I'm not sure when blacking out stopped being cute and started being at best questionable. Despicable behavior that once earned you high fives in the frat kitchen now just makes my peers shudder. I honestly tell a story these days and offer up my fist for a pound, but my married coworkers just shake their head as if they now need to clean out their ears to clean out the filth that I just told them.
As I get older and older, the things that seem to matter to me seem to get more abstract compared to my age group. A normal 26 year old might get excited in a drop on interest rates in a 30 year mortgage. I get excited that my old dorm just got ranked the rowdiest in the nation by some bullshit blog. And while some may not feel nostalgia for the place they first hooked up with a minority, I think about that place still at least once a day. So congrats to Briscoe Shoemaker, and fuck your interest rates.
As I have oft stated, life is about doing what makes you happy. And although it might be a slight hindrance to quickly achieving my goals, I can't imagine a life where you don't go out and get fucked up with your friends to create fun memories (or lack there of) what I worry about sometimes is that I'm pulling a breaking bad and slipping slowly from social antihero to full blown villain. Allow me to explain.
Today at work someone got hurt, and my immediate thought wasn't, "gee that sucks, I hope she gets better soon!" It was fuck me, I'm going to have to stay late. Then I festered about how I wouldn't have time to get to the gym when I got home and my room would go uncleaned for another night, and I didn't take solace in this poor girl's misery until I found a way to use it to my advantage. I look like the hero for staying late tonight, a Tuesday, where there is nothing exciting going on. Now I can TOTALLY hold this over my boss's head and guilt her into letting me out early to get fucked up on the beach.
This selfishness is not isolated. My first instinct when I see a car crash is to think "wow, what a fucking dickhead that guy is. Now a ton of people are going to be late. I DARE a motherfucker to crash on the 405 southbound when I'm on my way home on a Thursday or Friday night. If is burning car didn't finish him off, I will put him out of his misery myself for delaying my drinking 20 minutes.
You can see how I am a tad nervous that my addiction to partying is spiraling out of control. I become increasingly irritable when I miss out on something potentially fun. Even though most nights are pretty average, I still have this idealistic vision in my head that I'm going to have the best night of my life every time I set out for the evening. Because despite my growing jaded cynicism I still have all the elements of an eternal optimist at heart.
All of this can lead to an empty search for happiness. Like how you would feel after an all night hook up with someone while the original non-clubby, slit my wrist version of "Summertime Sadness" plays in the background on repeat. It's awesome, but you leave in the morning feeling hollow.
Such was my Saturday. I woke up at 9am on 5 hours of sleep. (Not party related, I was on the late shift of work) and was dragged up to Malibu Wines. Now Malibu Wines is a lovely place full of lovely people, but it's also a place you can get tragically fucked up if you have a designated driver. So by 3pm I was about 3 bottles of Turtlerock Cab deep and I decided that a nap would be insufficient. SO upon returning to Venice I did the only reasonable thing I could think of...ordered 2 Domino's pizzas and switched to hard liquor.
Well you can guess where this leads, my last memory is chasing a dog around some strange apartment and barking at him, as drunks are wont to do. Allegedly, I would stay up drinking for a few more hours, see a bunch of people I know, embarrass myself in front of a few cougars at a bar and get kicked out by 12.
It would be fine if that was how the story ended but apparently I woke up zombified in the pregame house and attempted to find a bathroom at 4 o clock in the morning, causing me to knock on several locked doors and convince all the women living there that I had my mind on a little late night sexual assault.
I sleepwalk I swear.
Plausible deniability.
But what are you going to do? When you have to work on a Friday night and you double down on Saturday sometimes you bust like I did, sometimes you hit a fucking Black Jack.
The point is, you have to try. Because if I wouldn't have gone for the gold on Saturday I would've sat at work all week unfulfilled by my shitty weekend. Instead I laid on the couch shivering all day Sunday trying to fight my hangover, but I could at least be at ease with the fact that my weekend got an A for effort.
I don't know if I have a problem...maybe. I have no desire to drink now...or Sunday. Tomorrow I have to get to the gym or I'm going to get fat. But I have an inherent need to aspire to greatness at least twice a week. It doesn't have to be some crazy drinking bender or some rave with all the party drugs in the planet, it just has to be SOMETHING. Let's jump out of a fucking plane or climb a mountain. Find a big ass rock and back flip into a river.
I've often commented to people that I'm not much of a writer, just a decent storyteller. And while some people dream up crazy sci fi worlds, I'm incapable of that as well. So it's come down to the fact that if I want to tell stories, I have to live them, and hang out with people that live them as well. So I don't see my lifestyle as some terrible adult to child regression, I'm out there just trying to have a good time and maybe just acquire a few good stories along the way. Some of the best stories about you are the one's that people have to tell you, so I'll justify my Saturday night as a creative experiment, researching a fresh perspective.
And maybe some day, I'll look back on all of this bullshit and think about how self absorbed all of it was, living a nihilistic life in LA's in my 20's. What a fucking Bret Easton Ellis cliche, right? But at least I'll be able to say I gave it a shot, those mortgage rates can wait.
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