-When the sun sets in New York City, one species emerges as the dominant breed – single twentysomethings bent on inebriation and fornication.  While these objectives are nothing novel to us (after all, we’ve been partying and mating for the better part of a decade at this point), the way we go about achieving these objectives has changed.  Each weekend night in the inexorable march toward our late twenties is marked by higher stakes – the alcohol more costly, the women more choosey, and the nagging suspicion in the back of our minds that there’s more to life than binge-drinking and laying pipe.  I’m not ashamed to admit that, for me, the weekend remains an opportunity for release, both mentally and, well, you get my gist.  This is my nocturnal admission.

-No twentysomething in the nightlife scene is more skilled in the art of hyperbole than the promoter.  Promoters are paid by clubs and bars to attract people to their establishments, usually via an unsolicited barrage of calls, emails, text messages, and crazily ornate fliers featuring japanimation cartoons of scantily-clad women who, if they really existed, wouldn’t go within a hundred yards of said establishment.  Never ask a promoter if a party is actually going to be good because this is the answer you’re bound to receive: “It’s going to be off the heezie.  Seriously, dude, off the heezie.  There’s not even going to be any more heezie after this party, man.”  Um, OK, I think I’m just going to stay home and jerk off to this flier instead.

-Never meet your friends out at the bar unless you know exactly where the bar is.  Because once your friends get hammered, the odds of them being able to direct you to a dive with no sign off an alleyway on Avenue B are slim to none.  Drunk friends can’t even comprehend why you can’t find the bar.  They’re like, “Karo, what do you mean you can’t find the bar?  We’re in the bar…we’re in the bar right now, just come inside!”

-Of course, once you finally make it to the bar, you immediately attempt to meet a girl and then leave as quickly as possible.  The worst is when you get in a cab with a girl at the end of the night and she right away tells the cabbie “two stops” – meaning one for her and one for you and your party flier.  I once went home with a girl who told the cabbie to go to my block. I was psyched until she bolted from the cab and into her apartment – which just happened to be across the street.

-Why is it that you can be naked hooking up with a chick all night but when she gets up in the morning to put her bra on she turns her back to you?

-I was talking to a girl in a bar recently and she told me she was excited because she had a date the next night with a guy who had “The List.”  “The List?” I asked.  “Yeah,” she said, “He’s got everything a girl wants in a guy,” and went on to name them: attractive, smart, funny, right religion, good job, and a nice family.  As we continued the conversation, I realized that she was talking about a blind date that her friend was setting her up.  I was like, “Are you kidding me?  Every guy has the List BEFORE you meet him!  Hell, I’ve got six friends with the List on the way right now.”  Too bad they couldn’t find the bar.

-Some guys are just blessed with more game than others.  I have one buddy in particular that possesses the one trait that all guys wish they had – the ability to get laid any night of the week.  My friend Shermdog is impossible to track during the course of the night.  You’ll see blurry glimpses of him in the shadows hitting on chicks, but then he’ll disappear without a trace, kind of like a khakis-clad Bigfoot.  Then the next day he’ll call and tell you some ridiculous story about the girl he took home.  My friends are fond of saying that the two worst things you can hear in life are that your relative is in the hospital and that Shermdog knows your girlfriend from camp.

-The sad truth is that not all men are blessed with Shermdog’s game.  Brooke M., a subscriber from Chicago, wrote to tell me that she was at a bar when a guy began hitting on her.  He regaled her with stories of his travels abroad including a little tale about how he and his friends taught some naive Czechs in Prague that it was OK to piss in the bathroom sink of a bar if the line for the urinal is too long.  She called him on it right away – that’s my story from Ruminations #46.  What a jackass.

-Have you ever hooked up with someone that actually worked in a bar?  I used to hook up with this bartender chick.  I never knew what to tip her.  Too little and I wouldn’t get laid, too much and she felt like a prostitute.   So I introduced her to Shermdog and never heard from her again.

-Quote of the Month.  Considering my alcohol intake, sometimes I wonder how I’m articulate enough to even hook up at all.  On New Year’s Eve, I managed to make it back to a girl’s place and, just when things were getting hot and heavy, I blurted out, “So is your roommate around?”  She was like, “Asshole, I live in a studio.”

-This month, however, is a time for introspection for me because it marks exactly four years since my last serious relationship.  You learn a lot about yourself being single that long.  You also learn that the girls you hook up with over the years tend to have the same interests.  For instance, mine all seem to wear Uggs and have those magnetic words plastered all over their refrigerators.  Great, all these years of bachelorhood and I’m attracting women with bad grammar who wear boots in the summer.  I think it’s time to get out.

