Lunch Untouched, Collins Avenue Through the Glass

The plate sat there getting cold. Some rice bowl from the counter spot on Collins, steam already gone by the time Savage Garden dropped in through the speakers overhead. Noon sun cutting hard across the table, condensation racing down the glass, and I Want You doing exactly what it always does — turning any room into something slightly more electric than it was thirty seconds ago.

Funky Green Dogs pulled the hour somewhere deeper. That album version of Why doesn't rush anything. It just sits in the pocket, and the restaurant noise — forks, laughter, the door opening and closing — folded into the production like it belonged there. Depeche Mode followed with World In My Eyes, then Cantaloop swung through with that bass sample that makes you nod whether you want to or not. Pet Shop Boys closed what felt like the first movement — Suburbia at one-twenty-four, locked tight, the kind of tempo that matches the pace of foot traffic visible through plate glass on a Thursday.

Da Hool opened the back half and the energy shifted. Wankers On Duty into Signum into Mary Jane Holland — a run that belonged more to the highway than the lunch table. I could picture the set landing differently for someone southbound on I-95, windows cracked, July pressing in. Then Inner City's Good Life arrived and everything realigned. Kevin Saunderson's Detroit, 1988, holding the same gravitational pull thirty-eight years later. Paris Grey's vocal over that bassline felt like permission to stay exactly where you were.

Electronic's Disappointed carried the cool-down. Then Tainted Love wrapped the whole thing — Marc Almond's voice against that unmistakable sequence, the noon hour burning bright and already gone. The plate was still there. Untouched. The hour took everything else.