I was out with my friends once in my early twenties, drunk at the limit between “flying high on wings of booze” and “incoherent mass of sick and confusion.”

There was this girl who kept catching my eye every time I saw her out and about, and this time she happened to be at the same dive as us. I finally decided to try talking to her, so I kinda’ awkwardly accosted her at the bar and I think I started pulling my “over-the-top intellectual” bit for a laugh.

Somehow, it worked! We kept chatting (she was buzzed but significantly more sober than I was), we kept laughing, then she asked me to accompany her on an ATM trip after a while. Now, I’d completely lost my capacity for reading between the lines at this point, so I just took it as a generic action. About midway through the trip, she started pulling in very close to me, my current guess being that she had intended to try smooching. My drunk brain thought “oh, she must be feeling the drag, we need to keep her blood pumping.” So I called a race, last one to the ATM is a rotten egg.

Again, surprisingly, she was into it! I could hear her giggling as I was pulling away. I was running like a madman, I could feel my legs moving by themselves. I was a beast, a high-performance machine, a force of nature! Almost started congratulating myself for being such an irresistible hunk, when suddenly I could feel the curb grabbing my left foot. I plunged forward, but luckily my stage fighting reflexes kicked in and I completely unexpectedly started doing landing rolls. I literally rolled the rest of the way to the ATM - about 4-5 meters, not kidding, I’d picked up some serious speed while galloping like a horse on coke. She won and was laughing her ass off, the alcohol inside me had been angered and my brain was oatmeal.

I don’t remember many details after that. What I will say, though, is that it worked! Also, that I never again tried wooing or racing anyone while drunk.