I’m a Cowboy. Not really.

Last weekend, I went home to Florida and attended the bachelor party for John, my best friend from high school. We held the festivities in Jacksonville, John’s future home and also where a bulk of the attendees lived. While the day started off with a round of simulated golf at Urban Golf (fucking amazing, why aren’t there more of these?), an afternoon riverside barbecue with a little JUI (Jetskiing…) action, and an epic evening preparty of four-on-four beer pong and suicide flip cup (everyone flips at once… games go MUCH faster and everyone gets to drink), the real fun was had at Maverick’s, the country bar where we decided to close out the day.

Some of the group were worried about how I might handle the bar, thinking that I had become a fantsy-pants New Yorker and was also, you know, NOT a redneck. However, I couldn’t have been more excited for the evening. I insisted that they teach me the line dances before we got there, so that I’d be ready to bust moves as soon as I got in, and in fact I DID BUST SOME MOVES. Over the course of the night, as each line dancing song was played, I would race out to the floor to get in on the action. I was hit or miss, missing more as the night went on and the jack and cokes kept flowing, but I enjoyed every single minute of it.

There was one dance in particular that was amazing. I can’t remember what song it was set to, but it involved girls and guys pairing up and forming two rings around the dance floor. Girls in the outer ring, facing inward. Guys on the inside, facing out. The song starts, and the next few minutes consist of performing a little 10-second line dancing jig with the girl in front of you, and then rotating. It was kinda like speed dating set to music, or for you Indians/Gujratis, the circular Raas thing with more physical contact. Essentially, the dance enables you to dance with/shamlessly hit on every single girl on the dance floor.

COWBOYS = FUCKING GENIUSES.

Now, this was a country bar, and that meant there was one other activity to also participate in. The mechanical bull. I had ridden one once before, at a work event held in a hotel four years ago. This time, I was much more inebriated and thus much. more. excited. Up I went, and by some dumb luck, someone remembered they had a camera phone to capture the ride.

Witness Exhibit A.

This is me riding the mechanical bull. I love this picture for so many reasons. The blur, though mostly just a fault of the shitty cameraphone, so appropriately captures the moment. This is pretty much what it looked like to the guy taking a picture, and I’m sure that’s what my vision looked like at the time as well. Also, although the pose isn’t bad, it seems pretty obvious from this picture that I’m terrible at this. Which is a true fact. I did not last long.

Witness Exhibit B.

Another phenomenal picture. This picture more clearly shows my ineptitude when it comes to riding mechanical bovines. It is pretty obvious here that I am just, quite simply, failing. However, an important distinction to make between this picture and the one before it is the differences in blur. If you look closely, you can see a little bit of motion blur in my arms and torso. However, there is very little blur at all in the actual bull.

Yes, my friends. This is not me failing to ride the bull. This is me failing to GET ON.

Extremely drunk and giggly from being thrown off during my first ride, I could not summon up the energy and hand-eye coordination to jump off the bouncy surface and back onto the bull. Even when they tilted the fucking thing toward me.

Eventually I made it back on, and lasted another few seconds before I was unceremoniously thrown off. As I picked myself up, I saw a group of girls unanimously giving me thumbs-down review of my performance. Embarrassed, I tried to redeem myself the only way I knew how, shrugging my shoulders, pointing my finger back and forth between the bull and I, and saying…

“Hey, I’m brown. We don’t really do this.”