This might surprise you, but I’m not exactly the star of the club scene. I know a lot of you have imagined me as the center of attention, lowering my sunglasses to playfully scold supermodels for spilling their Cristal on my trendily hideous jacket. Fortunately, or unfortunately, this is hardly the case. I’m generally the guy throwing unsubtle elbows as he tries to get to the bar, and wishing for the 100th time that he’d muster up the effort to finally go out and get some contacts. Glasses, my friends, just do not cut in the club. I’m not Lupe Fiasco enough to pull it off anyway, and I’m not Jonathan Franzen enough to construct elaborate, fully humanized metaphors about it once I get home.
Suffice it to say that the clubs are generally not the sort of place where I’m at my best. But there’s one thing I do like: the promo bills and flyers.
You’ve seen them, the glossy cards with some absurdly hot girl dancing beside some text. These cards invariably have some pants-wettingly cool way of saying that you can be 18 to party, but you have to be 21 to drink. For instance, “18 to stand up, 21 to fall down.” I don’t know who made that up, but if they told me that cigarettes dipped in heroin were cool, I would have to believe them. I’d have no choice in the matter.
Anyway, here’s a few I came up with on my own. I will grant that some of them don’t exactly deal with drinking:
“18 to grow up, 21 to throw up. On somebody.”
“18 to lie about what college you go to, 21 to lie about what investment firm you work for.”
“18 to be a pretty little unicorn, 21 to be a wild-eyed stud stallion rutting with brood mares.”
“18 to be Nick Cannon, 21 to be Dave Chappelle.”
“18 to be Spinks, 21 to be Tyson.”
“18 to come in, 21 to be the product of two primes.”
“18 to pay the cover, 21 to be a guy with an outside chance of not going home alone tonight.”
“18 to wash the stamp off your hand in the bathroom, 21 to skip that part.”
“18 to be treated ridiculously by a country that will draft you but won’t let you get a beer, 21 to have been drinking for the last 4 years anyway.”
“18 to vote, 21 to turn the primaries into drinking games.”
“18 to play Guitar Hero on ‘medium,’ 21 to bang a busload of groupies.”
“18 to be Tobey Maguire, 21 to not be Tobey Maguire.”
“18 to Bubba, 21 to Forest Gump.”
“18 to have a tree house, 21 to have the Batcave.”
“18 to junior prom, 21 to costume party at the Playboy mansion.”
“18 to be a smug Mac user, 21 to have some sense of reality and proportion.”
“18 to buy tickets in advance to see the next Harry Potter, 21 to hit mental puberty.”
“18 to play Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots, 21 to be Mayweather.”
“18 to be Dr. McSteamy, 21 to realize that watching Grey’s Anatomy is like teabagging your own brain.”
“18 to be Roger Moore, 21 to at least be Pierce Brosnan.”
“18 to be the mortgage crisis, 21 to be Warren Buffet.”
“18 to list ‘drinking, partying, your mom’ as your Facebook interests, 21 to take it all down before those damn employers see it.”
“18 to watch Sex & the City, 21 to blow money on mimosas in pursuit of a stupid fantasy world.”
“18 to be Steve Martin, 21 to be Peter Sellers.”
“18 to be an awkwardly uncool senior, 21 to have moved out of state and convinced yourself that you were too smart and progressive for your high school.”
“18 to be willing to drink anything alcoholic, 21 to complain about it but drink Natty Lite anyway.”
“18 to have plans to learn a lot and change the world, 21 to try and reschedule your psych class because waking up sucks, man.”