Can I talk to you for five minutes about why I hate clubs?  Since arriving on the 21-and-up scene nearly three years ago, I have spent countless nights in countless nightclubs in the greater Chicago area.  I’ve tried to like nightclubs.  I’ve wanted to like nightclubs.  I’ve gone to great lengths to dress, drink, and dance in a manner consistent with the nightclub crowd.  And what have I gotten for all my efforts?  Weekly reminders of the myriad reasons why I hate clubs.  I believe this is called irony.

There are many reasons to hate night clubs, all of them equally valid.  The $7.00 beers, remixed Lady Gaga songs, and pungent aroma of human sweat are excellent examples.  But there is another even more significant downside: the clientele.  Clubs are, without exception, little more than d-bag rec centers.  They are for toolsheds what Golden Corrals are for fat people and what youth soccer games are for sex offenders.  It gets them out of the house, they get to meet and mingle with other people like themselves, and they get to revel in the fullness of their social deficiencies without fear of reproach.

D-bags love clubs because clubs provide them the opportunity to engage in all their favorite activities including, but not limited to: drawing attention to themselves, wearing button down shirts unbuttoned and without an undershirt, singing along to Kanye West songs, and talking to girls about their workout regimens.

Furthermore, the social lives of the d-bags are aided by the corresponding ability of clubs to gather all the dumbest, most skank-tastic girls in the surrounding area into the same room at the same time.  By bringing these two groups together, nightclubs create an unnatural habitat which subverts the evolutionary process of natural selection.  People that society has marked for extinction are allowed to meet and reproduce, and the scourge of the d-bag is foisted upon future generations.

Seriously, have you ever gone to a club and watched the inter-gender interactions?  It’s like watching a class of fourth graders on Valentine’s Day.  Except these fourth graders are trading appletinis instead of SpongeBob cards.  They stand next to each other and make an effort at conversation, but everyone is just waiting around for everyone else to get drunk enough so they can all go home and have sex with each other.  Ok, so maybe it’s more like the Duke Lacrosse team than fourth grade.

These reasons, combined with a more general aversion to sweaty mobs of Yuppies make club going an unpleasant experience for me.  The more I try to “fit in” the more I end up hating myself.  The more I try to “be myself” the more I end up sitting alone at a table mulling over the appetizer menu.

As a casual fan of both hip-hop music and close physical contact with females, I sometimes wish I could enjoy clubs more than I do.  I wonder what it would be like to “get my grind on” with the same abandon demonstrated by some of my friends.  But alas, it is not meant to be.  I have a few convictions about a few things and an enjoyable night at a club would require me to abandon most of them.  Specifically, I would have to consume enough alcohol to kill a medium-sized horse.  As I do not typically imbibe that much alcohol in a single sitting, I am forced to look elsewhere when the urge to put on a tie and do a bit of socially-sanctioned dry humping strikes.

Thankfully, wedding season is right around the corner.