I can’t believe so many people do this EVERY WEEK

I can count on one hand the number of nightclubs I’ve been to in my life. Not just because I dislike dance music (or, for that matter, dance music with the bass cranked up to filling-vibrating levels (not that I have any fillings, but I digress)), but in conjunction with the fact that every aspect of the nightclub atmosphere is a sensorially oppressive experience, from the dark, smoky environment randomly peirced by flashing neon colours, the press of writhing, convulsing, drunken individuals who seem to coalesce into some anonymous, heaving singular organism, at all times punctuated by the crushing gravity of repetitive, thudding tumult assaulting your eardrums from every direction. But it was my friend’s 21st last night, and she decided she wanted to go club-hopping in the city afterwards, so who was I to be a fly in the proverbial ointment? Although I must admit, there is something postmodernly romantic about stumbling bleary-eyed back out into an inner-city street under an azure Sunday morning sky and groggily hailing the nearest availiable taxi, with the prospect of comatose unconsciousness while the rest of the hemisphere goes about it’s business. And there’s a certain tangible uterine mentality underpinning the whole dance scene (a conclusion arrived at during what I refer to as my “observant, introspective philosophical” stage of an all-nighter, where the levels of blood alcohol and sleep-deprivation are such that internal dialogue is congruous to original abstraction, without yet descending into gibberish; i.e. around 6am), but it’s just something I can’t ever envision myself embracing with any level surpassing that of curious, detached objectivity. Give me a pub with a Guinness tap, a big-screen tv set to a cable sports channel and an above-average cover band onstage any day.