It’s 5:47 PM, and you’re on the toilet fighting like Rocky in the 13th round because you’ve been trying to eat better so you can take a good Hinge profile picture this summer, but your digestive system is going through worse distress than any character Jason Bateman has ever played. You have two missed slack notifications, and you decide to mute that app because if you hear that ping one more time, you will have a full Taylor Lorenz breakdown in the shower. Before hopping into the shower where hot water WILL scold your back, you decide to hit your fridge and grab one of three loose beers from pregames past.
After optimistically shaving an area that has been more unkempt than a widow’s front yard, you put on a towel that’s the climate of London (cold and wet), and open your group chat to reluctantly find that better men than you have already started planning for tonight. Like CNN+’s short-lived tenure, tonight’s pregame will have a demographic of a lot of white women. Because of this, you go into your closet in search of something that says, I’m not exactly what you want, but I’m fixable. After two hours of drinking and losing your hard-earned money to the Utah Jazz’s failure to build team chemistry, you and two of the fellas decide to call an Uber to the pregame. Ninety seconds into small talk with David, a charming man in his mid-to-late fifties who keeps gum in the back seat, your friend sitting shotgun pops the two most stereotypical questions a semi-drunk guy asks an Uber driver: so you doing this full time? And busy night tonight? To escape the shame you feel, you scroll Twitter where Lil Sas concocted something that isn’t funny enough to make you laugh out loud, but funny enough to make your mouth queef. Instant retweet.
Pre-games in your early twenties is odd because conversation before three beers entails schools, work, and trips for this summer, and all roads after that lead to should we get another bag and is the teacher from Billy Madison actually hot or is she nostalgia hot. You notice out of the corner of your eye that one of the girls has brought the guy she’s been seeing. A lone soldier of sorts, he’s spent the last fifteen minutes listening to his girlfriend and her two friends talk about some show on HBO Max. Are you the best person? No. But you’re a good enough person to take him to the other side of the room where you and two of your friends need Jordan Poole to cool down, or else hungover Doordash is off the table tomorrow. About an hour and a half into this pregame, you guys take your final shots and gear up to wait in line for a bar without doors on its stalls.
Due to the fact that drunk people our age our children, lines for bars are as chaotic as they are at Disney World. The person behind you is in a Cold-War-like argument with his girlfriend, the person in front of you appears to be curing seasonal allergies with a key, and nobody in your group can stand straight. After the longest eleven minutes in your life, you put your hand out to get stamped, the bouncer mumbles flip your wrist, and because you have no idea what the fuck he’s saying, you laugh. He doesn’t like this and angrily repeats himself. You flip your wrist faster than a 2014 Tumblr girl with that stupid infinity tattoo and make your merry way in.
