I suppose at least it wasn't with teenagers, but with fellow "adults"...
I've honestly been debating for the past two days whether or not I even wanted to talk about this. It's sort of embarrassing. Fuck it.
Thursday night is my regular dodgeball night. Seriously, dodgeball. It's not so much a chance to get some fun-filled exercise as it is an excuse to meet new people and go drinking. I used to play on Wednesdays, and we drank less then. The crowd was a little different and we played in a different neighborhood, and I guess that's why it was a little more sedate. That, and it was a Wednesday night. But Thursday night seems to be a wilder and rowdier night, I guess since nobody gives a shit about work on Fridays. It's the best coasting day there is.
So we drink... And lately, it's grown from just drinking. Used to be we had a handful of beers each, hung out, listened to some music, chatted folks up, and went home. Now we're all buying pitchers. Last season, my team started playing Quarters at whatever table we were sitting at. Innocent enough. I can handle some low-key drinking games. During last season's playoff night (which I missed, because I was in Lisbon on vacation), it was reported back to me that the pool table was covered with a sheet of wood and a Flip Cup tournament was begun. By the time this new season had begun, after a 7 week break, the pool table at the bar was covered for us before we even got there (thereby pissing off the regulars of the bar mightily). Flip Cup I can handle, too. It's fun and gets everyone in a good mood.
But somehow, people got bored during Flip Cup this week. I took a quick bathroom break in between games, and when I came out there was now an empty beer bottle being spun at the center of the table, and a bunch of the regular FC'ers had backed off (though plenty also stayed), replaced with other people from the league. Yes, kids, they were playing Spin The Bottle. Spin The Fucking Bottle. Jesus, we'd reverted to our pre-teen and teen years.
I only have one distinct memory of playing Spin The Bottle as a kid, at a party at someone's house, after the parents had left us alone, and I'm pretty sure the bottle never actually landed on me. And the funny thing is that from time to time, when I think about the things that teenagers do, I realize that somehow I missed out on a decent amount of it. And more often than not, Spin The Bottle is on that list.
So what did I do, this supposedly mature 30 year old adult? Well, let's combine my latent regret about the things I neglected to participate in as a kid with the amount of beer I'd drunk at this point (a couple of pints with friends after work, a couple of nasty tall-boy cans in between dodgeball matches, and I-have-no-idea-how-many cups of beer at the bar) with the fact that I am, as per the norm, single. What would you have done? Damned fucking right I played.
A few friends played with me, but it was mostly new people for me, so I guess I made some new friends. I'm certainly intimate, or more intimate than before anyway, with a handful of new people.
But here's the funny thing for me... When you're 13 and play STB, it was an act of discovery (since you're just recognizing that the opposite sex isn't quite as cootie-licious as you previously thought) and an act of rebellion (since our parents would have been happy if we continued to think as we'd once thought, and we knew it). But when you're 30 and play, the discovery is long gone. Nobody there experienced any new sensations or performed any acts they never had before, even if it was new people. But it was still an act of rebellion, only now against The Man. Here's a bunch of mostly-corporate people sitting in a bar on a weeknight and playing games once reserved for the young and naive. It was a big middle finger to convention, the one that says we're supposed to be mature and adult. It was a beer-filled step up from Flip Cup and Quarters, a bar packed with grown-ups playing like we were kids once again, even if for an hour or two.
I don't know, maybe I'm putting too much thought into this from a sociological standpoint. You can bet everyone else that night went home and never had a second thought about it. But you can also bet that they didn't say a word to friends or co-workers on Friday morning when they got to work, too ashamed to admit the transgression, if you could actually call it that. I suspect it's going to continue as a late-night element of dodgeball nights, once the FC games die down. I'm going to be curious to see how things continue to escalate though... We went from just drinking to Quarters to Flip Cup to Spin The Bottle. I'm not dumb enough to think that this bar is going to let people go too, too far, but I'm going to be on the lookout for the first person who says "Hey everyone, let's continue this shit at my place."
Here's the better, more directly personal question though: If it happens again next Thursday, as I think it will, am I going to participate again? Cold, sober logic on a Saturday afternoon says no. But let's see how my thinking turns after I start smuggling a bunch of Bud Light in my belly.