on the hypercube and not dancing

Not really dancing on the dancer

I hate clubs. Besides my personal preferences against flashing lights and loud bass, I see little reason to ever go to a club. The only reason for a man to go to a club is to either go with a desperate friend who's under the mistaken idea that he'll hook up there. What most men don’t realize that most women just go to clubs to “dance away their stress” or whatever strange that it is that involves shaking one’s booties, and that many a girl are dressed up to knock out the other girls - not for the guys. So there’s that bad reason for men to go to a club, or maybe you can just do the creepy wallflower and check out beautiful women who look at you with disdain and disgust. Not a fan of being looked at with disdain and disgust, and anyway I’m already a possessor of one beautiful wife, so I don't care for clubs. They have covers, they're overpriced and there are no seats and did I mention, they’re overpriced? In addition, there really isn't much dancing going on in clubs in Czech Republic. Mostly it's just full of people looking down at the beers pondering the existence of emptiness and the miserable lightness of being.

I would rather just sit in a dark bar, listening to some live music, drinking cheap beer. Especially in Prague, where cheap beer is plentiful and awesome. If you're in Prague and going to a cocktail bar, you my friend, made a wrong turn somewhere. And as you notice the numbers of Czechs surrounding you dwindle while the number of Russians and Americans rise up, you might just be inclined to agree.

So when my friend from Georgia said, "Let's go to a club" my mood floundered. What did I know about clubs here anyway? You might as well toss me into a fighting pit of shiko dachi masters - that’s stuff I know nothing about, I’d lose just being stared down like I was a penguin in the Arctic.

Those words - “Let’s go to a club” - ring like alarm bells warning of the coming Mongol hordes. Those words mean that tonight, Saint Facetious, you will be sad and miserable and relive all those college years where you were alone and afraid of women, their curled tongues and fiery gazes. I will not go back.

Lasers transmitting gnosis!

"Yeah, I know where to go." But also I don't want to disappoint. And those two forces were waging mortal combat inside of me, one ventricle of the heart wrestling against the other, pulsing endlessly for full on tomoe-nage, rolling Street Fighter judo throw. Two places came to my mind, Roxy and Karlovy Lazne I had been to Roxy once before. It was a pretty large club, two stories, four rooms and also a chill-out room. More importantly, beer there cost only 35 crowns. However, Rip Curl was hosting their surfer party there, and I prefer to be the only one with bad taste in flowery, Miami Vice button-ups, thank you very much. Besides, Karlovy Lazne touts “mosaic tiling of the hallways and walls, mosaic pictures in the main rooms and partially preserved old spa facilities in the style of Roman baths, which now serve as dance floors.” Finally, I could live out my Cicerone dream of tripping the lights fantastic in a bathtub surrounded by scoundrels and societal derelicts, waiting for someone to offer me a dinner! Karlovy Lazne also offers to let you “dance in laser beams” while glancing into the deep nether realms of a “hypercube”, perhaps involving a secret pattern revealing the underlying elements of the universe. But that’s not all, on a different floor, you can “bob to the rhythm of R’N’B and hip hop” where they play the greatest of “black music”. I’m not precisely sure what that means, but if my guess is write, when they say you can “shake your ass,” they probably mean as you invoke Satanic invocations and raise Beezlebub with your black music.

As much fun as all that sounded in the advertisements though, it did cost 200 crowns (10 euros), which is something like 4 beers. That kind of math didn’t add up and I vetoed the option, letting them choose some other trashy tourist lounge, which also cost some terrible covers. Eventually we finally decided to go to some truly terrible place that was as empty and devoid of people as the black music they played was empty of all soul, having been sucked out by the great evening star of Capitalism.

Nihilism is best served chilled, with some cherries. So we ordered some of that and called it an evening.