Going Out

Tonight (it is 2:30AM on a Saturday night as I am typing this sentence), I 'went out' with my two housemates, D and C, and two of D's engineering friends, for the second time, and almost certainly for the last time (the key factor is not anything tragic, just that the three of us are soon to be evicted, about which more later). I left early, which is why I'm in bed creating this post. One of the things I shall endeavour to explain in this post is why I left early. I hope to cover in this post a significant amount more than that, of a lot more significance. I also hope to complete this post within the next hour in a fairly inebriated state. I don't know if this is overly ambitious; we'll see [FUCK: Update at 3:07.I am nodding off and I am about to turn off the light, even though when I started this post I thought it was quite urgent to finish it tonight). Update at 11:18AM on Sunday: I just woke up and I am continuing. Just so you know, I got up to "not too long after" (see below) last night, but I have been editing.]
Three or four Saturdays ago, D, who had at that point only been my housemate for a little while (but with whom I got on fairly well already, because he is a really nice guy (just to add detail, he is Dutch-Greek (he and his engineering friends all studied in the Netherlands)) invited over his French engineering friend T for 'pre-drinks' (T is doing a Masters with D at USyd), while C, my even newer housemate, a 23-year-old, highly genial, Irish (Derry specifically) psych graduate and Taylor Swift fan, got ready to go out with them. While I was in the kitchen preparing ravioli for myself, at 9:15pm, having had a typically dreary and lonely day of ceaseless, solitary intellectual toil in the library, feeling sorry for myself on account of my status as a total social pariah (as I sometimes do), D mentioned in a friendly and unassuming way that I was welcome to join the going out party if I wanted to (at that point I can't remember if T had arrived or not). I was noncomittal and rather blase in response, but the offer was intriguing to me. M and S, the ones who live opposite, whom I had not visited for several weeks - a state of affairs which may or may not have had something to do with my belligerence on the question of the scientific integrity of their obsession with Kombucha - had previously said some things to make me think they might be interested in going out with any social housemates I might acquire. As I was beginning to lean towards the decision "I am going to accompany my housemates on their night out", I sent a message to the M and S groupchat, saying roughly "I'm about to go out with my new roommates. You're welcome to come along if you want." It turned out S was at work (in recent times, she has been overworked by her boss because their shop is shortstaffed) and that M was at the library studying. Needless to say, the offer was not taken up.
After I finished making my dinner, I sat down at the tiny table in the small living room of the house, and I began talking with C and T (let's just assume that he was there when I finished my dinner, because I know he was there not too long after). Not too long into the conversation, I revealed to T that I speak French with some level of proficiency, and we had a brief conversation. I was lifted by his claim that I was "almost fluent" and that with a few months in France I would be. C was very impressed; she apparently learnt French herself but forgot it all. C is easily impressed, though, so this means little (she has also been impressed by my ability to cook what to me and most other people are extremely simple meals).
Anyhow, to make a long story short, we drank some nice Chilean white wine and then, finally, after 10 at some point, we went out. Following my lead, we walked towards Newtown.... We started out at the Newtown Hotel (although C couldn't get in because she had no ID, which was obviously terrible and meant she wasted 45 minutes walking back to the house and then back to King Street in elevated shoes), at which venue J (big, ursine, friendly, nerdy Italian engineer (my favourite, with whom I had good conversations about Australian wildlife and politics and other things (similar to me in terms of having a large database of interesting facts))) and A (blonde, typically French, seemed-to-think-he-was-really-cool-but-kind-of-dopey engineer) joined our party. After C had returned, and this party of engineers  plus me had finished three rounds of drinks at the hotel (lots of jokes were made about D's dislike of beer and fondness for cider), we went wandering further west down King Street. For some reason, they actually were keen on going to the Irish pub, Kelly's, so that's where we entered next. Inside Kelly's, we walked upstairs into an area of deafening noise - the kind of music so loud that it literally feels like it has become some kind of viscous substance enclosing you. I hated this fact; it made me extremely uncomfortable (the loudness of the music where we were sitting at the Newtown Hotel had already made me uncomfortable but this was worse). It legitimately made me feel claustrophobic, as well as concerned about my hearing. I have particular trouble with this kind of noise, not only because I have reasons to think that I am genetically predisposed to deafness (and I already have a weird occasional tinnitus which I suspect is related to hearing damage, even though I have largely avoided these kinds of environments and generally listen to music on a relatively low volume), but also because one of my many slightly spergy traits is that I have always been hypersensitive to loud noises. As an infant and child, I absolutely could not stand fireworks; they made me want to scream and run away. My parents were disrespectful of my intense fear, and so when the fireworks came on at the San Christmas Carols every year, I had to stand around with them with my hands clapped over my hears, wincing in terror, desperately trying to convince them that we had to go.
