Based on a true mess.
I met him on a Thursday night, the kind of night you promise you’re “just grabbing one drink” and somehow end up making life decisions with a stranger.
He slid onto the barstool next to me, ordered the same cheap beer I was having, and gave me that conspiratorial nod people give when they’re both clearly pretending this is a sensible use of a weeknight.
We started talking. I don’t remember what about. Life, jobs, exes, how the bartender looked suspiciously like a retired magician. At some point he became “my new friend” in that official, alcohol-notarized way. After a few rounds, one of us said, “We should hang out more,” and the other one said, “Yeah, let’s go back to my place!”
You know you’re making great decisions when the commute from “Nice to meet you” to “Let’s go to my house” is under an hour.
Back at my place, the plan was “a few more drinks.” That was the last reasonable thought of the evening. After that, time folded in on itself, and the only constant was alcohol and our growing belief that we were the funniest, most creative people alive.
We end up doing karaoke to Red Hot Chili Peppers and a lot of other bands throughout the night. My playlist was in one of those chaotic modes where every third song is from a different decade and vaguely embarrassing. Then that’s when it happened “The Bad Touch” by the Bloodhound Gang blasted through my speakers, and both our brains lit up like drunk Christmas trees.
He turned to me, eyes wide with revelation.
“We should make a music video,” I suggested.
“That is the best idea anyone has ever had,” He replied, dead serious.
We cleared space in my living room like we were prepping a film set instead of just shoving laundry and empty chip bags out of frame. I grabbed my phone like it was a Hollywood camera. He grabbed my sunglasses. I grabbed a hat. He found a scarf that had no business being involved in any artistic venture. We were ready.
The plan was simple: hit play on the song, hit record, and absolutely nail the most iconic lip sync performance of our generation.
In our heads, we were smooth. We were synchronized. We were… borderline professional.
We did multiple takes. We had choreography, if you could call waving our arms around and occasionally almost falling over “choreography.” At one point he tried to “seductively” slide across the floor, but my rug had other ideas and he just kind of friction-burned his way halfway and gave up.
We committed, though. Full body commitment. The more we drank, the more confident we got.
My phone was set up against a stack of books, leaning at a heroic, slightly crooked angle. Every time it wobbled, we’d dive in slow motion to save it like it was a newborn child.
The next morning, my head was pounding. My mouth felt like I’d been licking cardboard. The living room looked like two raccoons had tried to start a band in there. My new friend was a snoring mass on the couch, hugging a throw pillow like it owed him money.
Then I saw my phone on the floor.
At first, I didn’t remember. I just picked it up to check the time and doom scroll my way through my hangover. Then I saw the video thumbnail: our two idiotic, blurry faces frozen mid-gesture.
I squinted at it.
No. No, we didn’t.
Surely we wouldn’t.
…We did.
I pressed play. What followed was three minutes and thirty-four seconds of pure, concentrated, pure embarrassment.
First of all, the lip syncing… wasn’t syncing anything. The song would say “You and me baby ain’t nothin’ but mammals,” and my mouth would be doing this weird goldfish-gasp motion three seconds too late, like I’d just remembered English was a language but not how it worked.
My friend looked like he was angrily arguing with the invisible subtitles of a different movie. Half the time his mouth was moving but the lyrics had already moved on, like the song and our faces were in a long-distance relationship and it wasn’t going well.
The timing was a disaster. We’d dramatically point at the camera on the wrong beat. We’d try to hit a line together and instead overlap in a chaotic mouth salad. There was one part where I was supposed to “sing” into a bottle like a microphone, but I missed the actual line. Then there was the dancing.
I use “dancing” loosely. There were flailing limbs. There was an attempt at grinding on my own coffee table. At one point, we both tried to jump in at the same time, misjudged the distance, and bumped shoulders, causing us to stagger off in opposite directions like two drunk bowling pins.
He tried to do a sexy spin. Physics declined the offer.
But the worst part, the absolute highlight of our stupidity, was our faces. We were so serious. So intense. We weren’t even laughing in the video. We looked like we truly believed we were nailing it. Like we were auditioning for some morally questionable music video and the director had just told us, “This is your moment.”
I burst out laughing. Like, full-body, tears-in-my-eyes laughing. The kind of laugh that hurts but in a way that makes you feel gloriously, painfully alive.
My new friend jolted awake, hair sticking up in a shape I can only describe as “confused cactus.”
“What?” he mumbled.
“Dude,” I wheezed, “you need to see this.”
We watched it together.
The more we watched, the worse it got—and the funnier. Every time we thought, “Well, that’s the most embarrassing part,” the next moment would prove us wrong. There was a solid ten seconds where we forgot to move at all and just kind of… stared at the camera, swaying slightly, like we were buffering.
There was a close-up of my face that looked like I was trying to solve long division using only my eyebrows.
He paused the video at one point, pointed at the screen, and said, “Why do I look like I’m arguing with a ghost?”
We laughed so hard we both had to sit down. Somewhere in the hangover haze, between the throbbing headache and the taste of regret, I realized something: yes, it was awful. Yes, it was cringe. Yes, if that video ever leaked onto the internet, I would have to change my name and move to a different country.
But also? It was kind of perfect. It was this pure, stupid little time capsule of who we were in that exact, ridiculous moment: two almost-strangers who believed, with all the misplaced confidence in the world, that making a drunk music video to “The Bad Touch” was not only a good idea!
We didn’t look cool. We didn’t sound cool. We were not even in the same postal code as “cool.” But we looked like we were having fun. Honest, unfiltered, absolutely idiotic fun.
And that’s why, even now, when I think about that night, I still laugh. Not just at how awful the video was, or how off the lip syncing was, or how my “sexy move” looked more like I was trying not to sneeze.
I laugh because, for one gloriously stupid night, my living room was a music video set, my new friend was my co-star, and “The Bad Touch” was our anthem.
And every time I remember it, I’m reminded that sometimes the cringiest versions of us are also the ones having the best time.
~by definitely not a Bloodhound Gang member. Airdrie, Alberta.