At A Bar Long After the Time You Should Have Gone Home

For when the vibe is masculine, vigorous, and delirious.

At A Bar Long After the Time You Should Have Gone Home -- The Vibe Triangulation

I have a very trite, very unimaginative point to make, and it is this: humans are social creatures. Our penchant for cooperation is one of those things that makes us complex, extraordinary, and fascinating. Cooperation keeps us grounded and allows us to achieve greatness, and our vehicles for cooperation range from shared hardships to common goals to familial bonds to collective moral frameworks to universal cultural touchstones. A night out that goes on a little too long, the experience of having a little too much fun is one of those crucial vehicles.

There is a lot of wisdom in that classic adage ‘drunk people, kids, and leggings always tell the truth.’ Nights like these can let you know who your friends are; which ones make jokes at your expense to mixed company? Which ones hold your hair in a bathroom stall? They can tell you who you are; do you become prickly and belligerent when drinking whiskey? Does tequila make you strip naked and run away from your friends? They can give you a temperature check on your romantic coupling; do you get a little too handsy in public (generally good)? Do you devolve into yelling and crying in both public and private (exclusively bad)?

Nights out, when undertaken infrequently in parallel with structured pursuits and exclusively by youngsters in their early twenties, are uniquely suited to this kind of vivid, critical exploration. The digital marketplace will never, can never hold the same richness or the same life that’s inherent in the doing and the messiness of a night out. So (and continuing with the trite, unimaginative point-making), it is not just a quirk of youth culture that young people are drinking less, going out less, getting into relationships less, and are generally less social and lonelier than older generations, it is a serious problem that begs the question, what are they doing instead? Largely stressing, from what I can gather. There’s the fretting over, like, events (violence and climate change, mostly). There’s the ever-present knowledge that everything they do might end up documented on social media, making them cautious to the point of being boring on purpose. Then there is the hand-wringing over health, and a subsequent rejection of all things ‘toxic,’ such as uncomfortable relationships or mildly sloppy nights out.

Strong emotions, by and large, have been bucketed as unhealthy, and the agreed upon solution has been to medicate feeling out of the human condition. I humbly suggest instead a chaotic night out and a subsequent reckoning in the form of headaches, dehydration, apologies, thanks, strong coffee, greasy food, and a large dose of pondering. Not only would a hearty return to this most important cornerstone of civilization help to ameliorate the spate of loneliness plaguing today’s youth, it would teach that all-too-critical skill of self-regulation. It is important to know what pain is and where it comes from, and to know that pain is ok, suffering is inevitable, and recovery is possible.

I don’t want to sound dramatic, but I would argue that a night like the playlist in question is probably literally foundational for social development. Mistakes made during the course of one of these nights reduce anxiety about living life. They show you what your limits are and aren’t, and help you to engage with a fallen world in a healthier way. They even the playing field and help you crawl out of your own butt. It’s a lot easier to tend a sloshed friend with sympathy and softness if you know yourself what it’s like to lay your cheek on a mercifully cold bathroom floor while your body is spinning like a comet hurdling through the cosmos and your stomach is a hard rock of pain. Nights like these give you a story to tell on other nights, which can be as lubricating to social gears as the alcohol itself. Nights like these build trust on a societal level. If people are going out, the society will take steps to make a safe environment for going out (which means a safer environment more broadly).

And so, for all of these reasons great and small, socially conscious and introspective, I’d like to celebrate those emotionally-charged, booze-fueled stumbles through the night with a vibe that is genre-spanning, shifting easily from rap (Brass Monkey) to blues (Texas Flood) to indie rock (Bad Habits, Scumbag, Trouble, etc.) to country (Drinkin’ Problem, Must Be the Whiskey) to alternative folk (Loved So Little, Counting Sheep), speaking to the universality of the subject matter. If you can, imagine that each song is a stop on a long bar crawl, and each bar room is a different angle on why someone might be there, why they are drinking, and how the inner workings of the mind can make a night turn from good to bad to worse to better.

Oh yes, the night might start out with the youthful and fundamentally masculine aggression of Brass Monkey, and the tone might be fun and arrogant without even a hint of pain or foreshadowing (after all, you don’t start a night thinking you’ll veer off course into despair), but things quickly become frantic (Bad Habits), melancholic (Scumbag), and brooding (Must Be the Whiskey). It’s not hard to imagine that Are You Gonna Be My Girl (“So one, two, three, take my hand and come with me / Because you look so fine that I really wanna make you mine”) and Why’d You Only Call Me When You’re High? (“Now it’s three in the mornin’ / And I’m tryna’ change your mind”) might be part of the same night. The same goes for Drinkin’ Problem (“Last call gets later and later / I come in here so I don't have to hate her”) and Loved So Little:

“With your pulled on hair and your punched up lips

And your city-mouse voice

I should have known that we'd get into this

If I didn't watch the signals

And now, you lean in the door in your fired up skin

With your look of freedom, telling me that I'm in for it

If I can't keep up”

In both scenarios, each song in the pair takes a different perspective on the same situation. One has a little more optimism, while the other does not. At the beginning of the night the glass is half full, if you’ll forgive the pun, while toward the end it is half-to-completely empty. Both situations might resolve in Counting Sheep, a kind of delirious lurch home in the early morning hours and the inevitable comeuppance to follow, but first blissful, fitful sleep.

Long live the night out.

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