On Blue-Light Rooms & Other Gateways
There’s a kind of current that runs through the blue-light rooms where things are made, the backstage corners of plays, the band rooms humming after hours, the improvised studios where people gather around something still taking shape. It’s the same current that moves through any space where people are building worlds together, whether out of plywood, choreography, fabric, or light. These places feel rare, almost set apart from the rest of life, and the people drawn to them are often those who never quite fit the usual shape of things. They feel most themselves in the charged, half-chaotic atmosphere of a room in the middle of making something new.
A Place Built Without a Nightlife Vocabulary
Growing up in Utah, I gravitated toward the rooms where things were being made—the art classrooms, the wings of the stage, the band rooms buzzing after dark. Those were the spaces that felt alive. But as you grew older, the world around you encouraged a kind of narrowing. Creativity was tolerated in childhood, yet adulthood was expected to look settled, orderly, and suburban. There wasn’t much of a tradition of going out dancing or spending time in bars, and alcohol made so many people uneasy that some wouldn’t attend a wedding if there was a bartender. It always struck me as ironic in a religion built around a figure who turned water into wine.
In Utah—or at least the version I grew up in—not everyone avoided play, but there was a strong puritan reflex that regarded vigorous dancing, costumes, and nighttime gatherings with suspicion. Dressing up could be dismissed as childish or inappropriate. My father was convinced for years that Halloween had demonic origins and refused to celebrate it.
That way of thinking leaves little space for adults to experiment with identity or enjoy even modest forms of theatricality. The cultural instinct tilted toward self-containment rather than expression, toward seriousness rather than imagination.
Discos & Study Abroad
When I think about my first real encounter with dancing, I always return to that scene in Hanna, the Amazon series, where the girl who has grown up hidden in the woods ends up in a tourist disco for the first time. She isn’t scared; she’s fascinated and a little stunned people get to live this way.
When I went to study abroad in Madrid when I was 20, I’d never been into a bar before, but Spain operated on a completely different logic. Kids start drinking at 16, so the whole culture around bars and discos is less anxious and more woven into everyday life. People danced because the music was playing or because their friends pulled them into the rhythm, not because the moment was supposed to signify anything. Flamenco classes, crowded bars, and late-night discos slowly demystified it for me. A drink or “chupitas” helped, but what really changed things was watching people move without apology or self-surveillance. Movement made sense there in a way it never had before, and for the first time, dance started to feel like an essential part of who I could be.
The Quiet Rebellion of Fancy Dress
England added another layer I didn’t expect. After Spain, I assumed the ease around dancing and nightlife might be tied to Southern Europe, but then I moved to another very Anglo, very orderly country and found that a different kind of playfulness lived there as well. I first heard the phrase “fancy dress parties” and imagined formal clothing, only to learn that in British English it simply means costumes, usually chosen with enough enthusiasm to make the whole thing feel delightfully absurd. Someone would announce a theme, people would make quick charity-shop runs, and by evening the bar would be full of whatever interpretations they could assemble. During my master’s year those nights became a kind of punctuation between lectures and libraries — small, collective acts of imagination that gave the term “student life” a broader range.
Fancy dress is a faint descendant of older revels and masquerades where people were given a little room to slip outside the roles they held during the day. The modern version doesn’t carry the weight of those older traditions, but the instinct is the same: a simple, generous permission to become someone else for a few hours. Creativity and imagination need small departures from the everyday. Being someone else for an evening, or even just exaggerating one aspect of yourself, has always lightened the existential load. It creates a pause in the linear story of your life, a moment where you’re allowed to play rather than perform.
The instinct behind fancy dress — that willingness to step outside yourself for an evening — extends into festival culture, but in a different register. Glastonbury is the version most Americans have heard of. For a few days, ordinary life expands. People build temporary worlds in fields by hauling in scaffolding, generators, speakers, tents, sequins, and a small nation’s worth of waterproofs.
