ACHTUNG, MEINE KLIENEN BLOG AFFEN: the following blog may contain 80s club music and brief scenes of me dancing to it.  As such, it is not recommended for the faint of heart or anybody with any rhythm whatsoever.  For all the rest of you though, read on, and experience the complete and utter horror of, “Ben Goes to a Retro 80s Dance Club!!!!!”

            Last Thursday started normally enough.  There I was, sitting in front of my computer, talking with various and sundry homies of mine.  All of a sudden and completely without warning, I got an IM from, Zardok, daughter of Wulfgar, a girl of my acquaintance informing me that she and her fiancée, Glarg the Orc-Render, who is also very much a good friend of mine (in order to protect the innocent, their names have been changed to protect them from the socially lethal uncoolness radiation of shame which my actions might otherwise be exposing them to) would being going out to an 80s dance club in Richmond later that night.  At first I was somewhat reluctant to go along, “I’m somewhat reluctant to go along,” I said.  “But Ben,” she replied, there’s gonna be dorky 80s girls there!”  And of course, there are few things more loathsome to me than missing out on the chance to dance with dorky 80s girls, so I relented at last.  Now, owing to my unfortunate lack of hammerpants, I don’t really have anything that looks very 80s, except for my Viva La Reagan shirt, which somehow didn’t seem right for the occasion (if only I had one of those Ayatollah Assahola shirts that everyone was wearing back in the day).  Not to be discouraged however, I girded on my finest dancing clothes.  I donned my stylish yet edgy teacupmammoths.com t-shirt (only $9, buy one today!) and found my post-apocalyptic Mel Gibson death boots (which never fail to add like, 10 points to my dance skills), donned my Roman Gladiator Watchband of Fury, and put the +7 Chinese Magic Jade Monkey Amulet of Luck that my sister got for me in China in my pocket, assuming that it could only bolster my move-busting abilities (I was not to be disappointed in this, as we shall see).  Also, I wore pants.

            Richmond, as befits a city of its awesomeness, has a veritable plethora of neighborhoods which sociologists frequently describe as “really sketchy”, and last night I think we drove through most of them in our poorly planned quest for the 80s.  Happily though, we eventually found our way there, and within a few minutes, were surveying the scene.  Now, as happened to be the case, my fellow club-goers had some other friends to talk to there at first, so I found myself momentarily left to my own devices, and accordingly set out for the dance floor.  Now, I do not do a whole lot of clubbing, and except for the occasional homecoming dance in high school, haven’t really spent a great deal of time on the dance floor, and at first I felt some trepidation about just wading out there and trying to dance.  But then, it struck me like duffel bag full of yams being thrown from the international space station:  nobody else there could dance either!  Indeed, as I looked around with a somewhat keener eye, I beheld naught but an endless sea of completely rhythm-deprived dorky white people kind of flailing around like a bucket full of electric sea weasels (The Electric Sea Weasels, might I add, would make a totally sweet name for a band).  Heartened by this epiphany, decided that the time had come for me to at last unleash my dance moves.

            Now, it happens to be the case that the Good Lord saw fit, in his infinite wisdom, to equip me with but two different dances; one being the White Guy Shuffle, which is that universal dance that all white guys do when they’re thrown by some cruel circumstance onto a dance floor.  I’m pretty sure its actually genetic or something, like how when a cat into the bathtub, he instinctively remembers how to swim, just before he instinctively remembers how to jump out of the tub and gnaw your face off.  So there I was, doing the White Guy Shuffle, feeling relatively at ease with myself there on the crowded and anonymous dance floor.  All of a sudden though, something went horribly wrong, and I found that everyone around me had momentarily backed off a little, thus giving me a bit of room to move around in.  This is where it gets bad.

            Remember how I said I know two dances, and one of them is the White Guy Shuffle?  Well, I chose that moment to do the other one.  For some weird and mysterious reason that always hits me at dances eventually, I did The Ben.  What, you may ask, is The Ben?  It sort of defies human description, but I’m gonna give it a try anyway.  Once it started, I didn’t really notice much until it was all over and the survivors fled the building, so most of what follows is based upon the testimony of those who were brave enough to watch.  Where shall I begin?  Okay, imagine that I’m some badass computer guy from the Matrix, and I can move faster than humanly possible, and imagine that at this same time, my pants are full of weasels and silly putty, and now imagine that my Uber-fast pants-weasel silly putty dance is strangely in sync with “99 Luft Balloons”.  It was like an atomic bomb had been dropped in the middle of the dance floor; people instinctively recoiled in amazement and terror, and when it was all over, the living would envy the dead.  Seriously, everybody around me stopped to stare.  It was as if Godzilla had walked into Tokyo, but instead of making balloon animals out of commuter trains and breathing radiation breath all over the place (I myself had tanked up on Altoids not a hour before all this), he suddenly stopped kicking over building and had a seizure.  It was that bad.  According to those who lived to tell the tale it was tough to say whether people were mostly impressed or horrified, so I’m just gonna go with saying that they were all completely weirded out.  In short, it was totally freakin’ awesome.

            Alas, no dorky 80s girls saw fit to dance with me that night, but most of them didn’t run screaming into the street like they used to back in middle school, so I counted it to be a decided improvement and went along on my merry way.  Anyway, the moral of the story is, um, I dunno, kids, don’t do drugs, and don’t watch me dance either, because in terms of messing you up, they’re probably about the same.