I think the age of 24 is the age when, if you’re a dude everything is so focused and powerful. The world is just so exciting. Right now, ten years later, stuff is good, I guess. I mean, I have good credit and a wife and two boys and two cars and a house and a job and I write for different places and they give me money to do it. That’s like, everything I could want. But when I was 24, everything was exciting. A Saturday wasn’t just a day when I didn’t have to go to work, it was the day leading to a night that promised adventure. Who knew what the night would bring? Honestly, it brought the same thing every time, drunken buffoonery followed by an embarrassing strike-out with even the third-string girls, but somehow, at 5 o’clock on Saturday, as I would jump into the shower and lay out the ballingest outfit for the night, it felt like this would be the night when everything was off the fucking hook. The night was going to be the best night of my life, no matter what, and you know what? Despite the failures, the embarrassing drunkeness, it was. Every Friday and every Saturday was the best night of my life. There were no goals. I would try to get a girl, sure, but if I didn’t, which was often the case, I would bro the fuck out and just drink with my friends. We would drink and then we would punch each other in the face and try to kill each other to prove how good we were at being friends. I came up with this idea that if you could punch someone in the face and still be friends afterward, then that was the purest and truest type of friendship. So we would just beat the shit out of each other to prove how much our friendship meant. And you know what? It worked. Nothing can bro more than punching each other. When you allow your friends to physically harm you, and you them, it opens up a world of realness that you can’t otherwise experience. Punch all your friends. If they can’t take it, if they don’t understand that they are free to punch your face until the blood flows freely, than maybe they just aren’t your true bros. It’s a two-way street. Your friends need to know that if you punch them, they can punch you, and vice versa. That is the trick to it. And you have to be in your early twenties to fully appreciate the gorgeousness of being alive and how getting your face smashed only reinforces the good times, when your face isn’t bruised and bloodied. Plus everyone else will think you are insane and they’ll probably leave you alone.
