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“Party Animals”
Nachi Aguboshim
(Nachi,
like most African Children born in the diaspora
is trying to redefine himself.
He writes with passion and an open mind. Nachi
is an intern at the youth desk of African Echo
media group.) |
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So it’s Friday night and yet again you look forward to fully embracing what your evening has to unfold. You leave behind what seems to you to be the tedious confines of your 9 – 5 or your academic schedule, well for the meantime anyway. The piles of work that consume your table are no longer an issue, though they really should be, as your mind clearly switches over from deadlines and targets to party mode and burning that ever addicting midnight oil. Rushing home at such a frantic rate, you knock people down in the process as if you left your manners back at the office / classroom. You seem relentless in your quest to make it home, heaven help anyone who stands in your way, and its clear where your priorities lay.
On entry to your haven, that being your house you fail to acknowledge your father’s attempt to say hello, you are even oblivious to the fact that your mother is making Jollof rice and chicken in the kitchen, wow you really are focused, or is it distracted?
Relieved to be in your room, you now begin your ritual, first and foremost you open up your cupboard and reach to the back and pull out your ‘Raving Attire’ you know the one in the plastic dust cover, you take what seems to like an eternity to reflect on just how nice you will look in it tonight, a smile engulfs your face, your so vain.
You’re in and out of the shower and your house in record time as your friends wait in the car down stairs. As you open the door the smell of alcohol and weed has became a stench that you have become accustomed to, I guess this too is part of your ritual.
You reach your venue where the drinking and the smoking continues, one drink becomes two, and two becomes four and so on. So consumed with having fun that all reason is thrown out of the window, but who cares you work hard so it would appear that you would play hard too, (however at what cost?) As time passes by so do you, as you shift in and out of consciousness. The music pounds hard against your ear drum, but pales in comparison to the ongoing effect of both the litres of alcohol and the drugs you have that have consumed.
What you think to be your favourite song comes on, you make a feeble attempt to dance, not realising that each reckless step and gyration that you make merely injects into the mind of others the immature mentality that you have.
However the part of you that still has a piece of control doesn’t care and maybe that is where the problem lies? While you aim to reach your target of burning that ‘midnight oil’ one of you friends, who has been drinking since the drive down to the venue gets into a fight with a built guy over a girl (hard to believe, as he is the quite one in the group but the faster you absorb the alcohol, the higher your blood alcohol level will be, and the more alcohol in your blood, the greater its effect will have) somebody really should have told him that and you for that matter.
The fight escalades much like the drink consumption that being that one punch becomes two punches, two punches becomes four and so on. Your attempt along with you other friends to help him fails as your drunken states make you more of a liability then any form of help.
The bouncers see the incident and the mere fact that there are four of your against one makes your night get even worse. You’re taken out of the venue, by force with your bodies and prides beaten; however the police are waiting for you on the other side. It just got worse, as a night in a jail cell awaits you, and I guess you can now burn that midnight oil in the cold confines of a prison cell.
As reality checks in and so does your sense (oh how you now wish it was there from the beginning) you sit back and look around in your lonely, damp cell, to the left and right of you, you see you friends vomiting and crying and ask yourself
‘Was it worth it?’
You should know the answer to that question already.
CONTROL YOURSELF, DON’T LET SITUATIONS CONTROL YOU.
Peace.
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