A few weeks back, I went to a funny kind of party.
Someone hammered posters into telephone poles all over my commute route, and I figured I wasn’t the only one seeing them, so I looked into it. Scanned the QR code and was compelled to download an “app.” Why would I risk catching some malware? Maybe curiosity, maybe something else.
It wasn’t like most parties I’ve been to, and not to brag, but I’ve seen some parties that firmly slapped. Some of these, harder than Moby Dick’s tail when he was in a fight to the death with a whaling ship. Don’t quote me on that, I never read the book. This party, few weeks ago, slapped like a wet fart squirreling its way out of a bog.
Parties. I don’t mean the forgettable ones, where the host ordered two plain pizzas a few hours before anyone walked in the door, so they’re greasy and stiff, and a couple two-liter bottles of Mountain Dew, both of which were already opened and sat out to de-gas, and the best idea anyone had was to flop on the couch and play Mario64 or watch YouTube.
I have been to that kind of party, but they’ve all melted together into a soggy block of cheese and bread. They can be a wash with the right mix and end with bitter tears with the wrong ones. They’re not bad, exactly. They’re still worth going to, if you’re looking for company.
There was one party in my wiser years that I know you wish you could have signed up to attend with a QR code. It climaxed, for me, with a silhouette showing every pad, curve and strut projected from my alto sax onto the pavement, crisp as a wood carving, while I, standing, ordered it to trumpet an outrageous roar among whoops and cheers from miles around and whistles from my dorm-mates just meters in front of me.
That was a good pop-up party. It was worth the Zipcar overage surcharge I had to work a whole week to pay off by myself (after we missed the return deadline by minutes) and I’d do it again in a heartbeat if I could. Sure, I’d scan a QR for it, if it got me another 30 seconds to watch shadow bands tear across the hills and mobs of people sitting on the hoods of their cars. But it won’t be the same without the eight hour drive up to Wyoming with the crew.
This party I went to a few weeks back, through the QR code, it twists the definition of parties outright. It didn’t even hold a candle to the lamest birthday party from my childhood where nobody showed up besides my dog with a yellowjacket in her teeth.
This recent one, it had this app, overflowing with pastel animations, which upon installation delivered the greatest letdown of all time.
The party was apparently in the app.
I went anyway. The idea is that you experience some kind of social event through a flat window — you’re role-playing as a bubble boy, except the whole bubble is immobile concrete save a 2×3 inch window — and little people dance and say silly things through that window, and then everyone votes on each other in some peculiar contest that some partygoers seemed deathly serious about winning. Where the fun table was, I’ll never know.
There was nothing to drink, and nothing to eat, nobody with which to strike up a casual conversation about macroeconomics, and not a note of music. Functionally, nobody there seemed to have the faintest idea how to have a good time doing anything, let alone patronizing a gathering, and scarcely a handful were distinguishable from cardboard cutouts.
It made me question for a moment whether my memory, my recollection, of having attended and hastily planned countless feral parties had been merely a hallucination, a temporary escape from my real concrete cave. Had I actually escaped my dreams, woken up from an imagined fantasy, and arrived in the brutalist reality of a windowed sorting contest? Had I been drowning in a notoriously flood-prone river in Egypt, and only now taken the red pill?
Stranger still, this party went on for weeks and weeks without interruption, though I can’t claim to have been there the entire time, and it had evidently been running in the same way for nearly 20 years. Fifteen years of vapid gazing, sorting, platitudes, and dead air? Shouldn’t it have become clear by the fifteenth hour that the hosts of this party haven’t yet figured out how to do catering or event management?
I trust you’ll believe that I brought these critiques up to other attendees. I was only met with a steely silence and a curt goodbye. Perhaps I was intruding on some kind of cult, whose posters were only meant to be visible to inductees wearing polarized lenses. But I can’t start speculating here.
Summary, party: I have seen dilapidated museums empty but for spiders and silverfish with more intrigue and potential. I won’t be back, and if you are wondering whether you, too, should begin attending it, for any reason, I can advise that you simply plan a celebration of your own (in the mundo real, preferably).
Chips and pizza and a Bluetooth speaker are quite affordable, at least for now, and you can always hastily drop hand-scrawled napkin invites in your neighbor’s mailboxes if you haven’t any friends.
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