Tired

In theory, nightclubs are good. On any night of the week in New York and other major cities, you can go out and drink, dance, celebrate, meet people of the opposite sex and listen to bad music. Instead of idly sitting at a bar staring at a television, you can move around and actively participate in the experience without being limited to one little swath of territory.

If you don’t like where you’re standing, you can go stand somewhere else. If you don’t like standing still, you can go dance. If you don’t like standing or dancing, you can go sit down on a couch. And there’s usually a dress code and a set of aesthetic requirements, so if you get in, you know people will look halfway decent.

It’s not a bad concept. Like everything else, though, it’s “the people” that ruin it.

There’s nothing profound about this, but after bouncing for as long as I have, my thoughts on this weekend’s stabbings can be distilled into one very simple idea – that 75% of the people who walk through the doors of a typical Manhattan nightclub on any given night are superfluous human flotsam who contribute nothing to society.

I anticipate two arguments to this point:

1. That I can’t possibly know this for a fact.

2. That I, too, contribute nothing to society.

My responses to these two arguments are as follows:

1. After watching this parade of “humanity” for several years, I’m convinced I’m not far off the mark here.

2. True enough, but unlike most clubgoers, I don’t inflict myself on society in a negative manner by running around in a drink and drug-addled state and stabbing people.

It’s almost to the point where I no longer have anything to say on this subject. This is what it’s like to be jaded. I hear about something like this and I know I can write the script for it because I’ve seen it a thousand times. I can even imagine the conversations the stabbers have with their friends – if they have any – in the months afterward. I’m too tired of this shit to even write in dialect anymore:

“Hey, I’m going to prison for seven years.”

“Why?”

“I stabbed four people.”

“Why?”

“Because they told me to go home.”

It’s all so fucking pointless. Really. You really don’t understand what a monumental fucking waste of time clubs are until you work in one for a few years. Everyone sucks.

• The customers suck. People who stab people over coats suck.

• The personality-free “administration” sucks.

• Bouncers who take this shit too seriously suck.

• Vapid, drug-addicted “superstar” bartender-types suck.

• People who pay other people $50 to walk them to bathrooms suck.

• Suburban white kids with tattooed forearms and Ed Hardy shirts suck.

If you want to know why President Obama is sitting at a Hold’em table in London looking at an unsuited 7-2 on the flop, just walk into a club and look around. What a fucking joke.