Last night I went out, despite not feeling much of an inclination to. My friend Dane was free for the evening, which he normally isn't, and I had wanted to hang out with him for a while. Dane is both a nice, nerdy kind of guy and a socially "cool" person. He knows a lot of people. He knows where parties are, and I had been eager to go to more of those this semester. The parties that I had gone to with Dane, while typically alcohol-soaked and loud, had been laid back and un-hip enough for me to enjoy myself at. This was not to be the case tonight.
I went to meet him at Triple Crown, a small dive bar located next to the iconic "yellow store," the neo hippie/hipster gas station and alcohol distribution center of San Marcos. The crowd there was small and cohesive, seeming to all be familiar with the band playing. The band themselves were alright. They were not pretentious, and had enough technical skill and songwriting ability to entertain.
However, near the end of their set, they played what is apparently their anthem song, "Stop Drinking Alone." This irritated me a bit. Maybe it was the guy who repeatedly poked me and others in the back and instructed us to put our hands in the air, but I was not feeling this song. Its implication that life and social life in particular are all about drinking didn't resonate with me. It was far too earnest and lacking in humor, and I felt out of my element with a bunch of hipster-looking people enthusiastically singing along to it. I started to get a creeping feeling that this was not a crowd I fit into.
Dane managed to cut his arm open pretty badly on a piece of broken glass on the bar. Me and a girl helped to patch him up. This girl was one of a few who I had added on facebook back when I was in a futile "add chicks and get to know them online" state of mind, and I had removed her before too long due to her constant inane attention-whoring status updates and generally apparent shallowness. In person, she was basically the same, sending and receiving text messages every thirty seconds.
We took care of Dane's arm and then he and I went to my car. It was a chilly, moist night, and my windows were all entirely fogged over. Backing out of the very narrow parking space and into the equally narrow lane next to the bar which led to the street, I tapped the bumper of the car next to mine with my bumper, going 1 mile per hour or less. From experience, I knew that it couldn't have done any damage, and sure enough, it had not, but that didn't stop a sickly thin, hoodie-clad, thick-glasses, backpack-wearing hipster piece of trash from trying to start drama about it. Fortunately, I kept my cool, and everyone present could tell that it was a non-issue, so the idiot backed off and we were on our way.
Arriving at the party, my first impression was that there appeared to be too many people in a small house which was surrounded by deep mud from the recent rain. Everyone had walked through it, and the stuff was caked an inch deep on my own shoes. I spent about a minute trying to wipe it off, but quickly noticed that others had not shown the same courtesy, as it was being tracked all over the place inside of the house.
The house was standing room only, and about 90 degrees inside due to the mass of packed bodies. The only available keg was crammed into a corner, with twenty or so people all trying to get to it at once. I helped Dane wash some glasses in the kitchen (an example of the kind of thoughtful, well-meaning spirit that he has - he's a good guy), and then took a glass to try to get into that keg-waiting mob. I stood in the same place for about five minutes, and grew increasingly agitated with the heat, the lack of personal space, and the attire of the people surrounding me. It was all the same hipster uniform bullshit, with dumb tattoos, guys wearing womens' v-necked blouses, bandanas, skinny jeans cut off at the knees or not, large lip rings, thick glasses, and garish day-glo band logo t-shirts.
This overall assault on my senses got to me. I started to bitch, asking why one of the guys who had been standing at the keg for nearly five minutes wasn't moving and allowing other people their turn. In response to this, the same ultra-hip douchebag who had accosted me about my minor car bump earlier turned around and said "HEY, YOU'RE THAT GUY WHO HIT TWO CARS." Two cars? Was this guy just making shit up to sound more grandiouse? He had the trademark hipster completely unshaven facial hair, the buddy holly glasses, a pointless accessory backpack, and a black hoodie that he was wearing with the hood over his head, even though it was sweltering hot inside of this jam-packed house. I was completely disgusted. He started to give me some kind of lecture about how this "wasn't my party" and I promptly responded by calling him out on his exaggeration and telling him that he "needed to shut up." He had the last word, which was some kind of whiny effeminate attempt to tell me what was up, and then that was the end of that.
