'll dump the cam and focus on the chicks. Will this require me being sober? Hell yes.
May the gods bless your pretty little doomed souls.