I stayed in Kelly's despite my discomfort with the loudness of the music (and, look, at least we weren't right next to the speakers), and despite the stickiness of the floor. One reason to stay was that we had something to do: our party had decided that, since we were standing around some pool tables, we would play pool. Around the pool table at this point was a very eclectic collection of people. Playing pool were two guys who looked pretty old, one seemingly an over-forty five guy, with extremely brown, leathery skin and that really rugged look of a labourer who treats his body like shit but apparently is genetically fit enough to survive it all (I was very intrigued that someone that age was spending a Saturday night in an environment like this; needless to say, it made no sense to me, and I figured that he was an extremely different kind of person from me (and probably profoundly stupid, with little to no executive function or self-control)). The other player was this kind of seedy-looking, weedy guy who was at least over thirty himself; he was pretty good at pool and I think he won the game. Around the pool table, sitting on the furniture, was a lot of young people, mostly men, some of whom looked like those extremely degenerate, young English men from hideous Northern towns, as well as (bizarrely, from my perspective) a couple of good-looking young women. A lot of them were smiling and laughing but I must admit I didn't understand why they were there, just sitting around, because, as is clear, I found the place a very unpleasant environment.
For some reason, I think it was A and I that played the first pool match together, against the seedy-looking guy. I did some ok shots, but I didn't really help the team. But A was very good and he carried our team. I think we might have won when the seedy guy accidentally sank a black ball; something like that happened, but I can't exactly remember. A couple more games ended up being played without my participation (J performed some heroics, I recall, but I can't recall any specifics (this is not so much because I was off my face (I was tipsy, to be sure, but not drunk), and more that I have a poor episodic memory and am close to aphantasic)), and then, after about 45 minutes (maybe more) in this place, our party decided to leave. T had hatched a plan that we were going to catch a bus to the CBD to go to this underground pizza bar and rock venue called Frankie's that he had been to before, but we kept staying too long inside and missing the buses due to the pool games. We left knowing that there would not be a bus anytime soon. Upon walking out of Kelly's, and escaping the noise, it felt like I was underwater, and my ears were ringing. I figure this is the norm for leaving really loud places (very gradually, you start to hear normally again and the ringing disappears). At that point, I think it was probably after 1AM. It think it might even have been after 1:30AM. I can't remember.
With pleasant conversation, we walked back east up King St toward the shitty 'Greek' takeaway shop way back near Missenden Rd. The engineering boys bought some kind of unhealthy lamb-based meal at this place; I bought nothing, because I am vegetarian and because it looked disgusting anyway. At this point, J was planning to go home, and so eventually he came to be standing at the bus stop nearby, as we were sitting on a bench on the street. Unfortunately, the bus that he thought was the right bus passed him by even as he waved at it. Then another bus that was apparently meant to stop didn't stop. He eventually decided that he was giving up on going home at that point, and returned to be with us on the bench, ready to continue the night. As we were sitting down, I remember we were discussing the possibility of getting an Uber to travel to the CBD, but a major issue was that the party was too big for one. So we eventually figured that we were going to head back down King St. T, looking on his phone, raised the specific idea of going to the Sly Fox Hotel, which apparently you could still get into. Three notable things happened while we were sat on that bench: 1.) some youngish guy got in a taxi with what looked like a younger, highly drunk girl (like maybe five years younger), with the girl's friends looking on (the girl was in conversation with the dude, asking him where he lived (he said Kingsford and she apparently decided that that was "close enough" to where she lived)); 2.) A tried to seduce some ladies nearby, with whom he spent a while in conversation (they eventually told him they had boyfriends); and 3.) a strange tall man wandered past in the regalia of a 1930s detective and behaved erratically around us (I joked that he looked like he was from the video game LA Noire, which made the engineers laugh).
To make a long story short, we ended up walking all the way down to the Sly Fox (which was like 20 minutes west, beyond Kelly's), making jokes the whole time related to the fact that it might be an exclusively gay bar (the Google results were unclear on that). When we arrived, it didn't appear to be an exclusively gay venue, but we had to pay $20 to get in at that late hour (it was 3AM at this point). We didn't want to pay and so we decided to go home.
When I finally got home at 4AM, I sent off a message to the M and S group chat. "It was fun," I wrote, and I meant it. I had enjoyed myself, particularly my conversations with J. Even Kelly's had been an interesting experience, and I had found it vaguely fun to play and watch the pool games.
Last night, however, was a different story [it is now 1:11PM on Sunday as I am writing this sentence].
