Meme: two words that go great together

I’ve been vaguely dreading that I’d get tagged by this one, and Kate finally did. I won’t be able to think of anything, I thought. Or I’ll be able to think of things, but only pornographic things that someone will prefer I not post.

Anyway. The rules are, and I quote, “List 10 things (in no particular order) that bring you a moment of joy and tag 5 friends to do the same.” I wonder if the rules evolve and mutate as these things get passed around.

Stepping outdoors at night in the desert, and the air being warmer than it was inside.
the light before dawn, when you’re sneaking home late after getting up to something you know you’re not supposed to have been doing.
That moment when you and the person you just met first have a real person moment, when you both get a peek behind the usual shell of polite hello how are you ritual at the same time, and actually see each other. That moment of eye contact.
Just when the lights go on, and you know your lines, and you know your character, and you’re still blind but step out into the glow. I don’t have this one anymore, but it used to be one of the best.
Kim’s family had a cabin on Whidbey Island, with a pool and not enough beds for the crowds of friends she brought there in summer. Groups packed in cars, chasing each other about the ferry, on the way there.
When near-strangers at parties say You fit really well together. You get each others’ jokes.
A nightclub I’d been to enough times to be comfortable in it, on a night with a three-act set: the Eliot Bay bagpiper company, a kodo drumming ensemble, and closing the night a tribal-industrial group who screamed and howled and set fire to things and gave the audience chunks of rebar and welded-together piles of metal to pound along with. Knowing one of the drummers from work. The moment near the end when the bagpipers and kodo drums joined in with the rest of us.
Burning Man, Dead shows, Amsterdam, nameless music festivals in some friend-of-a-friend hippie’s back acres, or just close groups of friends large enough or insistent enough to take over a small area for a while and give it a name: Colonial house. Park Street. Jef’s campouts. Noppet New Years. Places where the rules are suspended or changed drastically for a while, where you might be free to get naked or dispense balloonsful of nitrous oxide or teach strangers how to juggle.
Drumming for early morning african dance classes in Chicago, the trance I’d fall into as we’d play a slow rhythm before class; how the intensity of our drumming and the depth of the dancers’ warmup stretches would feed off each other in waves. The seamless way we’d step up into a real pattern for the start of class, without cue, just knowing when.
Being in space empty enough that you can see there’s no-one between you and the horizon. The road being absolutely straight all the way to the edge.

That’s it. There’s my list.