Clubbing

Sometimes I read the personals, hoping to find the woman of my dreams.
Even at my age, those dreams include a woman maybe 10 or 15 years my junior. What can I say, that's the way guys think.

Yet even in my delusional state, I know that when a woman says "I like to go clubbing," there's no chance of a match.
I can't do most bars. Especially the large, loud, cavernous ones.
This week - twice - we saw what happens when hundreds of people, packed into these kinds of venues, need to get out quickly: many of them die.

There may be some wonderful folks around, but it's been my experience that the people who own and run these kinds of places are absolutely the lowest forms of human garbage. With complete disregard for anything but profit, they'll pack 'em in like sardines, sell 'em liquor regardless of age or law, and strut around town in overly-poofed hair, because they own a "nightclub." Safety and logic and sanity mean nothing.

And what of the bands who play in these settings? Most of the musicians are like Beavis and Butthead: they divide the world into cool and not cool. They want only pleasure and chicks. If starting a fire below a 7 foot ceiling in a cramped, wooden building gets them some adulation or sex, no problem, no conscience.

Someone must go to jail for what happened this week in Chicago and West Warwick, Rhode Island.

**Update: 2/23/03**
Based on coverage in today's New York Times, I'll add some more...
We don't conduct investigations or try people in the media, we have police and the courts for that.
But if we did, I'd consider this quote from Jeffrey B. Pine, a former Rhode Island attorney general: "In Rhode Island, if you're involved in a felony described as inherently dangerous — and I would submit that setting off fireworks in a place like this is inherently dangerous — and the result of that conduct is the death of someone else, you can be on the hook for felony murder."

Then I'd conclude that RI club owners Michael and Jeff Derderian (his crying and blubbering on TV notwithstanding; they're probably because he knows he's in deep trouble)......and Great White's tour manager, Dan Biechele, who the Times reports was usually responsible for setting up the pyrotechnics.......and lead singer Jack Russell (who brilliantly boasts that he tried to put out the fire with his bottle of water) are headed for prison.

-M!