It’s 7:58 PM and you’re sitting on your couch listening to your roommate go on about how he knew that the banks would collapse, and that’s why he held onto his one-one thousandth of Bitcoin this entire time. Many men struggle to find their personalities after high school, and cryptocurrency has become an island of misfit toys for people whose parents don’t talk about them much when people ask. You open your bank app to see what you’re working with, and like most times, you look down; you aren’t surprised that it’s not much, but you’re still a little disappointed. If your bank account is a fourteen-year-old Taiwanese boy with girlish features, pre-season football has been the President’s son. You have girls coming over for a pregame at 09:30, so you ask your roommate if he can finish this talk later and hop in your shower.
Earlier today, a guy bumped into you and told you to watch where you were going. The situation startled you and ruined your day simultaneously. After two minutes of analysis, you knew that you were, in fact, in the right. He had no reason to say that. As the water washes over your body and you pretend that you’re shooting webs of water onto the ground (something all guys do), you dream of a scenario where you had something on him. You dream of a world where you grab him by the shoulders and tell him why the girl he dated all throughout college left him for a woman senior year. You want to swab his DNA and send it to twenty-three and me. You want to get the results back and assemble a team of drunk Italian American men to berate each portion of his heritage as he withers in emotional pain and desperately clasps something his Oma made him when he was young. You want to lick his tears and…
After briefly running the same hair gel you’ve been using since #cutsforZayne was trending on Twitter, you throw on some clothes and begin playing music for the girls to listen to as they arrive. Your pregame will be small, and you have sufficiently friendzoned yourself with all of them, but when you walk in the bar, people won’t know how much of a loser you really are, and that’s good enough for you. After twenty-five minutes of pretending to listen to your roommate debate with just himself about whether or not he’d let Peter Thiel open up a vanilla gogurt on him in exchange for his mentorship, the girls and one of their boyfriends arrive. All guys know this, but when one of your girlfriends brings her boyfriend to your apartment or vice versa, the situation mirrors that of two dogs feeling each other out for the first time. I’ve been on both ends of the stick. You can tell if a guy wants your girlfriend by the way he daps you up or even a quick stare when he thinks no one is looking. It’s important to be conscious of your every move.
The reason that pre-games are the best is because they take the things men and women look forward to the most, and they add alcohol and stimulants. Every day, girls list about five things in their head that have happened to them or that they saw that day, and they wait eagerly to share this information with people. Sometimes they even get frustrated because their boyfriends don’t understand the significance of what happened or how weird it really was. That’s where the pre-game comes in. And almost always, men look to have meaningless debates about hypothetical situations that most women don’t want to participate in. The pregame gets that energy out. The ideal pre-game has the sounds of tongues reacting to tequila, overdramatic reactions from girls listening to their friends recapping an event, and guys debating UConn Shabazz Napier vs. Michigan Trey Burke as house music blares through a speaker that’s seen better days. Nothing beats the pre-game, and nothing ever will.
Half of the experience of going to a bar is looking around and sizing people up, feeling like you’re on your toes at all times. But the pre-game is the Subway sandwiches of a drinking event; you can customize it to fit your needs.
