Why would someone want to miss?

Maybe this story starts on Saturday evening, when I wandered around the college-town neighborhoods in New Brunswick looking for a street I'd never heard of.

Maybe this story starts on Friday, when Jay convinced me to venture out to the bars with his Johnson and Johnson friends. I still have yet to enjoy an evening with Johnson and Johnson. Ever. After an hour with them, we went to Harvest Moon and made some friends, one of whom had a party in a house on the street I'd never heard of.

There's a hole, there's a hole, there's a hole in the bottom of the sea.

Whatever. My brother and I walked into a house full of stangers. Four hours later, we stumbled back towards Highland Park (by way of some late-night pizzeria or other).

What happened in between was just dandy. Dandy is how I would best describe it. Splendid?

That was stupid, so I'll try again. The point is, I could say that the party itself was pretty average - some music, some beer, some pong... but that wouldn't be fair.

The music was from a series of live bands in the attic. (Also there was a weird metalhead with a mandolin). The beer flowed freely, and for free, from a keg... and it wasn't terrible! The pong was great, mostly because we were unstoppable.

Ben and I have now played beer pong together on two separate occasions. Our lifetime record is something like 10-2. The only defeat at this weekend came in double-overtime.

As FatMarc pointed out, beer pong is like softball, but with slightly less running around. A win in beer pong is nothing to get excited about, it is not exactly the pinnacle of sport. (Older Phi Psis will recall the summer epics between Brendan, Ed, and Rob the Deke, which ended around sunrise and often involved difficulty standing and uncanny, near-miraculous accuracy).

It feels good to win, certainly. It feels better to be those guys. You know those guys. The guys at the party that nobody knows, but who seem to know everybody. Listen, neither my brother nor I are particularly charismatic, maybe (maybe) slightly above average. Put us together, though, and we somehow transform into those guys.

It's one thing to have an opponent rib you - in good spirits, of course - for missing a shot. It's another to be flooded by trash-talk - in good spirits, of course - so densely packed that you can't get a word in edgewise.

At one point, we spent about a minute riffing on the theme of "why would someone want to miss?" Goddamn, we are those guys.

Coincidentally, you know what's great? Being the only two people at a party who speak Hebrew. It's like being Windtalkers or something.

Moral of the story: I should crash more parties. But probably with my brother.