Crossing Back to the Western Desert
The jump from that environment to the western United States is a kind of cultural whiplash. Once you’re back in Utah and Nevada, the landscape is huge but the places where you can actually move in public shrink to almost nothing. Spain covers about 195,000 square miles (505,000 km²) and holds roughly 47 million people. Utah and Nevada together span almost the same area—about 210,000 square miles (543,000 km²)—but have fewer than 9 million people combined. It creates a strange paradox: two states the size of a European country, but with almost no public spaces where adults are expected to gather, move, or experiment with identity. Outside a few country bars, and the singular outlier of Las Vegas, there isn’t much of a nightlife vocabulary across all that space.
Electronic dance music, house, bass—anything with a subwoofer and a color palette beyond beige—triggers immediate suspicion. And not the vague moral kind. In a culture that is otherwise intensely materialistic, the suspicion turns strangely supernatural. In Mormon thought, “Satan” isn’t a metaphor; he’s a literal figure whose primary task is to lure people into drugs, sex, and what gets categorized broadly as “bad choices.” Unfortunately for anyone who likes a kick drum, electronic dance music falls neatly into that category. Add strobe lights, fog machines, or—heaven forbid—darkness punctured by red lighting, and the entire scene reads as a recruitment center for degeneracy.
The irony is that the desert is perfect for building temporary worlds. Salt flats, canyons, old mining land, vast empty valleys — the West is designed for large-scale gatherings. But mainstream Utah culture treats underground dance events the way small towns treat UFO sightings: something is happening out there, and it’s definitely not good. (But I mean, how can you blame them if you know anything about “alien cattle mutilations?”)
I’m not tracing the full socio-cultural circuitry here, and don’t even get me started on aliens — that can wait for another essay — but this section needed grounding. England showed me that dressing up and being out at night doesn’t require a moral preface; it’s simply part of how people live. And historically, when a government or an authoritarian religion feels threatened, the first reflex is always the same: impose a curfew. Control the hours, control the movement. The underlying question doesn’t change: Who gets to be out after dark?
That became obvious during the pandemic, when a statewide shutdown and a curfew — for a respiratory virus you couldn’t catch outside, of all things — sparked a ridiculous, primal urge to leave the house. One night I grabbed my friend Lamb, a skateboarder with no interest in rules, and we ran around the empty playground at Liberty Park like kids who’d slipped the perimeter. We climbed the tops of the tower slides to scan for cops. It’s still one of my favorite memories from those years. Here I am “hanging out” in a hammock illegally in Liberty Park during lockdown, 2020.
Utah taught me how many people think the answer to “who gets to be out at night?” should be tightly controlled — and how intoxicating it feels to ignore that for even ten minutes.
The Edge of the Known World
If there’s a thread that connects Utah art rooms, Madrid discos, English fancy dress, and the temporary worlds built from plywood and light, it’s novelty. I’ve always been drawn to the moments when something unplanned rises up and changes the temperature of a life, when you feel more awake simply because you weren’t expecting what arrived. When I was little, that feeling lived in stories. Pocahontas was the one I returned to again and again, not for romance but for the idea of a girl who stepped toward change rather than away from it. She moved into the unknown because it lit up something inside her, something the familiar world couldn’t reach.
There’s a shot of her standing at the cliff’s edge, hair blown sideways, looking out at a world she doesn’t fully understand but wants anyway. For a certain kind of girl — the restless, the observant, the ones born into cultures that value obedience over curiosity — that image is a blueprint. It tells you that stepping outside your prescribed path might be the only way to find out who you are.
The Color of a Moving River
Heraclitus said you can’t step into the same river twice. The river moves; so do you. It’s the simplest description of what novelty feels like when it lands: a shift, a current, something that interrupts the default settings of ordinary life. That runs through the creative rooms I loved as a kid and the dance floors I found later—the sense that you’re stepping into a moment that didn’t exist ten seconds ago and won’t exist again.
Novelty isn’t decoration. It’s a physiological event. Wonder tightens the chest; surprise pulls the breath in; adrenaline flickers at the edges of perception; the world you thought you understood rearranges itself for a moment. Creativity depends on those physiological rearrangements. So does joy.
