AN ADAPTATION OF KE$HA’S ‘TIK TOK’

I wake up in the morning… well, it’s clearly not the actual morning. The sun has been up for hours now. People have gone into work and are halfway through their day. But since my own day is just starting I guess I’m just having my own delayed version of ‘morning’. As I stretch out and shake off last night, the thought crosses my mind that this is how rap stars of the 90s must have felt. I don’t know exactly where this thought comes from. For a second in my head I’m P Diddy before he went back to using his real name. I’m Sean Combs in his heyday, when he lived life as his alter ego: when he woke up another party down and another party ahead. This kind of life is fun for a while, but you can only survive on shitty sleeps on strangers’ couches for so long before the exhaustion takes you. Morning, real morning, has become the enemy. Each new morning lurches you into that unfortunately familiar feeling. That feeling where you know you just have to get out of this trashed house before last night’s host wakes up and remembers that I’m not their new best friend when they are sober. I look around around the trashed living room I made into my nest last night. Through the piles of empty pizza boxes with cheap cheese encrusted into the cardboard, the scatterings of half crushed beer cans and the trails of cigarettes butted out everywhere, I spot a crusty looking toothbrush. A vague memory comes to me of that same brush being used to clear out a particularly foul bong in the midst of the party. I shudder at what I know I’m going to do next, but dental hygiene is important – even if nothing else is. I pick up the brush and do my best to disinfect its horror by swirling it around in an abandoned and half empty bottle of Jack Daniels. The taste is bitter and I can feel the grit collected from inside the bong swilling in my mouth. Whatever, it still clears out the taste of hell that had set up shop in mouth while I slept. I drag my body to the exit and open the front door. The sunlight rushes through me, purging me. The heat slowly dissolves me, it feels good. I fish in my jacket pocket for sunglasses and get them on as quickly as I can. Looking around me I realise I’m in the suburbs again. Goddamn it. I look towards the city on the horizon and it’s like a mirage of an oasis in the desert. Without a cent to my name I know I’m going to have to walk to the oasis. I contemplate sitting down and just giving up, but then I look around at the white picket fences, the mailboxes shaped like the houses they belong to and – fuck- I’m leaving and I’m not coming back.

In the city I look through the shop windows. I see the girls getting pedicures, trying to make the one part of their body that can’t be made beautiful beautiful. I see the men trying on new clothes. Suits with slight shoulder pads built in and vertical pinstripes to make them seem like they’ve got those perfectly built bodies that they just don’t have. Everyone’s phones are blowing up, overfilled with plans for tonight. No plan holds together past the first play of their favourite song at the hands of a half-competent DJ. After that it’s just pulling up to every party that comes your way, trying to stay tipsy and ignore the fact that at some point it has to stop.

The song comes on and it won’t stop. The music pops and fizzes in the atmosphere. You want the DJ to keep turning the volume up until the speakers explode. You dance, fighting against the impending daylight of the next day. In the back of your head you hear the clock counting down. Tick tock. Fuck that, tonight’s party can go forever.

The song comes on and it won’t stop. The music pops and fizzes in the atmosphere. You want the DJ to keep turning the volume up until the speakers explode. You dance, fighting against the impending daylight of the next day. In the back of your head you hear the clock counting down. Tick tock. Fuck that, tonight’s party can go forever.

Tonight is beautiful. I haven’t got a care in the world, but I do have a lot of beer. I don’t have a dollar to my name, but my name was on the door so entry was free. I hear a group of girls talking about ‘swagger’ and figure that right now that should pretty much be my middle name. I head over to them and start flirting. I hear one of them whisper to her friend that I look like Mick jagger, I can’t figure out if this is a compliment or an insult.

It’s later in the night and I’ve got one of the girls by herself. It’s just us buried deep in the sweating pulsating walls of the mosh. Once again my mind dredges up an outdated hip hop reference and I whisper “let’s get crunk” into this girl’s ear.

I dance up real close to her and put a hand on her ass. She pushes me away, slaps me straight across the face and yells at me that I’m too drunk and should go home.

I just keep dancing.

I’m going to keep dancing until the club shuts down. I’m going to keep dancing until the police run in on a drugs bust. I’m going to keep dancing while the police drag shifty looking dudes through the crowd. I’m going to keep dancing until the police take me with them.

The song comes on and it won’t stop. The music pops and fizzes in the atmosphere. You want the DJ to keep turning the volume up until the speakers explode. You dance, fighting against the impending daylight of the next day. In the back of your head you hear the clock counting down. Tick tock. Fuck that, tonight’s party can go forever.

The song comes on and it won’t stop. The music pops and fizzes in the atmosphere. You want the DJ to keep turning the volume up until the speakers explode. You dance, fighting against the impending daylight of the next day. In the back of your head you hear the clock counting down. Tick tock. Fuck that, tonight’s party can go forever.

The DJ plays my favourite song and everything that I was is gone. The DJ builds a new me from scratch right there and then. He plugs himself right into my heart and my heart rate matches the BPM perfectly. I look at the DJ and though he doesn’t look up from his work I know he feels me. The DJ must know that he has me. Whoever controls the beat controls me and he knows it.

My hands are in the air, flung up like I’m a marionette. I look at the crowd and with my eyes I urge them to do the same.

The DJ plays my favourite song and everything that I was is gone. The DJ builds a new me from scratch right there and then. He plugs himself right into my heart and my heart rate matches the BPM perfectly. I look at the DJ and though he doesn’t look up from his work I know he feels me. The DJ must know that he has me. Whoever controls the beat controls me and he knows it.

My hands are in the air, flung up like I’m a marionette. I look at the crowd and with my eyes I urge them to do the same.

I know it’s an egocentric thing to say, but this night feels special. It feels like this moment right here was made for just me. It feels like the party don’t start until I walk in.

The song comes on and it won’t stop. The music pops and fizzes in the atmosphere. You want the DJ to keep turning the volume up until the speakers explode. You dance, fighting against the impending daylight of the next day. In the back of your head you hear the clock counting down. Tick tock. Fuck that, tonight’s party can go forever.

The song comes on and it won’t stop. The music pops and fizzes in the atmosphere. You want the DJ to keep turning the volume up until the speakers explode. You dance, fighting against the impending daylight of the next day. In the back of your head you hear the clock counting down. Tick tock. Fuck that, tonight’s party can go forever.

WRITTEN BY A. MURRAY www.seriousyeah.tumblr.com

BASED ON AN IDEA BY JAKE BROWN www.specialteam.tumblr.com