Don’t.

Hear me out.  I know: parties are an opportunity to hook up and possibly get drunk or high in a situation where you can feel less alone.  In some cases, going also fulfills a social duty.  At least one person wants or needs you to be there.  Or you feel obligated to make an appearance because if you don’t there will be social or professional consequences.  Maybe that’s where the deals are being made.  Or you go because all your friends (the people you see regularly when you’re not at parties) will be there and you’re afraid you will seem alien and awkward and will become a target for gossip if you stay home.  Or you go because you’re secretly bored or depressed, which worries you and makes you think a party will be good medicine.  Note: it never is.

There are other reasons, of course.  But these seem to be the most common ones.  And sometimes these reasons are good, which is to say, not anxiety-provoking or depressing or otherwise liable to leave you with an emotional scar and a bad memory.  But think about the parties you’ve attended.  I mean, the ones you can remember.  How many of them can you look back on and say “That was a good time” without certain regrets, without a flash of pain, like running your tongue over a sore tooth?

Maybe you’re an extrovert and you don’t agree with this at all. Maybe you like to say “I love parties!” the way you say “I love shopping!” or “I love parades!” or “I love concerts and riding the big roller coaster and telling jokes to the whole room!”  Sure.  You have an amazing life, oh thou Paragon of Well-Adjusted Exuberance and Charm.  But even extroverts get the blues and, for the rest of us, it’s not that simple.

Even if you rate on the manic end of the social spectrum and regard filling the air with words as one of the best things in life, you’re not immune to darkness.  In fact, I suspect the loudest, most visible attention magnets are sometimes the most sensitive.  They feel, somewhere, perhaps inexpressibly, that there are things slithering down there in the dark.  They’ll do anything to remain on the surface where life is bright and cheerful.  And who can blame them, even if a certain obnoxiousness and studied insensitivity is part of their armor?  As an unfortunate ex-girlfriend of mine used to say, “I like to keep it easy and breezy.”  Still, just because you turn up the television when you’re by yourself doesn’t make the madness disappear.  It will be there no matter what you do.  But, by all means, turn it up to eleven and pour yourself a stiff one.

On the technique of avoiding parties, there is ultimately little to be said.  Just stay home and read a book.  A book won’t stab you in the back at 2:00 AM by seducing your best friend.  A book won’t demand you perform the Esoteric Rites of the Porcelain God in someone’s weird guest bathroom while people continuously pound on the door.  A book won’t have you riding a bicycle for a month until your arraignment.  A book won’t gift you with questions you can ask yourself for the next 20 years.

Why?

Why did I go?

Why did I drink?

Why did I say or not say that?

Why couldn’t I have foreseen what would happen?

Why the aftermath, the fallout, the inability to ever speak with so-and-so again?

Why the difficult conversation the next day?  We were drunk.  It’s not you.  I’m just not looking for a relationship or anything at the moment.  It was just . . . a party.  You know?

Chapters 14 – 17 would have treated you better.  There are no repercussions that follow reading, having a cup of tea, and going to bed.  You’ll wake up the next day feeling better.  You will be blissfully unaware of the catty gossip, the betrayals, the bad decisions, the inside of the drunk tank.  You will have all your teeth.  Your brain cell count will hold relatively steady.

This is not to say you should become Fernando Pessoa and spend all your time staring at raindrops and probing the dark vicissitudes of your soul—though that wouldn’t necessarily be a waste of time.  Surely, it would be better than listening to Bob tell a joke about his cousin’s lawnmower.  Drink!  Or nodding while someone bitches about a politician.  Drink!  Or smiling at a not-unattractive person who might, after a certain amount of tequila, decide you are also not-unattractive.  Drink!

Drink!  Drink!  Drink!  Drink!  Drink!  So you don’t have to see.  So you don’t have to know.  So you don’t have to feel.  Because otherwise, even if you suspect your brain cell count may be in precipitous decline, you will understand that parties are a fool’s game.

“I was in a uniform, a costume, pretending to be the boyfriend, taking a year’s worth of classes I had no interest in, disguising myself: I was an actor and none of this was real.” — Bret Easton Ellis, The Shards