
There is a sort of serenity when you realise that you are considered an invariably boring person. You start to appreciate your apparent self deluded sense of sanity and absorb yourself in the wonderment of cynical boringness. I still get a little annoyed and depressed when people call me boring, just for being me, but I am starting to learn to embrace and be proud of it. Let me give you a few examples.
I hate drunk people. Absolutely despise them. I do, and have always considered drinking to excessive amounts, a weakness, and I have no time for it; and not just because when you drink and drive, you ALWAYS run over a horse, as shown in the photo above. I hate how different people become when they drink. I hate that I cannot have a conversation with a drunk person, because it becomes utterly absurd and if I say the wrong thing, that at any other time would not be considered the wrong thing, they suddenly hate me, in their pathetic drunken state, and then I feel guilty, as if i’m the one who is lingering in the wrong. When I finally come to terms with my utter hatred of drunk people, I start to think….. fuck them….. I will ignore them until they apologise for being shit whilst drunk. And if they try to blame their shitness, on alcohol, then I will ignore them further. And it’s absolutely every time I am out with drunk people, that it becomes inevitably negative. I have no positive experiences with alcohol. But, this makes me essentially boring. Being 24 and having an intense hatred of drunkenness does not bode well for my social life. When out surrounded by drunk people, I cannot control the fact that I feel wholly uncomfortable and anxious, as if i’m aware that something negative is going to occur in the very near future. Ironically, the uncomfortable anxious feeling objectifies the negativity that I am waiting to occur. And yet, I like being this way. I don’t want to be a drinker. It doesn’t suit my personality. I’d have to change much of my personality in order to squeeze a tolerance of drunkenness into my psyche. I don’t want to squeeze a tolerance of drunkenness into my psyche. That isn’t to say that I don’t accept that other people enjoy drinking. It’s their decision and if they enjoy it, great. I just don’t enjoy it, and I don’t enjoy being around people who excessively enjoy it. They just work to annoy me.
I do not begrudge people who genuinely love clubbing. Good on them! They have found what it is that makes them happy, that’s great. It just doesn’t make me happy, and certain types of clubbers make me hate it more and more every time I go out. “Omg just enjoy yourself!!“……. no!! I genuinely do not enjoy it. Constantly telling me to lighten up and enjoy something that I don’t enjoy, is so futile, I would rather tell you to be quiet and spend that time banging my face on a nail. It’s like me handing a copy of Camus’ ‘The Outsider’ to a drunk in a nightclub and saying, “here, sit in the corner and just enjoy yourself…. lighten up“. I can’t imagine they’d enjoy it.
Clubbing makes me want to vomit. I enjoy clubbing less than I enjoy being wee’d on by a tramp. You queue up, you pay a fortune, you get threatened by a drunken cunt, you stand in a room that stinks, you go to a urinal that has piss all over the floor, you watch a few people dance for a few hours, you see a fight, you stink, you see a drunk girl with at least an inch of make up on crying because her friend is snogging the chav she wants, you go out into the street to be confronted by an idiot wanting a fight standing next to a slightly overweight girl being sick in the gutter with her minge on show, at the tax stand you walk past two cavemen fighting because one looked at the other “funny”, you pay extortionate rates to get the taxi back to the hotel, you go back to a hotel, you don’t sleep for the next four hours because people are running up and down past the door, you wake up an hour after you fell asleep and for the next 24 hours you feel like your brain has been raped. I find no redeeming feature in clubbing. It is like genocide. I am supposed to, apparently, acknowledge that Saturday night was created specifically for clubbing and enjoyment. Yet, in my land of boringness, the words “clubbing” and “enjoyment” are antonyms. They are completely incompatible, which means for me, Saturday nights being made for clubbing and drunkenness means I either embrace it, and feel like I’ve wasted my weekend watching the enjoyment of other people whilst myself edging ever so closely toward wanting to top myself, or enjoy it my own way, on my own terms, and actually be happy with myself. But to be happy with myself, and what I enjoy, means accepting that I am, infact, fucking boring. I now fully accept that.
The crock of shit they refer to as “dance music” doesn’t help the situation for me. It is awful. It is a constant banging noise. When my neighbours put up shelves, I don’t suddenly stand up and dance to it, and yet it sounds EXACTLY the same as absolutely every dance track ever written. Every now and again, they have a special guest to come and do a live set!!!! How exciting!! “Ziggy from Big Brother is live this week at Oceania!!! Do you want to come?” No, as I am spending that evening poking myself in the eye.
It is probably all down to the fact that I don’t particularly like people. I am cynical when it comes to humanity. We’re bastards. My apparent sense of misanthropy drives my feelings on clubbing and drunks. I can only stand to be around people for a small amount of time on any occasion, unless they’re asleep. I like my own company and my own space. I like being on my own. I like the sound of my thoughts which is rendered impossible by the sound of god-awful club music. I do not dance. I take myself too seriously. I have to be in control at all times. And I fucking like it that way, until people start to question it, as if being me, and not being them, is a problem for me. It isn’t. I quite like it. “You must be 60“…… fuck right off, i’m just not you….. I don’t have to succumb to your narrow vision of what constitutes fun, to enjoy myself.
I do not like the idea that the only enjoyable way for anyone to spend a Saturday night is to be slaughtered to the point of excessive vomiting for the early hours of Sunday morning. It doesn’t appeal to me in the slightest. I quite like to read books and essays and I quite like to sit in bars and talk and I quite like to watch a film or play football. To people who enjoy drinking and clubbing on every Saturday night, my feeling of utter boredom and anxiousness in a club, would be equivalent of making those people sit and watch me read a book for a few hours on a Saturday night.
Clubbing, whilst making me sad, also provides people with something to talk about on Monday morning. “What did you do at the weekend?” …. “I went out!!”. It provides people, who we have already established I do not like, with the opportunity to smile vacantly whilst telling me exactly how many drinks they had, and how drunk they were. As if I care. There is nothing in life I have ever experienced caring less about, than someone telling me how many drinks them consumed at the weekend. I have sat just now and tried to think of something less interesting, and I genuinely can’t. Someone could say to me “Either I am going to spend the next hour talking to you about coastal erosion in East Anglia since 1900, or telling you how many Smirnoffs I drank on Saturday night”, the history of coastal erosion would suddenly appeal to me like being told how to turn poo into gold. And yet I’m supposed to care. I smile and act like downing three thousands sambucas and puking over the taxi-driver’s face is in some odd way, heroic. It bores me to listen to them. I want to cry at how bored I am by their incessant need to talk about how drunk they were at the weekend, I literally want to sob.
I am starting to feel proud, when people consider me boring and 24 going on 50. They are attempting to sound superior as if they are privy to some sort of fun that I am not. In this attempt to seem superior, it makes me feel superior that I am not a sheep when it comes to this.
Do not even get me started on the type of drunk person who thinks everyone will find it fucking hilarious if they start to sing karaoke as badly as possibly whilst drunkenly laughing uncontrollably. I hate these people more than anyone else, including serial killers.
It is a social norm, and a sign of social status, in the collective mind of my generation, that the only way any normal, sane, exciting 24 year old could possibly enjoy them selves on a weekend, is to get horrendously drunk and wake up on Sunday intent on posting the Facebook status…. “….is never going to drink again“. I cannot think of a bigger waste of a weekend, than to go to a club and get drunk. I would disappoint and in fact, bore myself if I were to acquiesce to this terrible social norm.