I don't get the clubbing scene.
I understand the concept- wear disgustingly trendy clothes in order to pass muster with a bouncer, hang out in a dark room with obnoxiously loud music, and spend way too much on just enough alcohol to surivive. The entire point being, of course, to find a sufficiently attractive member of the opposite sex, club them over the head with an empty bottle of scotch, and drag them back to your house, where you realize they're either dumb as rocks or crazy as a sackful of assholes.
At least, that's how I envision the mundanes 'enjoying' the club ambience. Like all experiences that you pathetic normals have, mine are far superior and worthy of your complete and total adoration. First of all, I'd never go into a filthy whoretank like that without a damn good reason, and my reason was among the best- it was free. My good friend Mike's brother was the bouncer. So, for several weekends, we'd all take a trip down to the Rio Hotel & Casino and head to Bikini's, where we'd make fools of ourselves and try to get fall-down drunk before the club closed and we had to go to a bar.
It's amazing to me how many people dance. I understand that clubs are designed with such unrewarding physical exertion in mind, but I always assumed that it would be more like high school, where nobody danced and I used the empty dance floor to play hackysack with my tuxedoed friends. The mechanics of such things, what you may call the club etiquette, eludes me completely. Do you ask someone to dance? Do you just run in and start freaking someone like the scary old guy did to the slutty chick at the office Christmas Party?
Actually, that was pretty hilarious. To go on a little tangent, my last job was an SEO, and we programmers were a small clique among a horde of telemarketers. Most of the telemarketers had gambling or drug addictions, and there were plenty of scary folks out there dancing while everyone with a lick of sense was taking full advantage of the open bar.
Near the end of the whole thing, when HR was out on the dance floor trying to perform some godawful seizure called the electric slide, some old guy comes out of the woodwork and starts freaking the everloving ovaries out of this missed abortion opportunity who was too lost in trying to remember some sequence of moves to notice Mr. Belvedere trying to get all up on her internal reproductive organs. The whole table of programmers screamed horrible, obscene insults at him until he sat down. The streetwalker-turned-dancer never acknowledged any of it.
But anyway, back to the clubbing. How do people meet in those places? We were trying, at the time, to get Mike hooked up with a girlfriend to replace his horrible one, so I was interested in getting the skinny. Let me elaborate. Two programmers and a web designer were trying to get somebody laid. Take some time to drink in the delicious irony of it. Really absorb it.
The web designer was the one with the club experience and the fashion sense, so he did some pathetic white-boy 'move your fists in a circle' dance and bobbed his head around a bit. I found this hilarious, but he said it was the approved club mating dance and wandered around a bit doing that. Mike's brother let us sit up in the laughably-expensive VIP area and said he'd send some girls up.
Meanwhile, of course, I'm drunk, hyperactive, and hopping around like the secretly-bisexual asian dynamo you all wish I was. The employee drink-service girl assigned to our area is laughing at me, Fancy (the web developer) is using his little aryan chick-magnet dance to engage in conversations, and Mike is sitting there, blitzed, staring into space and probably thinking of the unholy terror he has to go home to.
Eventually, I'm drunk enough to want to start a fight, but have no idea what kind of bizarre dance is necessary to get that action started. Fancy is done trying to mingle, and has come back to tell us about how us Vegas types are wholly unfriendly and that this club would be a horrible place for MDMA. We've left VIP in order to try to find someone, anyone, to take Mike home for some loving. Right then, the lights go on and everybody files out to the casino.
Mike is swaying, literally, forty-five degrees on each side, doing that hula-girl thing with his arms trying to keep balance, asking us what we want to do next. I told him to go home. The club experience, for the moment, has won.
PS: At the Christmas Party, I won - we left and drank absinthe. Then I bench-pressed an airplane and invented magic.
