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A Night Out With My Friends In a World Full of Hope and Despair

It was a Sunday night not too long ago in a city that likes its sleep. I was feeling anxious about the world but a concert with my friends lay ahead of me. It seemed as good a way as any to pull me out of the funk of too many news headlines. We exited our Uber and walked into the venue. The space was a little too clean and far too many lights were on for it to feel intimate. The bouncer was seated and lacked the menacing glare of a true professional. The venue was dubbed a “community space” and the crowd was full of piercings, wolfcuts, and judgement. The band was heavy on synths and colorful eye makeup. I bought my overpriced beer and made too much noise with my friends. Daggers were thrown at us from corners, people were there to look cool and sway, we were there to have a good time. Different strokes for different folks. The band asked the crowd to put their hands up, the guy next to me groaned and said “I don’t want to”. People nodded along to the music, their excessive key chains (I too suffer from excessive keychain syndrome) clanged together, adding a whole other backing track to the band on stage. With the band finishing their set and my friends and I not feeling at home in this “community” space we left the concert early. Walking out the doors into the cold air felt like we escaped some weird fever dream. As expected the city was asleep at 9:45pm on a Sunday but we decided to try our luck at one of our favorite bars. After a hop, skip, and a jump we walked through familiar doors and it felt like we could breathe again. The crowd was sparse and there was a live band playing covers. The bartenders laughed at our shitty jokes and fights over who's paying for what rounds. Pink Pony Club came on and we screamed at the top of our lungs, friendly strangers joining us in our cries. I drank the cheapest beer possible, danced with a little old lady, and thanked the universe for cover bands. 

The band took a break and while we waited between sets my skin began to itch. I have long suffered from this “itchiness” yet it had been racking my body more so as of late, a restlessness churning my stomach, irritating my skin. If I scratched an itch (be a surf instructor in Tofino) another would appear (travel to South Africa, save the world, learn to sew). Each scroll on Instagram provided countless more itchy patches to appear: people to meet, causes to fight for, places to go, lives to live. A girl at the bar said “You just have to go to Southeast Asia”, her dark brown hair and talk of the beaches of rural Vietnam made hives run across my arms. I started scratching. On our walk to the bar earlier we passed by some homeless people, hurting in the chill of the evening. How do we help these people? I continued to scratch. While I was talking to the bartender I got a text from a friend, they were singing karaoke on the other side of the country and told me to move back. My nails started to chip. A news headline pops up on my phone while I wait for the urinal and I watch a hospital being blown up in Palestine, people being murdered in the streets. To puke or cry is the question, my skin alive, as if a thousand stinging nettles had brushed up against it. In the frenzy of scratching I didn’t realize that I was getting close to the bone. 

The band came back on and we danced again, though my mind was still spinning and my heart wasn’t in it anymore. Anxiety / tiredness / some combination of both had hit the rest of the group as well and we left the band singing Taylor Swift. Drunk pizza seemed like our only salvation. Sat in booths covered in unidentifiable stains, being watched by a portrait of a Rastafarian on the wall, we recapped the night: “That cowboy was looking at you!” “That bartender hatedddd us and she was so chill at first!” “The shots were not necessary” “I may have puked in the bathroom”. Anxious laughter spilled out of us making me relax, the spirals in my brain slowing down. 

Mike reading to me right after our mud fight (don’t ask)

Forgoing an Uber, looking for any excuse to keep spending time together, we walked home. As we got out of downtown and into the neighborhood where my buddy lived we stopped at one of those little community libraries. It's one of the ones someone spent a winter making in their garage. The name of the neighborhood is in big letters across the top, a birdhouse with books where James Patterson will live an eternal life in someone's front lawn. Looking for something to make each other laugh, my friends and I shuffled through titles and opened them to random pages. We found some beautiful passages in Goddesses In Every Woman (You, yes YOU have a goddess within!) and some fascinating knowledge in the Basics of Islam (God is known by 99 names!), yet we were captivated by Gigantosaurus. It's a picture book about dinosaurs and the plot is the boy who cried wolf, but the wolf is a Gigantosaurus and the boy is a little Ankylosaurus (I hope you know your dinosaurs). The kind of highbrow literary picture book to really get you thinking. We read through this picture book, each of us taking on a different character, trying our hardest to make the others laugh. The book shook in my hand as I shook with the giggles. Hanging on to every word yet focused more on how we said the word than the meaning behind them. We finished the book to our own applause and put it back in its home. The “itchiness” began to settle as if I had lathered with Aloe. 

It was a night so many of us have had. We talked about going traveling and quitting our jobs and where we might end up, what life could look like in five years time. We were (and are) broke tired kids trying to figure it all out. The world's problems tugged at our sleeves, echoed around our brains, and we gave half hearted attempts to fix them. There was nothing extra special about the night, no big event, if anything the things we set out to do, listen to music and dance, were met with haphazard success. Yet in all the chaos and darkness that fills our world, I was spending time with people that I care deeply about. It seems like that is important, more important than anything else these days. I am not advocating to stick your head in the sand and ignore the world but if you don’t remember to laugh with your friends then what is the point of it all?

 At the very end of our night we saw these massive blooming Cherry Blossoms hanging down over the sidewalk. Drunk and tired we stuck our faces into the flowering petals and breathed deep. Branches hit us in the face, petals flew to the ground below us and spring roared through our nostrils. Despite everything we could smell the promise of summer.