Encourage me to quit my job

Opinions and criticisms are sought. Also, please give a nice round of applause to Coppe who helped hammer this into something readable:

You might wonder what I’d be doing going out to clubs and pubs; the bar-diver scene’s a bit social for me after all, right? Well, it’s like this: The human ear can’t hear anything below x cycles per second, instead those really deep bass notes are felt, right behind your breastbone, shaking you from your lungs to your toes.
I remember once my parents took us to one of those activity nights at the Y, try out some of their classes and activities for free sort of thing. I sat in on some Jap martial arts class, and the instructor – round-eyed gaijin with a bald patch – talked about qi. Your qi centre is below your navel but above your groin, a metaphysical bladder that fills itself with energy.
I’ve always liked to believe that when the music’s just right you don’t feel those low notes in your chest, you breathe them in through your qi, Yang triumphant. You can’t get that kind of volume in any home stereo I could afford, and the neighbors would take exception – neighbors always have shit taste in music, this is a law of nature.
So here we are, the bar scene. University co-eds in free drinks push up bras and middle-aged homosexual predators who offer speed for a bathroom blowjob, all under cycling colored strobe lights. The humanity of youth culture, with its sweaty bodies, salted beer, poorly washed glasses and plastic cups that dissolve from a gin and tonic…
But you can’t beat the sound, or the throbbing atomic motion of the dancers as they masturbate themselves against each other. The band was good, they had that lean hungry drive that separates successful musicians from true artists. They’d get noticed and get signed one day soon, and then that tortured soul at the microphone would cash in his hard won truths and individualism for whatever post-alterna/goth/indie/emo teenage craze was the dépêche mode du jour de rigueur.
I didn’t come for the band, though, good as they were. I came for the music, that white light little death; a rollicking boogie that was the holy lovechild of a Gibson guitar and mongoose. All riki-tiki-tavi, fur and teeth. It grabbed you from somewhere below your breathless qi and took you along a full Gee rollercoaster of Yang. It would be criminal to waste good amphetamines on pulling the young gays (and the merely curious) in attendance so I bought a drink for one of the mutton dressed as wolves and charmed him for a while as the guitarist replaced a string.
I’m a white boy, through and through, and this was white kid college rock, but sometimes you have to let go. Crest the wavefront on that perfect union of sound and chemical and give birth to motion. There was a black prophet once who left a gift to the white man, a perfect Zen koan: “free your mind and your ass will follow.” I got out there and danced, joy and music and motion, mongoose and cobra, arms waving free like that lonely little NH2 amine that made it all just right.
There are times when everybody needs somebody to dance with. A room full of strangers, every one of them a nation of loathsome humanity building up their GDP of groove, dancing to paradise. I didn’t want to know names, I didn’t want to remember faces. I got out there and I moved with the speed behind my qi, soaking up that Yin. No matter how much you try to stay to yourself, there’s always something you need from someone else. Human mercantilism doesn’t work, we’re social animals.
Even so, John Donne was wrong. You have to work at it, but you can make time to yourself. There’s a joke I like to make about my surname, a little pun for one. My name’s Thomas Everyman, and I’m an island unto myself.

It reads to me a bit like Holden Caulfield enjoying himself, as you might expect him to be if he could have time traveled to now from the boring times he was stuck in.

I thought that described it really well.

Had to look that one up - I dread the possibility of re-creating such a character, if only because there are no decent rock musicians left to murder and I wouldn't want to waste my first novel on the frontman from Razorlight.

Well I've known Garner for years and I was confused for most of it until I figured it was a work of fiction.

hehe, that one aspect of it completely prevents it from being autobiographical.

I remember one live show in particular, some frat boy next to me leaned over after the first song and asked if i had some problem with the band or something, as i'd just stood there like a statue throughout it.

the first time i saw Bob Dylan, i was doing my usual 'i'm in a room full of other people' social shutdown up until about Rainy Day Women #12 & 35. Now, its important to understand that I don't even like that song all that much. If i was making a list of my favorite works form the Dylan cannon, it would not be included. regardless, it got to me (the whole place was dancing by that point) and i started to groove a bit - so, I'm doing my geeky bobbing and weaving thing and I notice Dylan looking over at me. I did my usual eyebrow waggle that passes for me saying hello to someone from a distance, and Bob Dylan, His Holiness, did the same eyebrow waggle right back to me and laid into it on the guitar a bit more. that did it for me. that time, that one time, I actually tried to dance in public.

The downside is, now everyone who knows me has to put up with me saying "Bob Dylan smiled at me once" every two months or so.

Good lord, you mean there are still people on this earth I haven't bored to death with my story about bob dylan smiling at me! Well, it all started this time we were at a dylan concert...

I hate that second entry where someone has written "oh my gosh's variant." instead of God, it's a pet peeve of mine where people are too bashful about using the right word in context, because it's a swear word or whatever, and actually distort the meaning for future readers - polluting the minds of millions with there non-swearing nicenessness...

I am woefully ignorant about most things spongebob. I did see part of an episode once, seemed like good Kids TV from what I could tell.

I've had other near misses with celebrities - once litterally. I was running around the corner in downtown Athens, Georgia, and Michael Stipe (plus maybe Peter Buck, I didn't actually get a good enough look to be sure) was coming around the other way, and I nearly plowed into him. I said sorry and he nodded at me.

When I was a small child, maybe 6 or so, my dad was showing me around the museum in the state capitol, and we saw Ralph Abernathy enter the building. Dad explained that Mr Abernathy was a civil rights champion, and a colleague of Dr Martin Luther King, Jr, so I went over to ask if I could shake his hand. He smiled at me and my parents and we shook hands.

Some years later, I heard on the news that he was arrested for trying to smuggle a quantity of marijuana into the states from Jamaica. I hope he got let off on a suspended sentence