Last night began with D and I playing chess against each other at 8:30, using our laptops. He beat me three games out of three (one game was close). D had planned the night believing that our landlord would show up and that we would 'take him out' (our landlord has apparently decided to live in the house for the few days until it is being renovated (that's why we're being evicted)). The landlord didn't turn up. Anyhow, at about 9:30, T arrived and then later J arrived (this was the first time I had seen them since the events just described three or four weeks previous). We had slightly more extensive pre-drinks this time, because 'we' (I don't know if this is the right pronoun to use, because initially I thought I wasn't going to drink, given that I am about to enter my exams) had decided to take advantage of the various kinds of unused alcohol sitting about the place that other residents had left behind: we had one of those tiny bottles of Bailey's, about 400mL of Pimm's, and this disgusting drink called Coconut Beach (25% alcohol), as well as some of the Chilean wine from last time (which had been left out). Initially, C was convinced that the Pimm's wasn't pure, having been diluted by coke, and therefore thought that we wouldn't need anything with which to mix these drinks, but she was wrong, so I decided to quickly go to the 24 hour Convenience store nearby to buy Sprite and cranberry juice. When I returned, I started drinking with the gang, and I had basically decided that I would go out with them. My thought was: 'Well, I've run out of past papers for integral calc anyway, so..'... The discussion that went on covered several topics, but the main topic was places to go in Australia. (The NBN, Australia's internet speed and the idea of fibre optic cable 'to the node' was also covered, and several jokes were made about D's failure to gain significant muscle mass despite going to the gym regularly.) I was probably the dominant speaker, as I often am in social and academic situations, especially when I have a lot of knowledge to impart (as I did on Australia).
We ended up leaving quite late, when it was already 11pm (or maybe 11:30pm)  This time we were going to head to this Frankie's place directly, by bus. So that's what we did; we walked towards Parramatta Rd and eventually got a bus that took us to Central, then another to near Martin Place, from which it was a short walk to Frankie's. I think it was definitely after midnight when we arrived, and we still had to wait in a queue for quite a while. During this wait, several jokes were made about D's shitty Greek ID as he worried about being barred (he had been already at a different Sydney venue, on a previous night out). "You can tell it's from a bankrupt country," I said.
Finally, we got in and entered Frankie's.
The first room in Frankie's was pleasant-looking. It was an incredibly noisy and busy pizza bar. Meanwhile, shitty 80s rock music was playing loudly from the dark area behind. T gave me the impression the venue would have live music, but apparently not. T bought me a beer as we were standing around awkwardly in the crowded space. Meanwhile, I realised I needed to piss pretty badly and was looking forward to moving onto the next area, where there would no doubt be a toilet. As my need to piss came to conquer my mind, I surveyed the people around me with my judging eyes. As usual, I felt pity/mystification at the bartenders, who weren't that young and were clearly destroying their ears by working at a place like this. (Also loud noises increase cortisol levels; loud noise is just really bad in general; I am shocked at how profoundly reckless so many people are (I guess it doesn't help that when you start drinking heavily young you damage your ability to make sensible decisions!).) After about 10 minutes, time spent hanging around as D and T looked over the menu and then decided not to order a pizza after all (and also D and C and J each bought a drink for themselves), we moved into the dark dancing zone.
The dark dancing zone was really bad. I'm pretty sure the noise level in this room was worse than Kelly's. Put it this way: it felt like my head was being bored from both sides with laser beams. I couldn't help feeling like my brain was going to explode inside my skull at any moment. It really felt strongly like I was under a very strange but very real kind of physical assault, and I had to exercise a degree of willpower to make the rather stupid decision to actually stay in this atmosphere. Meanwhile, the claustrophobia element was amplified significantly; the sound was so loud, so thick, that I really did feel entrapped. Now, I should clarify that when I first walked in, it wasn't quite this awful, because the front of the room doesn't have all the speakers on the ceiling, and the first thing I did was put my beer in J's hand and walk to the bathroom (incidentally, the bathroom was one of the many disgusting things about this den of depravity, with a floor covered in piss).
But when I returned and the gang had started dancing underneath some of the speakers - well, that was when things got really bad...
It might have been slightly less bad if the music wasn't awful (although I don't know how anyone could enjoy music at that level anyway). But the music itself was fucking awful. The engineers loved it, because they have no taste (in fact, J really loved it, this was his favourite music), but it was really horrific to me. Two of the first tracks that came on while we were on the dancefloor were AC/DC. I think it was "Thunderstruck" and then "It's a Long Way to the Top". (It's when the bagpipes came in in Thunderstruck that I literally felt like my head was going to explode, and I decided to escape to the bathroom again, despite the filth.) We also had "Lithium" by Nirvana, which I guess is an ok song and felt kind of like a relief because it was slightly quieter - but that's about all I can say in favour of Nirvana. To me, this is the kind of music you listen to as a little boy.
