Its Friday, so you’re probably counting the minutes until you’re free from your little cube and able to get your drank on. Your options tonight are casual bar, bar with dancing, club (if you’re feeling ragey), dinner and drinks, or movie on the couch. You might be sick of all of those options… but hey, at least you’ve got ’em, right? Remember a time when those options didn’t exist? Remember when you weren’t 21? Remember when you weren’t 21 and were far too young to pretend you were in fact 21 with a fake ID?
Remember when you weren’t in college yet and everyone you knew lived with their parents? What the HELL did you do every weekend? Where did you drink? Sure you went to the occasional house party, but it wasn’t every day that someone’s parents went away. So, let me remind you — Here are 10 places you probably drank in high school. Happy nostalgia!
1. The Woods. By far, the most popular place to drink in HS was the woods. Just plop yourself and your friends right into the middle of nowhere and there will most likely be no escape, other than running through poison ivy and loud leaves, when the po-po comes.
2. By A Body Of Water. A lake. A reservoir. The ocean. Whatever body of water was closest to your town, you were there, drinking your adolescent troubles away. Water always makes things more peaceful and back then, us high schoolers were pretty peaceful with our Dave Matthews and Dispatch playing iPods. We just wanted to chill. Now, high schoolers need to RAGE with Skrillex and Avici, so like a body of water would totes kill their buzz. No thanx.
3. In An Industrial Park. What a great idea. An open space. An empty parking lot. Dark surroundings. And a quick getaway if the cops come a knockin’. The problem: You couldn’t really hide from the cops in said industrial park if you weren’t already inside your car from a far enough away distance… and you couldn’t hide from others when hooking up… and it could be really scary when a light in a window was on (like, is someone still at work or did they just leave their light on?). It really wasn’t a good idea. But whatever.
4. Parking Lot of a Fast Food Restaurant (i.e. Wendys or McDonalds). Where there are late night snacks, there are drunk people. Including your high school self, because your older self who stays out late would never 1. eat fast food, 2. drive drunk when there are taxis running around, and 3. make it to Wendy’s before it closed. McDonalds, on the other hand, is always open and is a pretty decent hot spot for teens. Caring about health was not a thing in high school.
5. A Friend’s Basement. For some reason, our logic was if we were in the basement, no one would know what we were doing. That was kind of false. I’m sure 50% of all parents knew what we were doing. Unless they weren’t home. Then that just justified the basement drinking.
6. A Random House Party. Whether it was at your friends house and everyone and their mother came because everyone needed a place to drink (standard)… or it was at some random older guy’s house and you just creeped in the living room until the cops came and you had to run, the high school house party was a very rare, awkward, and fun time. We really should have used cabs back then.
7. A Car. For the times there really was no where to go. Perhaps your ‘drinking spot’ was being taken over by upperclassmen or another clique. Perhaps it was raining. Perhaps you were waiting for McDonald’s to start their late night menu. There was always a time where you had to resort to car drinking, which was a fantastic idea considering the fact the person driving you was not only probably drinking too… but they also 1. weren’t allowed to be driving past midnight and 2. weren’t allowed to be driving anyone else under the age of 18. Oh well!
8. The Town Dump. Even though I did not frequent such a place, to me it was always the most hilarious ‘drinking spot’ ever. This interesting idea was brought to you by the students of my suburban greater Boston town (unless this is a hot spot in other towns too). Maybe the thought process was ‘the police would never suspect us to drink here!’ But they somehow figured it out… A great cop did once say, ‘we drank at all the same places as you when we were in high school.’ Imagine if nerds became cops. They would never figure it out!
9. Football Game. Because you can’t watch a bunch of scrawny and fat (there was usually no in between) dudes play football outside on a Friday night for more than 15 minutes without taking a shot of Smirnoff in the parking lot. Mind you, that one shot would have you wasted for what seemed to be… the entire game. Hmm…
10. Bonfires. Behold the firepit. The coolest setting for underage drinking ever. There haven’t been many bonfires since I turned 21 (mostly because everyone lives in cities and no one has a backyard), but in high school it was backyard bonfires (or woods bonfires) on the reg.
Other notable mentions include team sleepovers and concert tailgates. Aren’t you so happy you’re not in high school anymore? So when you start complaining that you’re so old and that you miss college, and when you start complaining that you’re sick of the bars and do the same thing every weekend, think back to a time where you drank at the above places. Then maybe you won’t feel so bad. Long live our high school style alcohol appreciation.