-I hate to admit, though, that when I party these days, there’s one thing I’m more concerned with than how much tail is at the bar – it’s deciding if and when to break the seal.  Breaking the seal is of course a euphemism for taking your first piss of the night.  Purely scientific studies done over many years in frat houses and other places of male intoxication have proven that, as one participant put it, “Once you break the seal, you’re fucked.”  Apparently, once initial urination takes place, the male bladder is no longer capable of storage and instead becomes a conduit from the bottle of Amstel Light directly to the toilet (or sink if you happen to be in Prague).

-The ability to delay seal breakage is put to its most severe test during that celebrated ritual know as open bar.  The open bar, when experienced under ideal conditions (i.e. top shelf, no waiting), is a twentysomething Utopia – costs are fixed but potential inebriation limitless.  Unfortunately, open bar rarely exists under said conditions, forcing us to imbibe beforehand.  Thus we end up actually pre-gaming prior to an unlimited drinking event.  This paradox is closely related to the “drink less, spend more” phenomenon in which on a night you decide to drink less, you end up spending more money, because buying a few beers at the bar is a lot more costly than drinking heavily in your apartment before you go out and then coasting the rest of the night.  Trust me, this paragraph makes sense, just read it again slowly.

-Ever notice that when you are with a bunch of guys approaching a bar, everyone instinctively slows up just before reaching the door?  Or that half the time when you ask for a bottle opener you’re holding a twist-off?

-Is there anything more disgusting than when you’re eating breakfast in your apartment the morning after having a bunch of people over to party and you accidentally drink a leftover screwdriver instead of your orange juice?

-Do chicks really stash things in their bras or is that just some urban myth?  Maybe that’s why they always turn their back to you when they put it on in the morning…

-Is it possible to lay in bed with a girl after hooking up and not have at least one of your arms fall in some awkward and uncomfortable yoga-style position where the girl says, “Is your arm OK?” and the guy lies and says “Yeah it’s fine”?

-Does the guy with the ugly shirt at the bar know how ugly his shirt is or does he hope that being the ugly shirt guy at the bar will somehow attract women via some convoluted ugly shirt reverse psychology?

-Don’t you hate when you’re trying desperately to get a drink at a crowded bar and you finally get someone’s attention and yell out your carefully scripted order, but then you realize it’s just a busboy who happened to make eye contact but who has neither the authority nor the inclination to serve you anything?

-In the end, I think that professional promoters and I have a lot more in common than I initially thought.  After all, we both spend our weekend days communicating with partygoers via phone, email, and text message.  The only difference is that promoters spend Saturday afternoon hyping up that evening’s event to their friends and contacts while I spend Sunday afternoon apologizing to my friends and anyone I had contact with the night before.  You see, while I may have been blessed with a sense of humor, I am severely lacking in that other important quality known as tact.  Thus, after a few dozen cocktails, I tend to speak my mind when I should shut my mouth.  But my buddies and hook-ups know by now that I ramble not out of disdain, but rather out of drunken adoration for this city, its nightlife, and the men and women that make it all come alive.  And that is my nocturnal admission.

-As always, here are some random things I’ve been ruminating about lately…

-Currently, I am in the midst of performing a cruel and unusual experiment on myself.  Tired of craving this horribly addictive product, I am attempting to wean myself off of chapstick.  It is proving to be much more difficult than I expected.  They should call it crackstick.

-Isn’t “wintry mix” just meteorologist slang for “we have no fucking clue”?

-I don’t like the fact that everything advertised these days is guaranteed to work.  There is not one product on the market that does not offer guaranteed satisfaction or your money back.  It’s pretty much impossible that all these claims can be true.  And who are the people who actually request their money back from a stick of deodorant?  If you have so much time on you hands that you’re demanding anti-perspirant reimbursement, it’s pretty safe to say no one cares you’re sweaty anyway.

-And how the fuck does Gillette have the nerve to put the words “high-performance” on aftershave?  High-performance?  It’s blue goo that stings, not a Ferrari.

-Ever notice that no matter how diligent you are about regularly going to the gym, the one day you slack off you end up walking right past it, and it silently taunts you?

-My fancy gym has some pretty wacky aerobics classes.  Without fail, there’s always that one solitary dude in every session full of women.  Hey, if you feel comfortable taking a cardio-striptease class, then more power to you, man.

-How come when me and another guy are the only people in the entire gym locker room do our lockers always end up being right next to each other?

-Something I’ve always wondered: if you can’t feed Gremlins after midnight, then when can you feed them?

-My mom’s response to every complaint I have is “open a window.”  “Mom, it’s really hot in here.”  “Open a window.”  “Mom, I don’t feel so well.”  “Make sure the windows are open.”  “Mom, I’m hungry.”  “Did you try opening a window?”

-You know, I don’t think I’ve ever ordered the special in a restaurant in my entire life.  Who can pay attention when the waiter is speeding through all those fancy dishes?  I pick up like a “bisque” here and a “black olive puree” there and then just order the chicken.

