I shook my head, smiled and stepped back, kind of abashed about dancing with this boy who was probably going to be sleeping through homeroom on Monday while I was looking for a job and trying to figure out my way in the world.

Still, it was nice to be seen as one of the kids.

I returned to the office to eat and check in.  The cameramen knew what shots they needed to get and were getting them.  Simon was taking a nap.   I looked at the schedule and saw that The Crystal Method was about to start playing at “circuitGrounds”.  At 11 p.m., I headed out to catch their set, accompanied this time by one of the other P.A.s, a photographer in his mid-40s or early 50s named Shawn.  We crammed bright orange earplugs into our aural cavities and wove our way through the ever-thickening fairway mob.

At Crystal Method, we found ourselves part of a dancing circle.  A black boy wearing green-and-black striped sleeves jumped in.  He danced like a shaman, a wheeling composite of leaps, skips, pounding feet and flailing arms, his body being shaped in the synthesis of the driving music.  At the Mark Farina show after midnight, Shawn and I watched two girls dancing in a gyrating green-speckled arena created by a boy holding some kind of vibrating pen light above their heads (one of many accessories that I had no idea existed before this night).  The girls in their halter tops, giant boots and crazy eye makeup were mesmerizing, making the throbbing rhythm their own as though their bodies were born understanding it.

And, as 1 a.m. approached – maybe because I was tired, or everyone else was getting tired, or everyone else was on increasing amounts of drugs – but as I witnessed Mark Farina making his music, I stopped feeling so self-conscious.   I remembered that we’re in the middle of a fucking rave; everyone’s here to have fun.  The kids watching the glowstick-dancers are giggling like children, that guy blinking at the stage with the beatific smile on his face is at the supreme height of joy.  I remembered: this music tells us how to move to it.  I’m not a terrific dancer but nobody’s looking at me, nobody’s judging.

Even Shawn – who had been reservedly watching the bands until now – started to get loose and move to the beat.  I remembered the strobe-bathed clubs I used to go to – in London with Jen when I was nineteen and we went to Fabric to hear DJ Sasha.  The jittery insouciant energy of Red Bull-and-vodka, the rarified environment of flashing darkness, fog and encompassing sound.  I danced with an Irish/Israeli boy named Joe, and we seemed to spiral into a different kind of space, composed only of warm touch and pulsating sound.  Time became abstract, nothing but green digits on Joe’s watch.  When Jen and I finally stepped outside, I was astonished by morning.  Time came back into existence: mini-cabs waited at the curb to lure dance-wearied clubbers, and Jen and I walked to a bus stop to catch the first double-decker in the gray dawn.

The music still ties it all together, even if “rave culture” has become more about binkys, sequins and a synthetic kind of sexual display than the sublimity of the electronic music trip. Perhaps the music, like Ecstasy, has always been for the mass of its adherents just a really, really great party rather than some sort of Hellenic transcendence.  Perhaps it’s only me – who have always been susceptible to Romanticism, to “Be through my lips to unawaken’d earth / The trumpet of a prophecy!”, and always looking for the scene or event or phenomenon that is the Algonquin Table or Haight-Ashbury of our time, the moment when we can, however briefly, believe we will change the world – perhaps it’s only me who is looking for this kind of meaning.

But, for whatever reasons these kids are here – and there’s something to be said for that class outcast who comes here and gets to wear his shiny leggings and lose himself in the dance – the artists are here for the music. Electronica is uplifting, positive, with dreamy messages about connection, love, and home.  For many of the artists, it is a spiritual medium.  Some artists point to it specifically (like Astral Projection), while with others it’s built into the structure of the music.  The Killers’ song “Human” asks its question not only with words, but with the soaring transcendence of its tone: “Are we human – or are we dancers?”

Overall, there are worse ways to earn $200 than digging hours and hours of cool music.  Still, by three-thirty I was praying for it all to be over.  While the ravers would get to go home and sleep – or continue the party elsewhere if they were still rolling – four o’clock meant that we had to start the heavy work of our night: packing and loading all the gear.  At exactly four a.m., Paul Van Dyk’s last song came to a halt in the “kineticField”.  Tens of thousands of ravers began filtering out through the arches.  Half an hour later, the Coliseum was empty.  Florescent lights came on, revealing a carpet of plastic bottles and aluminum cans over the floor and all the stone steps.  A bunch of janitors set stoically to work with push brooms. Like trying to sweep sand off a beach.  I turned away from the office window and started helping to pack up.

After two hours of cleanup and van-loading, Kelly and all us P.A.s hugged weary goodbyes in the gray, trash-scattered dawn that only a couple of hours before had been an electronic orgasm.  When I arrived at my car, the windshield was coated with grime and multiple flyers, inviting me in Rainbow-Brite colors and bubbly ’70s lettering to more raves throughout the summer.

I drove up the 110 as the sun burned red through the dirty fog of downtown dawn, just past 6 a.m.  My feet ached as I pressed the gas.  I thought of the thousands of teenagers now sleeping it all off, oblivious to the wreck they’d left behind, the environmental insult that they’d casually wreaked on the carnival grounds.  What was it all for?

The masters of the universe must always cede power to the raving rabble, who then gradually settle down and become the establishment themselves.  But each generation needs – and deserves – their moment of madness, the radiant blaze of sonic ecstasy.

Rave will die out, eventually.  Whatever comes after Post-Irony will find a way to make even our postmodern super-self-reference seem clueless, because we must always demolish the past in this generation-gap era.  But something tells me that the essence behind rave won’t go away entirely.  It’s only the most recent incarnation in the humanity-old tradition of rhythmic, trance-inducing music, and it’s only the electronic form of it that’s characteristic of my generation.

The beat will go on as it always has.  And as always, it will go back underground, whence it came, and reemerge as something else altogether.