you cant be straight gunned and suave at the same time

Here at HotClique, we pride ourselves on being the young intellectual go-getters our community expects us to be. Known for possessing keen conversational skills, heart on the sleeve passion and above all, unprecedented maturity and perspective. Essentially we’re half respected, half infamous. Then sometimes we wake up and piece together the night through Facebook, debit receipts, outgoing call history, text messages, bruises and the varying accounts of our belligerence as detailed by others.

Beautiful. I was excited about the barbeque. Everything about the evening was to be beautiful- the people, the house, the view, the respective soirées of both parents and kids coexisting. I am quite fortunate for the lifestyle I have, weekends split between lurking dive bars in the city and drinking cheap beer in expensive houses. Funny thing is I call posting up in our bourgeois-esque suburban community, in clichéd ironic fashion, slumming.

Excitement turned to cockiness, which turned into excessive drinking. Conversations became slurred, vision blurred, intellect scarce. I doubt I was looking/dancing as good as I thought I was. Resembling a well-dressed zombie and occasionally drooling, impressionable pretty girls got the wrong impression of me. A stimulating discussion about the UFC turned into me struggling to keep my eyes open. I was being the guy who I routinely chastised. In the end, I was out before midnight.

Though admittedly our antics were a bit over the top, ultimately I think they were pretty harmless. We’re well meaning guys. Restraint was even exercised when we didn’t drink the apology wine purchased for Morgan’s parents on our second liquor store mission.

“Vice is nice if you can handle the guilt”, a seventy-four year old Norwegian man mused in the sauna earlier that day. I felt a little guilty, made some more humbled amends and thought about things. Somewhere along the line a lesson was learned.