The art of pregaming before Houseparties

"And when the sixth hour had come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour. And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, 'Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?' which means, 'My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?'" (Mark 15:33-34).

Just hanging out between the sixth and ninth hour. Can we even stand it? Sober? Hardly. Forsaken, indeed, and the pain of living too much to bear. Fortunately for we piteous souls walking the earth these days, at Princeton, etc., though we may be forsaken by a higher Grace, we are certainly not forsaken by the truly righteous folks at Popov, Leeds, Bacardi, Absolut, Jack Daniels, etc. A pantheon to rival that of the subcontinent beckons the young American tongue, beseeching it to drown itself in all that liquid salvation. Amen.

Pregaming — we drink in anticipation of drinking, meeting, going, talking, ogling, bumping, grinding and then either sulkin' on home alone or stumbling there, elated, arm-in-arm with a beer-gorgeous special someone. It's all too much, of course. To deal, one needs to have worked up a fairly thick cushion on which to glide here and there, over this or that curve of a body. Lama sabachtani! — our childhoods have forsaken us and now, in order to play tag on the playground, so to speak, we are going to get drunk. Maybe even crunked.

Houseparties is only a day away! This suggests a consideration of prepartying and pregaming — the "art of pregaming" — its ethos, one might say. First, let me mention, for the sake of shaking up preconceived notions and forces of habit, that in Russia they do it all backwards. A night of drinking in these United States may take any number of courses, but even the most liver-lashed boozehound contrarian would allow that the general trend of an American kid's melancholy path to blackout bliss starts with the hard stuff, meanders down to beer and finally falls face down in the murk of something on par with Franzia, a fine port (you jerks . . . ), etc. In Russia, the country that invented brooding misery, they do things a little differently — they go from soft to hard. Imagine: sipping some white wine with the Xanax, then polishing off some 40s and then doing that whole "meth & martini" thing that I've heard so much about. I found out about this infamous "Russian Reverse" (What? No one actually calls it that?) from a buddy of mine who went on a summer program in St. Petersburg. There, in the unending daylight of a summer at near-polar latitude, the night ended, rather than began, with cheap vodka in the park.

Were it not for the bravery of men like Senator Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover, perhaps, we here at Princeton would be drinking in much the same manner today. For better or worse, though, it's just not the case. For us, pregaming means shot glasses and the Notorious B.I.G. playing on someone's laptop. At Yale, they wouldn't consider that "pregaming." Over there, that would be more like, "the whole shebang." Cool room party, Eli. Sweet posters.

This disparity highlights, perhaps, the best thing about pregaming — the momentum that it generates. There's nothing like taking a solid nosedive into the sauce and then, after some sort of too-loud consensus, finding oneself rolling 20 deep, a snuffling, lowing pack, herdin' it on over to those well-appointed abattoirs all in a row. In that sense, pregaming is brilliant. Stepping out of that entryway (maybe leaving the Biggie playlist still going in the empty dormroom — ruckus!), thrilled to the gills, one comes to realize, "I've become a nutcase." And this is what we all ought to be bringing to the Street — energy and abandon. For, however many nights we hit it, at the Street there should never be an akward or withdrawn moment while we wait for the "lubrication" to kick in. Pregaming helps us to avoid all of that. Instead, we come riding off of the mesa with guns blazing. So this weekend, Princetonians, I want to hear "Juicy" playing on those laptops. "It was all a dream, I used to read Word Up magazine . . ."