Last night I was at a house party here in Ann Arbor and I suddenly realized that nearly every house party I have ever been to has been terribly organized. 

I had just finished walking down the stairs into the basement when I suddenly rammed my shins into a couch that had been conveniently placed at the bottom of the stairs. Sober people would trip over that couch and for some sadistic reason the owners of this house thought that placing a couch at the bottom of stairs would somehow benefit the party. I thought to myself, what would make any sane person place a couch in this clearly obtrusive location. And secondly why would this couch have long metal rims sticking out from its side so that even if someone managed to locate this black stealth in a poorly lit basement they would still have to avoid the large metal poles.  It brought to mind another example of a poorly organized house party.

About a month ago my friends and I were just getting to a party after about a fifteen minute walk in a sub-30 degree Michigan winter just to find what; a long line/clusterfuck outside of the house. And since we don’t go to USC like fellow TCM writer Adam and thus don’t have the privilege of a year-round tan, we really wanted to get inside. It wasn’t like getting “in” to the party was an issue, merely getting in. To be clear, the genius that designed this party put the keg in the doorway so that only one person could shimmy into the house at a time. Again this wouldn’t have been that bad except for the simple fact that he put the keg in front of the door! Hundreds of alcohol hungry heathens battling each other for the tap while I try to squeeze past them and actually talk to the people I came with. I finally get inside just to realize they had hired a college band to play Nirvana covers in the front room which was okay, I guess. I like Nirvana, but I’m not sure any guy was getting laid with grunge playing in the background. Plus he was, in Kurt Cobain fashion, incoherently screaming gibberish while the bass /guitar/drum sound poorly calibrated itself into a loud incoherent thump, thus making the entire band look like four homeless guys performing on stolen instruments on more drugs than late-nineteenth century China.

I went into the basement. Here human beings could actually carry on conversations and I got myself on at a beer pong table. Unfortunately if you were taller than 5 foot 5 you had to duck because the ceiling was built for, well, people 5 foot 5 or shorter. And so everyone kind of just hunched over afraid to go upstairs and be traumatized again by an even more Niravanaesque Nirvana performance until we realized we could just go to another party. So we did.