On Nightclubs and My Omnipresent Absence

Listen, I know nobody reads this blog, and I view it as a board to sound off my ideas and stuff. Also, it is no way, a traditional blog, with huge-ass posts and no pictures to satiate the attention-deficit teenage mind of today. I want to use this to improve my writing and rattle off about stupid things, and refine my arguments with regards to these things so my contentions won’t sound half-baked if the opportunity comes for me to voice in real life (IRL). That said, I realize I haven’t done a part 2 for my projekt 45 thing, partly because, I, as usual, royally fucked up my final years yet again. I have no intention in the foreseeable future to make another post chronicling my failure attempts at getting myself to study.

This is a recurring problem: I have no discipline. Laziness and sloth overtake my mind, controlling it, making it procrastinate every other assignment or self-study, instead just turning my attention to 4 hour CS marathons, at the end of which I feel pathetic and depressed. It’s a vicious cycle, that I have tried several times to get myself out of, but have failed miserably. So I won’t be touching on this for a while now. I need to recuperate from my failures, and most of all I need some time. With school closed, I get more time to think what I want to do, and how I want to do whatever I want to do.

Those last two paragraphs didn’t make much sense. This is another caffeine-fueled post.

So, several people I know, think about nightclubs as a status symbol. Not in the grown-up Bvlgari-watch, Beemer-car kinda way, but in the sense that a Facebook photo album of a person (most of the time under-18) at a nightclub, preferably smoking sheesha, is instant cred. A symbol of a popularity and social power. You might guess that this is going to be a rant from a socially inept fool about how crappy clubs are just because he isn’t cool enough to get in.

Wrong.

I believe clubs are a good place to socialize and get some good pussy drinks and all, but the way it gets hyped by the under-18 crowd on facebook and in my school, makes it seem like the ultimate place to be ‘seen’ at.

I think it’s a conspiracy, echoing the words of Charlie Brooker, from the Guardian, who asked “Nightclubs are hell. What’s cool or fun about a thumping, sweaty dungeon full of posing idiots?”. Then again, we’re dabbling in ad hominem here, characterizing clubs as dungeons where (posing) idiots gather to thump together. Most people who go to clubs are perfectly normal, well-adjusted folk, looking for some place to chill after a hard day’s work and get some nice pussy drinks. However, that’s looking at the over-18 crowd. The way I see it, the under-18 folk are there to get ‘seen’ by people in their network, later upload pics of their awesome fun time on to Facebook, and get some pussy drinks, probably the type they couldn’t get from 7-11 or regular bars with a fake ID.

It probably is a conspiracy. The place is usually full of sweaty drunk people hitting on other sweaty drunk people, taking sweaty, drunk photos to each other to upload to a social networking sites to show how sweaty, drunk and cool they very obviously are. Either that, or its them sitting on a couch with some friends smoking out sheesha, looking all high and wasted, even if sheesha has absolutely no drug-like or hallucinatory properties, and most of them are probably smoking flavors like strawberry or lime. Nevertheless, the thick smoke they exhale, which they take a snap of, and inevitably upload to Facebook, instantly would give them much cred and “respek” for looking like a smoky douchenugget.

So how can we sum up the clubbing experience in one sentence?

“Clubs are despicable, cramped, overpriced furnaces with sticky walls and the latest idiot theme tunes thumping through the humid air so loud you can’t hold a conversation, just bellow inanities at megaphone-level, and since the smoking ban, the masking aroma of cigarette smoke has been replaced by the overbearing stench of crotch sweat and hair wax.”

Thank you Charlie. How would you describe the people who put themselves through such torture then?

“Clubs are such insufferable dungeons of misery, the inmates have to take mood-altering substances to make their ordeal seem halfway tolerable. This leads them to believe they “enjoy” clubbing. They don’t. No one does. They just enjoy drugs.”

Replace “drugs” with sheesha or beer and you have the experience most underage cool-kids crave here in Singapore. Considering how mind-numbingly easy it is to get into The Arena or similar clubs here in Singapore, don’t be surprised if you see some young looking people incessantly taking shots of themselves in the club, like a pictorial timestamp to prove how they were ‘there, and enjoying it thoroughly’.

So Charlie, if it isn’t the beer or the sheesha, or the popularity spike in posting pics of their presence in the club online, what other reason could there be for underage kids to put themselves through such torture? Why would they forgo the dancing component for pouting and posing for hot shots of them in hot clothes with hot people in a hot, humid hellhole?

“Because you might get a shag,” is the usual response. Really? If that’s the only way you can find a partner – preening and jigging about like a desperate animal – you shouldn’t be attempting to breed in the first place. What’s your next trick? Inventing fire?

So could this be the final point in the evolutionary tangent of the mating ritual by humans? A return to stupidly dancing around a potential mate, outdoing other competitors with a nicer haircut or a better dance-step? What ever happened to personality? What happened to conversation?

It got drowned out by the next crappy My Chemical Romance song the clueless DJ belts out. (Crappy is a vast understatement for the abortions that are MCR ‘songs’)

Since it’s the tail end of my rant, I would like to point out to the reader that I am a hypocrite. If I got the chance, I’d totally attend those European raves people keep talking about. The kinds in which truly amazing people come together, and DJs know what songs to mix-out, be it Daft Punk remixes, Telepopmusik tunes, or some good old dance hits, and the clubs themselves are themed so you won’t find a punk group in a hip-hop themed club (which is the prevalent theme of most clubs here in Singapore). The problem is here in Singapore, most DJs look toward the top 10 hits for their song track, the clubbers are drunk or underage, and most of them are too busy snapping away to actually dance or talk. Yes, I might seem like a sneering, spiteful fool in this post, but I have no desire to attend clubs here in this good nation, since all people seem to like doing there is pose and collectively try to out-cool each other in Facebook pictures.

Thank you for reading this rant,

‘Till next time,

Roucateur