I USED TO have so much party in me. I could stretch an entire week around tent-poles of chugged cheap booze and gorged meals remembered only when I woke up next to their shredded, discarded wrappers. (I CAN'T COUNT THE NUMBER OF TIMES I'VE WOKEN UP BLEARY AND STILL DRUNK, STARING DOWN A HALF-EATEN CRUNCHWRAP SUPREME LIKE SOME KIND OF TACO-SEASONED SITCOM ONE NIGHT STAND.)

I thrived within these habits born of restriction and scarcity—habits developed back when I was a lower-case g, trying my damnedest to find alcohol and a place to consume it with my coterie of likeminded knuckleheads. For some reason, those habits stretched throughout my 20s, the years when logic should have dulled my AW-HELL-HEDONISM-RIGHT-THE-FUCK-NOW lifestyle. Back then I could just walk into a bar and buy a drink, or walk into a grocery store and buy some beer, or walk into a liquor store (and feel like I'm waiting in a Soviet breadline), and doing so should have muted the urgency I felt every time I decided to cut loose—but it did not. It finally has.

I'm aware it's fairly hack to talk about how much harder drinking gets as you grow older, but it's one of those things that's hack for a reason.

This last weekend was the Bridgetown Comedy Festival, and I'm still too hungover to come up with a creative way to describe how much drinking goes on within its glorious confines. I will tell you I participated fully, and I will also tell you that because of this, I feel like I fell out of a tree and landed on myself and I've felt this way for the last three days.

I feel like over this last weekend I've finally come to terms with the mortality of my ability to party. NO LONGER SHALL I WAKE UP AFTER A NIGHT SPENT CONSUMING SIXTEEN BEERS, FEELING LIKE A RUINED PIÑATA, AND EARNESTLY WONDER TO MYSELF, "Oh man, feeling pretty gnarly, maybe I have a gluten allergy???"

Well, I say "NO LONGER"... but that probably isn't true. I'm sure it will happen a few more times, but the truth is—it just isn't fun anymore. You get busier and life gets a little bit more hectic and stakes are higher and sometimes it's a bummer that shit is more real, but you also enjoy how maybe your life is a little more serious, and then? Then it doesn't feel as good to give Saturday and Sunday's wellbeing to Friday night's pursuit of grinning oblivion.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm turning into a square-ass-square-butt and this is just me trying to justify it to myself. If that's the case... fuck it, fine. If I've already woken up for the last time with a quesadilla stuck to my torso, good. I used to have so much party in me, and maybe now I don't.