the world has turned and left me here

the unbearable lightness of circus peanuts: or, i am a bad wingman

I can tell this is going to be hard. "Hey," I say, and it pretty much ends there. Ok, start over. Think of something to talk about. Come on.

"So this is my first time here," I tell her, somewhat of a lie, "and I was just hoping someone could explain this place to me, cause I don't really get it."

"What?" Now she thinks I'm retarded.

"You know," I continue, "like this back here." I gesture to a room behind us cordoned off from the rest of the club by velvet ropes and big guys with black dress shirts that say "Agent" on the back. Inside there are couches, arranged around a small central bar. Windows with metal-link curtains allow the patrons of this room to look out on the rest of the club. "What is this?"

"Oh, that's the VIP room."

"I see. Tell me, if you were in a room with green lighting and chain mail curtains on the windows, would that make you feel special?"

"Uh, I don't know." Giggles.

"Because," I add, acting very serious all of a sudden, "they sure would make me feel pretty damn special."

This time I really killed it. It's so, so dead. She looks off in the distance, pretending now that I don't exist. It's definitely a suggestion. I take it, but not before dragging out that wonderful moment of total awkwardness for far longer than politeness proscribes. I walk off. Sorry dudes, it's 3 on 2 now.

I hate this particular club so much that at certain moments I almost love it. It's hard to explain. The only metaphor I can think of for it is a circus peanut. They look tasty, and in fact are tasty, but there's actually nothing in them. It's a disturbing sensation: the wave functions collapse to nothing in your mouth, and you wonder what, if anything, you just ate.

You might feel ripped off at first. "Hey, I paid for substance, and you gave me the absence of it." But then you start to wonder how the hell they did it. Zero point zero calories. How can something so content-free even be brought into existence? In the end, like me, you might come away slightly impressed.