Adventure Club and Sabai

Raving after 40 and drinking like your 21

Let’s talk about the single most idiotic, self-destructive, and utterly glorious act of defiance a person over 40 can commit: going to a rave, drinking like the year is 2004 and your knees haven’t betrayed you yet. You think you’re there for the music. You think you’re there for the community. You’re wrong. You’re there to wage a brief, beautiful, and catastrophically expensive war against your own mortality, and your body is more than happy to return fire with interest.

Here’s the deal I made with the devil, a deal signed in the sticky residue of a bar top. You trade tomorrow’s mobility for tonight’s delusion. You hand over a shocking amount of money—$37.70 for a double Tito’s, are you kidding me?—and in exchange, the bartender pours you a glass of liquid amnesia. Not amnesia for your past, but for your present. For the fact that you have a 401k, a mortgage, and a left knee that makes a sound like popping bubble wrap every time you take the stairs.

You down five of those, a couple of Watermelon Lime Absolut shots with some sprite, and three “modern day” Jager bombs with some ghost-flavored monstrosity instead of Red Bull, and suddenly, the transformation is complete. Dr. Jekyll, the responsible adult who worries about fiber intake, clocks out. Ms. Hyde, a sweaty, grinning maniac who thinks grinding on a second-floor rail is a perfectly reasonable form of self-expression, clocks in for a four-hour shift of pure, unadulterated stupidity.

The Physical Reckoning

My brain, pickled in vodka and nostalgia, might have believed it was 21. My musculoskeletal system, however, was keeping a detailed, itemized receipt of every transgression. That slick dance move I pulled off during Adventure Club’s set? That’s a 48-hour lien against your lumbar spine. That enthusiastic headbanging? A foreclosure notice on your neck vertebrae. Grinding on the rail all night? Congratulations, you’ve just paid the final installment on a brand-new walker you’ll be fantasizing about all day Sunday.

The next morning is not a hangover; however it’s a post-battle damage report. It feels like an elephant has taken up residence on your knee. You used to be able to rage, sleep for four hours, and go about your day like nothing happened. Those days of glory are dead and buried. Now, a single night out requires a full weekend of recovery, a regimen of Excedrin, and the kind of deep, soul-searching regret usually reserved for people who get face tattoos.

The Financial Insult to Physical Injury

Let’s not forget the second wave of pain that hits when you check your bank account. You could argue that festival drinks are cheaper, and you’d probably be right. But there’s a special kind of masochism that comes with paying nearly forty dollars for a drink in a dark, crowded club. You’re not just buying alcohol; you’re buying an experience. The experience of being flagrantly robbed while loud music plays. You do the math—six of those Tito’s monstrosities—and you realize you spent enough to fund a small nation’s infrastructure for an afternoon, all for the privilege of destroying your own. It’s the price of admission to the dumbest theme park on Earth: Geriatric Nostalgia Land.

But Why?

So why? Why do we do it? Why endure the pain, the cost, the crippling shame of limping into work on Monday? Because for a few glorious, bass-filled hours, none of it matters. It’s not about reliving your youth. It’s about spitting in the eye of middle age. It’s about finding that community, that shared, unspoken understanding among everyone on the dance floor that we are all here for the love of the music, and we are all going to be in a world of hurt tomorrow.

I will never give up raving. It brings me a joy that no sensible, age-appropriate hobby ever could. My knee will remind me of this night for another week, a throbbing, aching testament to my poor life choices. And I’ll cherish every goddamn limp. Because it’s proof that I was there. I was alive. And I was an idiot. And sometimes, that’s the best you can hope for.