The Biggest Nothing that Ever Somethinged

The New York Times has this new article about what it’s like late Thursday night/early Friday morning at the Kellog’s Diner which is funny because I used to live right there.

When I first moved to New York, I lived in an apartment a block away from this diner and, every Thursday night, my roommates and I would go to the bar across the street, Union Pool. Since two of us were unemployed, one was a student, and the other just didn’t give a shit, we stayed till the bar closed most nights. That’s when we started noticing a phenomenon we started calling the 3:30 Shuffle.

It only happened there on week nights. On Fridays and Saturdays, the bar was packed with cool people just hanging out. But, on week days, there were tons of people whose only goal was to fuck a stranger. That’s it.

Around 3:30am, when they called last call, these people would suddenly go from casual drinking to having a purpose. They’d just begin walking around and making intense eye contact with anyone who came into their line of sight, willing the person to make a move. If you didn’t do anything for a few seconds, they’d move on to the next person.

This whole thing made me incredibly uncomfortable. Not only was it crazy aggressive, but I’d just started dating a new girlfriend. However, two of my three roommates took to the situation like a fish takes to water. Especially if said water is super easy to get laid in.

Over the course of a few months, I would meet one or two new hipster girls in my apartment every Friday morning.

It helped that we lived half a block from the bar. However, my two roommates would also go home with a bunch of girls. And, if you want proof of how weird this whole situation was, how about this? Both of them had a similar experience of going home with a girl and having her weird, male roommate ask if he could tape them having sex with the girl. This happened to both guys. With DIFFERENT WOMEN. Only one of them said yes.

Sadly, I don’t live with either of those guys any more. I do still live with my third roommate from that time though. Just last week, he and I were marveling just how different our lives are, two years later, now that we don’t live in Williamsburg.