The nightclub, that bastion of ego-maniacal excess. The forward guard of the self-indulgent and self-involved. The last place I thought I would find myself on my thirty-fourth birthday, yet there I was. How I get dragged into these things I'll never, no that's not right. I didn't get dragged, I invited this living hell unto myself. I thought I had been lucky lately and that going out to a club might continue my streak of luck. Nothing ever hurts so much as falling from so high. The tide of luck had run out, or rather stopped at the door and waited for me to return from the nether regions of this orgy of the self.

Sitting at the end of our territory I was nothing more than a bookend, an orange cone marking the space as ours. No one talked with me, no one acknowledged my presence aside from an occasional 'excuse me' or a glance my way. That was fine I thought, I would just sit there and observe the crowd and maybe find someone interested or interesting.

The first woman I smiled at, not even one of the plastic, fake, beautiful people, but just an average good looking woman with a nice body and face to match returned a look of near disgust and turned to her friend with a frown and they began talking closely and looking my way occasionally neither with a smile. Probably one of the worst starts to a night ever. I was beginning to think that when I stepped through that door not only did the tide of luck run out to sea but my physical humanity as well and I was left as something of a Quasimodo, a monster to be scorned and derided. Yet I remained and sat there and watched the ebb and flow of the crowd, a crowd utterly oblivious of my presence.

In the end I left because I was bored. I had stayed all of an hour and a half, and then I left. On the way out I ran into a group of friends coming in, they said they were coming to celebrate with me, but I doubted it. I once again descended into that pit of despair and when no one was looking, which took about twenty minutes and felt like an eternity of penance, I silently slipped up the stairs and out the door like a soul of the damned who found a crack in the walls of Hell.