Clubbing

I went to a club this weekend. I’m not generally much for going to clubs. There are basically two things to do at these establishments, dance and drink, and I’m not particularly good at either of them.

I can move my strange, rigid body with something approaching fluidity, if I concentrate really hard. But even when I bring all of my accumulated skill to bear, I still can’t dance half as well as those freaky Santa Claus figures you see in department stores this time of year, the ones whose hips swing back and forth under their loose red santa claus pants when there’s music nearby. I would kill for that kind of rhythmic mastery. As it is, I couldn’t pick up a beat if it was covered in superglue and handed to me. Worse, I’m painfully aware of my limitations, and extremely self-conscious. I can’t dance in front of a mirror, because I don’t want my reflection to see me. The thought of doing it in the middle of a large group of people is absolutely mortifying.

As for drinking: I never picked up the habit. Not sure why. There was drinking all around me in college, nightly bacchanalias, the smell of cheap beer mixed with stomach acid, the call of bliss in the comforting embrace of oblivion; but I think that maybe some deep self-knowledge warned me off of the whole thing. Possibly I’m afraid of addiction, maybe I don’t like the thought of finding out what’s on the other side of my sobriety. Either way. Drinking not an option.

So what does one do at a club if one isn’t drinking or dancing? One stands around and watches other people drink and dance. Or one admires the eighties kitsch plastered on the walls, Footloose posters and fluoresecent pac man ghosts and pictures of that bright pink what-the-fuck-were-we-thinking species of punk that consumed itself in embarrassment almost the instant it was born. Or one checks out the latest dance “steps”, hips and pelvises grinding into backsides, the metaphor for intercourse that dancing once was dying the slow death of all metaphors in this relentlessly literal age. One avoids eye contact.

But all of these pursuits lose their appeal very quickly. So one leaves. One walks across the parking lot, the generic thump thump thump of the single mildly varying permasong they play at all these places following one out to one’s car. the ghost of the beat still drumming in the ears, the smell of tobacco and beer still clinging to the clothes, and one drives away, contemplating one’s advancing age.