Novelty interrupts routine and reminds you that the world is wider and stranger than the narrow structures you were handed; it opens doors in the mind. For people who never felt entirely at home inside the expected structures, novelty is the moment where you remember that change is not only possible but natural, and that moving toward the unknown has always been where the story becomes interesting.
But novelty is only one face of change. Most of the time change arrives without excitement: jobs shift, people leave, landscapes alter, seasons tilt. What you crave in one moment—movement, unpredictability—becomes something you brace against in another. The same current that delivers the jolt of possibility also carries away what was stable a moment before. Heraclitus wasn’t describing thrill-seeking; he was naming the underlying condition. Whether or not you want it, the world is already moving.
On Arising and Passing Away
Early Buddhist thinkers approached the same truth differently, not as an argument but as a quality of experience. Things arise, change, and pass—not tragically, not triumphantly, simply because that is what things do. Hesse’s Siddhartha takes this and turns it into a story, letting the river become a companion rather than a symbol. From here, the ideas meet in color.
Blue is the shade most often given to water in motion—not because rivers are actually blue, but because the mind recognizes the mix of depth, shadow, and reflection as something that can’t be held. Blue is a color defined by scatter and movement. In painting, in stage lighting, in the natural world, it is the hue that recedes even as you look at it. Theaters rely on that property. Blue backstage light is meant to be seen without being noticed. It reveals just enough for the next action to take place while allowing the rest to fall back into near-invisibility:
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Audience visibility: blue falls off quickly over distance, so the audience can’t see backstage movement even as crews work a few feet away.
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Night vision: blue interferes least with the eye’s rod cells, which lets stagehands keep their sense of darkness while still navigating safely.
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Cues and markings: spike tape and backstage markers glow cleanly under blue without disrupting what’s happening onstage.
There’s a quiet philosophy in that. Change often announces itself the same way—low-intensity, peripheral, easy to overlook until it has already rearranged the edges of things.
And then there is the river’s color, which isn’t really color at all but the result of light passing through depth, sediment, air, and constant motion. The blue we assign to rivers is a metaphor we keep returning to because it captures something about impermanence better than language can. Blue is the visual form of transience: the distance inside the present moment, the shimmer between what is and what is becoming.
You can’t step into the same river twice, not because the river has changed or because you have changed, but because the meeting point is always new—the water, the light on its surface, the air moving above it, the moon tugging at every tide, including the ones inside your own body.
The Blue Flower of Enlightenment
There’s a plant I keep on my windowsill with the cultivar name Hana Aoi. The name simply means “blue flower” in Japanese, a phrase that has appeared for centuries in poems, paintings, and seasonal imagery. In Buddhist art, the blue lotus—the utpala—carries its own long history. The Lotus Sūtra notes that the Buddha’s radiance is “blue as the utpala, fresh and pure,” a color linked to clarity and the difficulty of awakening. In later iconography the blue lotus is often shown half-open, a form that suggests insight arriving gradually rather than all at once. It is a flower you glimpse rather than grasp.
Japanese poetry adds a quieter note. Edo-period poet Chiyo-ni (加賀千代女, also known as Kaga no Chiyo), wrote around the 18th century:
朝顔や
つるべ取られて
もらい水asagao ya / tsurube torarete / morai mizu
Morning-glory blue
has taken the well-bucket—
I ask next door for water.
Chiyo-ni’s poem turns on a small domestic moment: a morning-glory vine has curled itself around the rope of the well-bucket, and rather than tear the bloom, she simply walks next door for water. The haiku isn’t symbolic in the Western sense, but its clarity comes from the way it treats a minor inconvenience as something worth accommodating. The blue morning-glory is held in place for a single interval between dawn and heat, and the poem catches that brief suspension—the stillness of a flower that won’t last, and the world adjusting itself around it. It’s an image of transience without drama, the kind of quiet impermanence that sits beneath so many Japanese seasonal poems.
Across these traditions, the blue flower echoes the same intuition found in rivers and backstage light: things change shape, appear and vanish, and part of their meaning lies in that movement. It is not a symbol of permanence, but of passage—a reminder that the world doesn’t hold still, and that our lives don’t either.
