Tag / karaoke

by Alexander Sorondo

April 27

Pretty tipsy and it’s Karaoke night again, the music’s crazy loud, and while reading somebody launches into a Linkin Park song at the mic and — maybe this is you being drunk and hypersensitive — the vibrations through the bar, through your stool, are running through your torso and seem to be tracing the outline of your organs. Your organs are buzzing.

It’s awful.

But also might not actually be happening.

Except it feels like it’s happening. You feel through vibrations every bunched-up contour of your intestines and you hope that this song ends immediately.

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by Alexander Sorondo

April 26

Karaoke. You didn’t know.

A middle-aged guy in blue jeans with red suspenders and his shirt tucked in takes the stage with a melancholic rendition of “Love on the Rocks”. You see him at Barnes & Noble sometimes. He goes there with a backpack and a baseball cap and stays for hours. Reads a lot.

His voice is deep and he talks with a cadence that sounds aloof, and every step he takes looks a little too deliberate. You see him sometimes with a friend who’s shorter, slimmer, has more hair. They talk and talk and sound like close friends. This other guy sits while the big guy reads, never cracks a book himself. Just looks around, plays on his phone. Now and then he’ll interject with a remark. Big guy responds as though he weren’t preoccupied.

Next guy on stage is tall and white and bald, wears a sleeveless t-shirt, and he raps and even though the on-screen read-along has substituted the n- and f-word for something else he supplies them anyway. The room is uneasy, and he descends the stage with a smile. A shitty dude, powerless, takes what joy he can from making people uncomfortable.