Free Love in Bloomington

So I was feeling like shit today [Friday] (the price I pay for getting drunk off 151 on a worknight), but I gathered up the will to drag myself off the couch and go to Hairbanger's. Great show--as always--and it was good to see the 0L's beginning to integrate with us. One thing about me though, is as much as I like good shows, I fucking hate crowds. I hate having the mob press in on me, and I hate it when people try to walk through me instead of around me while they're on their way to wherever. To me, the crowd is really one single entity instead of individuals. Unless, of course, you do something to stand out.

Halfway through the show, we moved up to close to the stage, and I started to get a bit more relaxed and into the mood. And, I started to notice a certain regularity in the incidental contact I was getting from the stern quarter. Hmmm. Worth a glance. So I quickly survey the scene. There's a dancing couple right up against my back and they're pretty into it. The girl is OK looking, and the guy is a dirty long-haired hippie in a tank top. Ew. So anyways, I evaluate the situation to be accidental, albeit repeated, contact from an apparently drunk girl. No big deal. And as the night goes on, I notice that others around me are getting "bumped" into as well, but I'm clearly getting the brunt of it, and the duration of the contact is getting longer. At one point, I turned around and made eye contact with her. She smiled and said something--I couldn't hear, but I assumed to apologize--so I just said it's cool and directed my attention back to my group and the band. But immediately after, she backed into me again. This continues for a few minutes, and the contact is lasting long enough that we are clearly out of the "bump" side of the spectrum and into the "grind" side. I'm slightly annoyed, but not really, because there are much worse things that could happen to me than having a girl grind her ass against mine. But it's awkward because I can't really reciprocate, because she's obviously with this dirty hippie guy...............

Girl grinding on me...not an accident...but still dancing with her date? Still dancing with the dirty hippie. Wait, hippie--

...And then it hits me.*




Ew.

So now I have to try not to wonder too much about why they apparently thought I was a comparatively good bet.

Sigh. Fucking hippies.

*To better illustrate this moment, recall the scene from The Hunt for Red October where Jack is shaving and thinking aloud, trying to figure out how Ramius intends to deal with the crew that are not defecting with him: "...they'd have to want to get off. How do you get a crew to want to get off a submarine? How do you get a crew to want to get off a nuclear sub---?"