Of Human Bonding

This weekend was the bachelor party of my future brother-in-law. My brother and I hopped in his big, red truck and headed off to Dirty Jerz to a condo chock full of my brother-in-law and his closest high school, college and gym friends. My sophomore year of high school, I was inducted into the National Honors Society where I took a vow, while holding a candle, to always continue my pursuit of knowledge and search for truth. This weekend was no different, so here are some take-home lessons from bachelor party weekend.

1. If your brother offers to pick you up and drive your ass across state lines gratis, then you best not doze off while navigating. Otherwise, hypothetically, you may end up closer to Delaware than the Jersey Shore.

2. No matter how heroically you dash everyone’s low expectations of you, you’re just not going to beat a guy named Cleetus at beer pong.

3. If you pretend that you are only playing poker for the 3rd time and you come in 3rd out of 20 players in a tournament, a drunk guy or 3 or 4 are going to get in your face and call you a “fucking hustler” in the style of Wesley Snipes in White Man Can’t Jump.

4. When married men escape their wives and kids for the weekends, they really, really want to make it count. When Sunday morning rolls around, you will be able to tell by the looks on guys’ faces who will be returning to a warden.

5. Inevitably, someone will find out that your work may or may not vaguely involve drugs, and he will present to you, in graphic detail, that among the many side effects of his mood elevator, one of them is delayed orgasm. He will wink and tell you that maybe it’s a good thing, but he won’t mean it. He will ask for advice, and in the middle of your shocked silence, while you contemplate how many more beers you should have consumed, he will run down the street after what appears to be an underage girl.

6. If you’re lucky, you’ll get to hear how the man who is about to marry your sister lost his virginity. Possibly, it will entail 3-5 quick thrusts and an explanation to his prom date that she was no longer the big V.

7. Men will use the word “gay” as a pejorative; yet, these will be the same men who hug and kiss each other, tell each other how much they love the other and will flash naked body parts at one another.

8. Dave Matthews Band will be played with alarming frequency. Men will muse at his genius and marvel how they are probably the only group of men on the Earth to really, you know, connect, with him and his music.

9. It may not go over as well as planned, when in talking shit during beer pong, you tell your future brother-in-law that your sister’s ex-boyfriend was a much better beer-ponger than he is. In fact, the silence that follows may be jarring.

10. You may be happy to realize that you genuinely like the guy your sister is about to marry, especially as you realize he’s scared to do anything stupid in front of you. And then he does it anyway.