Now, to clarify, I was dancing to this music (well, I was intermittently dancing and just doing that kind of bouncing thing that people do when they're not really dancing but don't want to stand completely still) because otherwise things would have felt really awkward. They already did feel really awkward, because, although J was getting well into it, D and T were sort of just bouncing to the music a bit (this despite the fact that this was T's venue of choice) and I reckon our group would have looked slightly odd from an external perspective (what can you do without pingas?). I soon began to notice that although I had had a fair amount of alcohol that night (well, I'm not really sure (I think probably more than four standard drinks), but it's hard to tell because of the way I was drinking at the house (no shot glasses and I didn't pour myself a lot)), I was still very much sober in the sense that I was highly aware that I was in a deeply ugly environment listening to terrible music and that I was only pretending to have fun.
One of the major things that made the experience non-fun was observing the disgusting degeneracy and animalism of the human beings around me. Probably the majority of the people in this room were older than us, although there were a fair few ugly young men (there were certainly very few very young women around (classic place for an engineer to choose)). All of these people around us, mostly men, seemed to be much less inhibited than we were, standing directly under the deafening speakers as they did exaggerated dancing and made MDMA faces (probably a lot of them were not on pingas, but no doubt they had drunk an immense amount of alcohol). Incidentally, during "It's a Long Way to the Top", all of these people shouted out the main lyrics. Everyone also sang the main "Yeaahhh" in "Lithium". This made me feel as if I was in a nightmare.
During the fifth or sixth song, I started directly reflecting on how profoundly ugly and debauched my surroundings were, in this horrible dark room with hideous penis art (I didn't mention that, but there was some disgusting penis art on a column near us), enclosed by this crowd of ugly degenerates, listening to horrible music at a volume that was obliterating my fragile biology. It was epiphanic, not because these were really deep thoughts for me, but because the fact that I was having them showed that I was actually pretty cognitively alert. It suddenly occurred to me that even at my most drunk, I would be far too sober for this inferno. It occurred to me that, fundamentally, this was not my place; I didn't belong among these animals. At that point, I stopped dancing. Surveying the room once more, I saw a thirtyish year-old woman about 10 metres away from me, at '11 O'clock' (using the analogue-clock directional system) making those typical female-drunk bodily movements on a table (moving her arms about really loose-limbed and so on) right underneath one of the speakers; ahead of me, through the crowd, I saw a young man making a classic MDMA face as he enjoyed the music next to the even bigger speakers that were probably blasting the music even louder than it was near me (I found it hard to fathom how noise could get louder than it was near me (the noise near me felt to me  viscerally like the maximum possible volume noise could be)). It suddenly occurred to me that I could leave, and that I would be much happier and healthier if I did. And so I did.
I shook hands with the engineers, and then hugged C, and got out of that place. At the door, I was informed, in a voice that I knew was louder than it sounded to me (because I was suffering from the underwater sensation and ear-ringing, despite only having been in the worst of it for maybe 25 minutes) that, since it was after 1:30, I would not be allowed back in if I left. "That's fine with me," I said, and walked out.
Although I was concerned about my hearing, the overwhelming emotion I felt after my escape was relief. I had fled the subterranean cesspit, I had done it. I also felt a certain degree of pride that I had been at least intelligent enough to leave before I had damaged my hearing more (and for no reason, given the lack of enjoyment).
Strangely, out in the relatively clean and crisp air of a Sydney night (with no cars around), I felt an overwhelming urge to run. The same thing happened on a previous occasion where I had a night out, that time at a classical music concert  at the Opera House (that time I ended up running more than 2.5 kilometres in chinos and brown suede shoes, only stopped by the disgusting air of Parramatta Rd, which made me worried about my lungs (it wasn't that late on that occasion, so there were still a fair few cars)). And so I did. On account of the hearing damage, my shoe-slapping was all muted (the underwater sensation lasts for a while), but it felt good to be running, even if it was in chinos and brown suede shoes. I actually ran quite fast and hard, at a 3-minute kilometre pace, and for quite a distance (roughly a kilometre). And then I ran a bit more. As I passed people, I imagined that probably most of them thought I was on drugs; little did they know that I was just an eccentric. Once I got near central, I just started walking. I decided, as I had also decided on that previous Opera House night, to walk the rest of the way home. As I was making my way home, my driving thought was that I must write about my experience. As I was about to cross Parramatta Rd opposite Glebe Point Rd, I amused myself by trying to describe in the most pompous way that dark area at Frankie's; phrases that came to mind were the rather cliche "den of depravity" (used in this post, as I knew it would be), and "the epitome, the quintessence, of bestiality", which was more creative (and also more dumb).
And now it is 3:09 PM, and I guess I should have a shower and clean up the alcohol from last night and so on - and then go to Fisher Library for some maths study. I heard C get up more than an hour ago, I think, but I have been holed up in my room for a couple of hours now (I only went down to get weetbix, all six of which I scarfed down in my room), and I think D just got up too.

How strange life is,