Animals

I went to college in the eighties. My generation did not invent binge drinking, but I like to kid myself into believing that we somehow elevated it. I grew up in a world of dollar pitchers and a terrifying event known as Animal Drown Night. This was an evening set aside for patrons to come to a particular establishment, pay a nominal cover fee, and then drink "for free." Rather than having this bacchanal once or twice a year, it was held weekly, usually on a slow night during the week when coaxing folks out of their dorms was a little bigger chore. This promotion worked on me. I didn't miss many of these opportunities to show off my mad drinking skills. Looking back, I wonder what sort of business plan included cramming a college bar full of undergraduates and letting themselves get blind drunk. I understand I had a choice in this. I could have stayed in my apartment, or the library or hung out at a friend's place. I didn't. I plunked down my eight dollars and proceeded to do everything I could to make sure that I drank my fill. And that of several others.
This was an age that helped define drinking games. While it is true that finding ways to get yourself or your friends inebriated through some contest or other dates back to antiquity, I lived in a world that required quarters not just for laundry but for bouncing off a table. Into a glass of beer that would then be designated for someone else to drink. At no point did the strategy for this game suggest that the person who had been picked a few times get any kind of break. The point was to get drunk. Or at least ensure that someone else did.
Which brings me back to those college bars that also had promotions called Ladies' Night. Ladies got in free, and drank one dollar pitchers all night. Again, the notion being that boys would come and drink without much excuse, but filling the place with ladies drinking one dollar pitchers would be the tiniest incentive to get all the boys who may have needed another reason to show up on a Friday night. I tended to go with ladies I knew, and would happily buy me pitchers of beer for a dollar. This was not every boy's tack. Many hung on the edges, waiting to see where all that beer was going, and finding a table full of ladies who may have spent their laundry money on beer might be a little worse for it.
And just up the street, there were fraternities running much the same concession, only with bedrooms upstairs and no one who might be held "responsible" for the bad things that might ensue. It was a party, after all. And we were all animals, weren't we?
I went to college in the eighties. So did Brett Kavanaugh. I am not proud of everything I did in those days. My abuse was primarily verbal, mostly unintelligible, and aimed at myself in waves of self-pity and loneliness. How about you, Brett? And remember, you're under oath.