YOU KNOW, it's quite all right if you actually chose not to leave the house last week. Other than the odd night out, I mostly just followed Cosmo's standard breakup advice for coping with Black Tuesday: have a couple "me" days, spend $20 on something ridiculous like chocolate, and give yourself a much-needed mani-pedi. OK, so I actually spent one day (I'm Canadian, so I've at least got that escape, should I need it) eating Hershey's Kisses and milling about MP3 blogs. Sometimes, when the weather sucks and the entire city is on suicide watch, it pays to take the club home and throw a slab of vinyl onto my ultrafunctional – and dare I say, cute – Numark PT-01 portable turntable, or git down to M.I.A.'s freshly downloaded and aptly named mix tape Piracy Funds Terrorism, Vol. 1. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and sharing the sounds of the struggle on the Web seems like a step in the right direction. Plus, the London-born bhangra-dancehall queen's "URAQT" is, by and large, the best song ever written about text messaging, and god knows there have been some dandies.

But with the promise of Piracy's wider release – the hard copy is currently more difficult to track down than Danger Mouse's Grey Album on the day of its preliminary injunction – and with M.I.A.'s remixer-producer, Diplo, rocking last week's Soul Lab Wednesdays at Milk with an inspired mash-up of funk, soul, breaks, rock, and hip-hop, the first clouds of postelection fog may have just been lifted.

Certainly my initial attempt to get happy, hanging out with a sparse crowd of goth kids three hours before the Psychic TV show at DNA Lounge, didn't quite do it. I figured if anyone wouldn't be taking things too seriously, it'd be earnest goth kids, right? Well, suffice it to say the dark-clad sprites left me to lick the tender wounds on my lonesome, beer in hand, tracing the lines the strobe lights made on the floor as they danced in time to a rather choppy and unhinged psytrance mix. Perhaps 8 p.m. is a bad time to hit these darkwave affairs. But even with a full crowd later on, the goth leader – politically agitating man-becoming-woman-becoming-third-sex Genesis P. Orridge, once known for pissing on and fucking his girlfriend onstage in the name of art – could only offer up the words "stupid election."

I refuse to be scared off, though, knowing that at least gothy weeklies like Death Guild at the Glas Kat – "Bring a dead stiff squirrel and get in free," the Web site claims – and the Cat Club's 1984 still know how to have fun. Perhaps it's because DJs like Dangerous Dan and Melting Girl find common ground between blue eye-shadowed lovers of Liquid Sky and black-lipsticked Nosferatu fans without too much fussing over goth versus new wave and lycra versus leather. Consider that job taken by New Wave City, the roving Reagan era-inspired shindig that recently honored Duran Duran's legacy at Space 550.

Sometimes wistfulness for the '80s is more than just being old-fashioned – it's often a mark of good taste. The Soft Pink Truth's Drew Daniel (one half of techno revisionists Matmos) claims a bit of both. With his homage to nights spent working the coat check and go-go dancing at long-gone S.F. gay clubs like Mix, 1970, and Klubstitute – the amazing new covers album titled Do You Want New Wave or Do You Want the Soft Pink Truth? (Tigerbeat 6) – Daniel is back to celebrate the release and blow the doors off Mighty alongside London electro king DMX Krew. Though Daniel waxes nostalgic for those times gone by (Aquarius Records proudly displays a pic of him in his beefcake days behind their counter), Do You Want New Wave? is as fresh a take on hardcore classics as they come, with SPT giving Crass and Minor Threat an icy-cool vocoder treatment. It's not the usual fare for Club Rendez-Vous' Macho night, but with his hard-ass cover of Nervous Gender's "Confession" ("Jesus was just like me / A homosexual nymphomaniac"), maybe it should be.

Soul Lab takes place Wednesdays, 9 p.m., Milk, 1840 Haight, S.F. $5. (415) 387-6455.

Death Guild takes place Mondays, 9:30 p.m., Glas Kat, 520 Fourth St., S.F. $3-$5. (415) 495-6620.

1984 takes place Thursdays, 9 p.m., Cat Club, 1190 Folsom, S.F. $5. (415) 431-3332.

New Wave City takes place Dec. 4, Space 550, 550 Barneveld, S.F. Go to www.newwavecity.com for time and price.

Macho takes place Saturdays, 9 p.m., Club Rendez-Vous, 312 Polk, S.F. $3. (415) 673-7934.

Soft Pink Truth perform with Da Hawnay Troof and DMX Krew Mon/22, 10 p.m., Mighty, 119 Utah, S.F. $12. (415) 626-7001.

E-mail Ken Taylor at syntheticsf@yahoo.com.