The Beerluck

My roommate and I went to our friends’ house for a “beerluck” on Friday, which is exactly what it sounds like: a shit-show of an evening for yours truly. I don’t know if inviting people to your house under the condition that they bring the booze is brilliant or incredibly brilliant, but I always get excited when one comes along (I’ve been to about seven of these in two different houses); plentiful, varied, fancy drinks and the license (nay, imperative) to guzzle them freely is delightful to me, because I lead an empty and desperate life.

Early in the evening, with all the guests clustered into the living room to endure that awkward period where one large discussion splinters into several less compelling ones, I began to feel the acute emotional smallness associated with your peers’ lives and careers shooting far beyond your own. Sandwiched between two particularly ambitious former classmates alternating tales of zany professional misadventures in exotic locales, I felt short of breath. Thankfully, the beer was concomitantly planting its flag in my bloodstream and I decided to get creative. A friend, sitting across from me, asked me how I was doing in Skyrim, and before I could answer, the fellow to my right (one of the globetrotters I mentioned) expressed his distaste for the selfsame title’s grip on his younger brothers’ leisure time. Anyway, long story short: I managed to wrest control of the discussion and—to a certain degree of success—to transmute my sweaty, tiresome ramblings about the self-important videogame I’ve been wasting my weeks inside into an inquiry of the dubious socio-political aims of the game’s developer. 

I was going to make this little update into a frothy-but-incisive missive exploring the dynamics of an expressly liquor-fueled social event, but I realize I can’t really remember anything in particular after I pissed my pants about racism in pretend-land and just started pounding beers without any object for my attention. I don’t know if I had any discussions with anybody, and in light of that uncertainty I hope I didn’t have any discussions with anybody. Anxiety knows no greater ally than amnesia.