The heat, the claustrophobia, and probably my lack of sleep from the night before were adding up. Suddenly I wanted to beat the shit out of this guy, and shatter his awful glasses on pavement while kicking him in his emaciated stomach muscles. Of course, I have more self control than that, so I stood there and sweltered some more, still waiting for my chance to get a goddamn beer. A few minutes later, still standing in the same place, some girl looked at me and said "you aren't very happy, are you?" I wasn't even frowning, but I guess it was obvious from my eyes. I said that no, I wasn't, and she responded with some kind of "that's too bad" phrase and sneered at me. This girl was actually trying to fuck with me just because I didn't look pleased by the situation. I hadn't said a word to her or looked at her beforehand. My incredulity about these people continued to rise.
Finally, I managed to get over to the keg, and the tap was broken. A girl fiddled with it to no avail, and people started yelling for another tap. Frustrated, I gave up on that working after a minute or so, and moved out of the oppressive mass of people surrounding the no longer functioning keg.
I went to the kitchen, where the host and a few other people were secretly setting up another one, but the tap they had was missing the bottom piece which connected it to the keg spout. Despite this, they kept trying to force it to work. I pointed out that it was not going to work for simple mechanical reasons, and visually showed them how the bottom part of the tap did not fit with the top part of the keg. You'd think at this point that they would just start searching for the bottom piece, or find another tap altogether. Instead of this, they kept trying to force the incomplete tap to work. I couldn't believe it. It's like these people were so divorced from mechanical, physical reality, so accustomed to getting anything they wanted at the push of a button, that they couldn't grasp the extremely simple fact that this tap was a mechanical device which was missing a vital part. They just kept pushing it into the keg spout and turning it, futively hoping that some magical physics-defying event would occur and beer would burst forth from the keg, like ambrosia divinely granted by the god of college hipster parties. Yes, my thick-spectacled brothers, the Dos Equis shall flow freely on this night, for we are all far too hip to be sober.
Anyway, after this event I had shifted into a mentality of wanting to escape. I went outside and stood on a stoop, cherishing the cool night air. The contrast between the cool dark silence in front of me and the noisy suffocating heat behind me was very palpable. I thought about how maybe I was just too old for this kind of shit. At 28, I don't feel like an old man, and I don't think I should, but maybe any party full of 20-year-olds would be physically draining to me, even without the unappealing hipster elements. Then I thought about other college parties that I attended in this town, and decided that no, this was simply a bad scene.
It's worth mentioning that the house itself was a nice place. It obviously dated from the 1970s, with unhewn stone walls organically incorporated into the structure, and a tiered carpeted living room area that looked delightfully comfortable and retro. That area was currently jammed full of dancing hipsters grinding mud into the carpet. Glancing into that area upon going back inside, I noticed that the music was coming from someone's ipod. Their selections were decent, at least. Danceable stuff like Michael Jackson and Jamiroquai. Listening to "Thriller" at a party in 2009 seems strange to me, though.
Somewhere along the line I managed to get a beer from the first keg, but it was Natty Light or something equally vile, and I only finished half of it. I briefly talked to some people outside, and then Dane and I left at around 2 AM, working together to find the right roads back to the middle of San Marcos in our somewhat drunken state.
All in all, I felt like it was a waste of an evening. It wasn't an environment where I felt comfortable making friends, and I was turned off by the appearance of most of the people there, including the girls. There were a couple people I talked to briefly who seemed like nice folks, but the negatives far outweighed the positives. I also ended up tracking the same gunky mud into my own apartment, and it felt like a cursed mark of having gone to the wrong place.
Other highlights:
Seeing a girl whose birthday was that night walk into the kitchen with her entire face covered in icing, holding the half-destroyed cake she had mashed her head into. Some guy licked her face. She was very drunk and not attractive, and the whole thing was gross.
Telling the girl at the party who kept texting every 30 seconds that she should have her cellphone implanted in her arm. Instead of taking offense to this, she said "oh, yeah" or something like that, as if it were a normal observation to make.