-My roommate Brian and I regularly have a woman clean our apartment and do our laundry.  I am not embarrassed by this – we are both financially independent and that’s one perk we choose to spend our money on.  What I am embarrassed about is that we decide to call the cleaning woman not when our apartment is sufficiently dirty, but when we run out of underwear.  The problem is, we have different amounts of underwear and so an argument ensues every time.  In order to ease tensions between us, we held an “underwear summit” where we both decided on a per day underwear allowance that would result in a mutually agreed upon laundry day.  Cooler heads prevailed for a while until Brian’s girlfriend broke the ceasefire by buying him a few new pairs, thus throwing off the balance of power.  My ally, my mom, responded by buying me even more underwear and now Brian and I are locked in a heated battle to stockpile the largest arsenal.  It’s like the Cold War of boxers.

-One of the most depressing experiences in twentysomething life is having to go to the ATM two days in a row.  It’s almost like when you swipe your card the machine says, “What, you again?”  And, just once, I’d like to not be completely baffled by my account balance on the receipt.  You always do that double take like, what the hell is going on here?  Why is my balance $4,000 less than it’s supposed to be?  I don’t get it, I was just here yesterday!

-What’s the first thing you say when someone tells you that you snore?  “I don’t snore!”  That’s got to be the dumbest argument we as humans ever make.  It’s like we’re saying, “Listen, I know I’m unconscious and completely unaware of my motor functions, but I think I know what I’m doing, damn it!”

-Just once I’d like to see a talk show host say to his guest: “You know what, that joke you just made wasn’t very funny, so I’m not going to utilize my fake laugh at this point.  We were going to show a clip from your latest film but let’s face it – it sucked.  So thanks for being here tonight, let’s go to commercial before we lose even more viewers to this incessant dribble you call conversation.”  I think that would make me happy.

-I’m pretty psyched that new episodes of “The Sopranos” are coming soon to HBO.  Just a word of advice to the FBI guys on the show: when you bring someone from the crime family to your offices to interrogate him, you should probably remove the large mafia org chart you’ve put together on the dry-erase board in the back.  I’m no law enforcement expert, but it’s probably better if the bad guys don’t see a graphical representation of all the dirt you have on them.

-Hey, if you can’t get a jar open and you give it to me and I screw it off easily, you don’t need to say “I loosened it for you.”  Let’s just assume the joke is implied, OK?

-I hate IM lurkers.  I don’t use instant messenger, but when I’m home at my parent’s house, sometimes I log on to my old America Online account.  Immediately, I’m bombarded with IMs from high school friends still on my buddy list.  “Where are you?”  “What are you up to?”  I mean, you know that if I’m on IM that I’m home and that if I’m writing you, I’m doing nothing.

-Do DJs and producers really need to wear those big headphones all askew on their heads?  I know you need to keep one ear in the headphones and one ear on the music, but that doesn’t mean you have to wear the thing like you just crashed headfirst through Radio Shack.

-The good thing about the new cell phone law?  You can switch carriers but keep your number.  The bad thing about the new cell phone law?  The proliferation of cell phone commercials trying to get you to switch to their service even though it sucks.  “Verizon Wireless – We never stop working for you.”  Yeah, except when I’m in the basement of the bar at 3am trying desperately to make a booty call but can’t get through because there’s no reception.  Guaranteed.

-Have you ever gotten an assignment at work that was exactly what you learned to do in college?  You think, finally, for once, I can actually put my education to use instead of completing random tasks that have nothing to do with my degree.  Then you get cracking and realize that the assignment sucks.  Because it’s just like schoolwork.

-Coffee people need to calm the fuck down.  Where do these people get off being all surly and gruff just because they haven’t had their morning coffee yet?  I think the coffee people should join the cigarette smokers in the stained, stinky, cranky, annoying, and addicted section.  It’s in the back.  The way back.

-To use the bathroom in the studio where I take acting classes, you have to use a key attached to a little bathroom pass that hangs on the wall.  Besides the obvious “what are we, still in kindergarten?” feel of the whole thing, I don’t like the fact that this piece of wood is traveling to and from the bathroom all day.  Why don’t we all just urinate directly on the key?

-And, finally, my dad recently lost a lot of weight on the South Beach diet.  I’m very proud of him and he looks great.  The only problem I have with the whole thing is that it seems as if all family members and associated acquaintances are now required to comment on his weight loss each and every time we see him, even if you’ve already commended him.  Otherwise, my dad gets offended.  So now I’ve had to wrack my brain every time I come home in order to come up with a new compliment on his trim figure.  Last time I visited, I decided I’d had enough and didn’t say anything.  Sure enough, my dad gave me a hard time.  When I complained to my mom about it, you know what she said?  “Open a window.”  Fuck me.

HOME