Every night of the CMJ music festival, the streets of Manhattan are packed with all the visiting young music-lovers vomiting happily on our curbs. Tonight will be the most vomit-alicious: it's the big Spin magazine CMJ afterparty. I'm not attending this event because I'm sure it's really loud and I'm saving my eardrums for Mars Volta on Friday night, but here's what I imagine is going on right now:

11:20 p.m. I suspect that the gloomy members of Interpol met at the Williamsburg Back Hair Support Group. The drummer has had too much of the free Sam Adams; his post-goth affect has shifted two consonants from dour to foul.

11:40 p.m. The entire Lower East Side is stuffed inside Piano's. Eep! Is that Vincent Gallo? Oh no — it's just Lou Reed with his hair grown out.

Midnight. The staff tears Spin editor Sia Michel out of the DJ booth. Perhaps her acid has kicked in; she's trying to scratch it up, but those aren't turntables, it's just Moby and another bald friend. Mike Caren, Atlantic L.A.'s A&R man, slips her a tranq from his bag of tricks as the Madison Strays come on.

1 a.m. Who the fuck invited Serena Altschul?

2 a.m. The cute couple from the Raveonettes (a Jesus and Mary Chain tribute act from Europe somewhere) are pogoing endlessly. But there's no music playing. It's kind of embarrassing.

2:30 a.m. VHS or Beta finally take the stage, to huge applause. Everyone's rocking out until suddenly they all realize that VHS or Beta is literally super-gay Pet Shop Boys synthesizer disco music. The amps are knocked over, the lights are turned on full blast. A bunch of homeboys start thrashing the band while Thalia Zedek flicks her Bic under a copy of Spin. All the free magazines ignite, and Piano's goes up in flames.

3:00 a.m. Paramedics are driving around the L.E.S., scooping up dazed members of Earlimart and Enon and Elf Power and all the other E bands to treat them for their third-degree burns. Everyone decides this was the best party ever: then they realize they have to go to work in the morning and put out a magazine. There are tears, and drunken promises to apply to graduate school.