From The Desk of Ray Smuckles: Party Blog! (Patreon)

Yo, yo, yo! You might think I hung up my dandy-wand lately, what with all the no-bloggin’ about my weekly parties. True, Covid put a big cramp on my style, but we still did up a few quality ones. (Plus, who blogs anymore? Maybe I need one of those Sub Stacks.) You know me — can’t keep me down! Here’s a little summary of how we partied during those confusing years. 

Creep Into My Airlock

First there was Creep Into My Airlock, where everybody got a hazmat suit at the door and we boogied “silent rave” style with these sick collab earbuds I designed with TMQO, a brand I found on Amazon. Turned out the earbuds were kinda cheap and defective though, and kept picking up nearby phone calls from this neighbor who still used a cordless phone. At first people were tripping out over how apocalyptic and timely-intense the DJ’s liquid-sickness EDM thickness was when it started gettin’ layered in with a lady asking if her daughter had seen “how bad the death numbers were in Italy,” but when she started laying into racist stuff about how the Chinese were responsible for none of her digital Safeway coupons working anymore, people got pretty turned off and started for the doors. Damage control on that party cost three times more than the event itself, what with everybody thinking I had gone all alt-right in planning a night of hardcore xenophobic disinformation. What's more, the sushi belt with all the food under special “airlock” covers went maybe 99% uneaten, except for when Lyle came in and just destroyed like forty plates of those sweet little bean paste sesame balls. (Thanks Lyle — you really helped me out at my lowest.)     

The Disease Ate the Morsel

Once people had gotten their Covid sea legs, we started havin’ a little more fun with things, and I thought The Disease Ate the Morsel would erase folks' fears through facin' them outright. I had these special “Covid molecule” gloves made for people, with sticky stretchy “spike protein” stalks all over them, like three hundred and sixty degrees of froggy fingers. They were meant to encourage flirting, like with accidental entanglements that got people laughing and talking, but it turns out that the men at the party spent most of the night trying to un-grip their gloves from their crotches, because apparently guys are constantly scratching their crotches without even thinking about it. I hadn’t factored this in. Also, the sticky residue from the gloves made all the food taste like formaldehyde or something, so the egg roll bar barely got touched. (Thanks again to Lyle for showing up with all those people from the Mud Scow and plowin’ that grub before I had to toss it.)  

Co-Tangy

One that actually went off pretty well was just called Co-Tangy, a podcast-themed party where everybody got immolated on Super Silver Haze and paired off with somebody I picked at random from a really, really small Cat in the Hat hat (I used tweezers). The pair had to come up with a podcast, and do five minutes discussing a topic that was important to them. Mostly it was just the pairs trying to remind each other of what they were supposed to do, but this one guy and girl got really into the fractal nature of epidemiology, and I think today their show is rockin’ like a million weekly listeners on Spotify. Plus, thanks to all the munchies, the Sweet-and-Sour-It bar I designed (have anything you want battered, deep-fried, and tossed with tangy sauce) went over in a frenzy, with zero food left. Unfortunately, when Lyle showed up with maybe five dozen people he had rounded up from all his favorite dives and there wasn’t anything left to eat, things got really tense, and I had to have a lotta spray paint cleaned off the concrete and walls the next day.   

—RQS