I just recalled a slightly embarrassing memory from a few years back. I went through this odd phase thanks to a few of my friends where I would pull down my pants whenever I was drunk, because, y'know, it was just THAT funny to do. What was even MORE funny was doing it in a nightclub, on the dance floor, because everyone wants to see that right? So there we all were, early as the morning birds (except it was night time, at the club Cuba, and we're not birds), we had the dance floor to ourselves so we all took our stationary dancing posts at each corner and dropped the pants, laughing at our delightful foolishness! This idea progressed into the night but became less frequent as more people began arriving, the non early birds. It seems we were only trying to impress each other, our strange insecurities made secure by bearing our legs to each other. As the night wore on (like a pair of jeans!) we got progressively more drunk, me in particular as the event I'm about to tell you unfolds.
Everyone was dancing in a group on the dance floor. This excited me greatly so I downed the remainder of my pint, slammed the empty glass hard on the table as if what I was about to do my final note on my "to-do before I die" list and headed to the dance floor. I imagine if this was some sort of film the remainder of this would play out in slow motion. Like an unexpected ostrich I sprang onto the dance floor into the center of the group dropping my pants and flailing wildly in an orgy of cacophonous laughter while swinging my head around in a drunken insanity. If I had feathers they would've been flying everywhere. As I continued flailing but slowly succumbing to a more acceptable dance so I could read the reactions of my friends, a sudden realisation fell upon me, like a bird had shat on my head. These weren't my friends. And they certainly weren't impressed by my powerful bare ostrich legs. The looks on their faces were caught somewhere between disapproving, disgusted and eyebrow raised confusion.
As the truth of all of this dawned on me I turned around to see all of my friends sitting in the corner laughing at my misfortune. All I could do was stand there, hang my head in shame in a group of strangers, with my friends pointing and laughing at me, with my pants down. Textbook humiliation
Have you ever woken up in a strange place and forgotten how you got there for a brief moment? Until reality comes crashing down on you, or in my case, you go crashing into reality (aka ground).
Let me tell you a story about one of the more odd places I've woken up in. How I got there was obvious, I was indulging in a few underage drinks with my friends. And like all underage drinking nights, something stupid happens. To me. I remember the night not clearly now, back yonder to my sweet 16 days, it was my friends super sweet 16th birthday and it was super fucking cold out...
I don't remember exactly how we got the drink, but anyways, we used to drink in this field between two estates thinking it was safe, when in reality it was actually quite a retarded place to drink. Anyone could trap us there and people, mainly parents, frequently walked it on visits or on catching-underage-drinkers strolls. Luckily for us, the Garda in Castlebar are as retarded as we were (double negative makes a positive!!), so we never really did get caught.
"Oh no! Double Garda means double negative! That means there poooositively will be trouble!"
So we would drink there, bushing as it were, and we would go clubbing (or we would go "club", because there was only one really worth going to, unless you had one of those spontaaaaaaneous urges to be stabbed at the other). This particular night though, it turned out that going club was as fun as sitting in a cold shower trying to light a cigarette. If that doesn't make it clear, I will just say, it was not fun. Fun it was not. Luckily clever little ustards stashed some extra drink back in our field. So back we went back, flaming 3 can heads on us, we WERE Castlebar!!
We arrived at the field, it was beginning to rain, but like good alcohal does to you, it makes you forget why our bodies warn us of cold, of pain, of stupid decisions, of just about everythingness. So we drank for a while and then for the first time ever noticed a peculiar tree about 100 metres away. It looked a little something like this:
"We might've been seeing a little extra that night..."
One of my friends let us in on a little secret, apparently it was a BANSHEE TREE, oh my! So not only did parents, Garda, scumbags and children walk this field, but also screaming dead old women. I have to say that was certainly a little more alarming than most things (apart from Irish Radio). Especially if you believed in it, which unfortunately one of my friends did (at the time). I won't mention his name though because James will get really angry at me.
So we left the field because this tree was creeping people out (or person). The weather had also gotten a little bitchy so that last pulsating part ourselves that was sober managed to give common sense a shout and get us to make a move along. We did move along, but alas, underage drinkers don't really have a place in the world besides in the wild emerald banshee infested fields of Ireland. So what was the next best thing to a field? Well since we felt neglected by nature, with it's sky piss and tree whores we decided to drink in a place that was fighting back for us, a building site.
At this point I had drank a few more cans, and being the Captain Incapableofalcohal I was, I was pretty shteamed. We found the building site, with a lovely shed to shelter us and lots of cardboard to go pyro with. So we had it all, shelter, warmth, drink... but wait, we didn't have ONE thing. Music! Now, before I go on, I don't really listen to bands at all, I'm a bit of soundtrack buff, or scores or whatever you wanna call them. I like them ranging from TV shows to films to videogames. This night in particular I felt like being a videogame music. So I kept singing this:
Now don't even ask me how or what I was doing, let alone the fact that only one of my friends actually knew what I was talking (singing?) about. The rest just stared on at me while I constantly repeated myself until (and I'm just realising that this was probably the case) they actually had to resort to giving me enough drink to put me to sleep, which admittedly, wasn't a whole lot. I gladly took it, they gladly saw it worked. I blacked out, which was unfortunate because everything in the night was fairly non memorable, yet the part I forgot was pretty much essential in knowing what shouldn't have happened next.
Anyways, all I remember next was waking up cold. I didn't open my eyes because I didn't exactly quite realise I was awake yet. So like I always do in my bed, I turn over to get a little more comfy. Except I wasn't in my bed. And what happened next certainly wasn't comfy. If the coldness didn't wake me, the 7 foot fall to the ground definitely did. As I laid there sideways in the kind of pain that can only be described as listening to Justin Bieber, I saw that I had laid my shoes perfectly and neatly next to the scaffolding that I had just taken a short cut off of. It turns out that at some point in the night I felt like that the higher I was the safer, BUT I HAD to make sure my shoes were neatly stowed away first. I probably just wouldn't have slept otherwise!
Anyways, I think one or two of the lads were awake in the shed, and I'm pretty sure if they weren't, the sound of me hitting rock surely did (I was something of a human alarm clock). We awoke, we felt pain, we felt misery, we felt hungover. Yes the boys of the super sweet 16th certainly WERE Castlebar that morning (that sentence is to be read like the narrator in desperate housewives).
