Whiskey, friends and the strip club

The night started like all the best ones do: with a bad idea and an open tab.

We were packed into a rideshare that smelled like Axe body spray and weed gummies, chasing that ancient American hunger for trouble—the kind you can't find on a screen or wrapped in a fucking podcast. No, what we were after was something primal, something with flashing lights, fake eyelashes, and just enough moral ambiguity to make it interesting: the strip club.

Now, before your brain floods with moral high-ground nonsense or some half-assed TED Talk monologue about the "objectification of the female form," pause. This isn’t about politics or cultural decay. This is about the ritual. The timeless, beautiful, absurd ritual of men getting together, drinking liquor they can’t afford, and pretending they’ve got everything under control while watching someone named Destiny do acrobatics in lucite heels.

Call it primal. Call it pathetic. I call it a public service.

We pulled up to the club—a place with a name cooked up by a coked-out marketing major with a soft spot for oxymorons—and were immediately assaulted by the kind of bass you don’t hear so much as absorb. The bouncer was built like a refrigerator and had the suspiciously professional demeanor of a guy who’s definitely seen someone die in a parking lot. We paid the cover, filed in, and were swallowed by the red neon glow of America’s last sacred institution.

Inside, time doesn't matter. Day and night lose meaning. You're in the belly of the beast now, boy, and the beast runs on fireball shots, sweat, and whispered lies. Your friends morph into degenerates, philosophers, and comedians. Every booth becomes a confessional. Every dancer, a saint with a six-song sermon.

There’s joy in it—not the manufactured kind you post on Instagram, but the messy, raw kind that stinks of tequila and honesty. You see a man finally tell his best friend he's proud of him, or another admit he's scared shitless about becoming a dad. All under the soft thunder of club speakers and the rotating glint of a mirrored pole. That’s not sleaze. That’s freedom.

And let’s not kid ourselves—there’s something magical about a shared glance between friends when the third round hits and the lights dim just right. It’s a pact: tonight we feel something. Not in an app, not in a meme, but right here—amid perfume clouds and half-eaten chicken wings, in a place where the artifice is so complete it circles back around to honesty.

People will say it’s stupid. That it’s toxic. But these are the same people who haven’t laughed in six months and do yoga with their dogs. They don’t get it. This isn’t about sex or sleaze—it’s about camaraderie. About ritual. About letting loose in the age of always being watched, rated, recorded.

Out there, in the cold blue glow of your phone, we’re all brands. But in here? In the thick, hazy air of a place where no one is pretending to be better than they are—we're human again.

We drank. We tipped well. We laughed like jackals and talked like priests. And when we stumbled out into the morning light, bleary-eyed and half-broke, we weren’t ashamed.

We were alive.

Let them judge. Let them tweet. I’ll take whiskey with my friends and a front-row seat to the madness of the American strip club over a thousand sterile brunches or "virtual happy hours."

Somewhere between the bass drops and the bad decisions, I remembered what joy really is. It’s not safe. It’s not clean.

It’s real.

And brother, that’s rare these days.