Some of the best times of my life have been at terrible parties. Those messy, overcrowded affairs at shitty college houses, where you get there and you don’t know anyone and decide it’s time to be a bastard.

Yes, my fellow state-college Diaspora, I was that ironic-tee kid lingering all night around the keg. I over-bantered with people I didn’t know and mercilessly teased the host’s girlfriend.

I was your best friend for 20 minutes, flinging open cupboard doors and passing out Cheese-Its. Then I messed with way-too wasted dudes and ran to the bathroom to flush whole boxes of q-tips. No consequences, no honor—just pure “yanking-out-speaker-cables, pissing-off-the-porch-on-to-somebody’s-Camry” fun.

Yesterday, my friend told me he ended up driving to see “Grindhouse” at a drive-in in Wisconsin on Saturday night with a dozen people he had never met and who the buddy who brought him had also never met. They were giddy bastards, I’ll bet, running from car to car, cracking lame jokes: free from expectations and ever having to explain.

They got home at 5 AM.

I sat on the couch with my mother-in-law (who’s lovely. really) and watched an old Hitchcock, sadly being myself.