4. Things get worse

For my next and final stop, I decided to go straight into the lion's den. After a quick, dread-filled walk, my journey, like all bogus journeys, had taken me to hell.

Since an integral part of Ladies' Night is Ladies, and because every Dante needs her Virgil, I had a longtime female friend meet me inside Webster Hall for their "Girls' Night Out" event. Even with a familiar face by my side, Webster Hall was still a living nightmare. No one is capable of love in Webster Hall. Everyone looked like a Kardashian and everything hurt. By the time I joined the festivities, ninety percent of the women in the club were at that part of the night when they are feeling young and alive, like a Thought Catalog piece just waiting to be written. Ergo, I got inadvertently slapped in the face a lot. Unseen hands kept grabbing at my body, half of the toilets were clogged, and I'm pretty sure they were playing one dubstep song for the entire four hours that I was there.

Whether it was a self-preservation technique or because the open bar finally caught up with me, I don't know, but thankfully, I don't remember most of what happened at Girls' Night Out. The one thing I do recall, seemingly in HD, is that one minute I was just minding my own business, and the next, there was a boner just up on my butt. Judy Blume doesn't exactly teach you how to handle a hard wang trying to burrow into your butt cheek like it's ready for hibernation. No one does. Because that shit ain't normal. After delivering a swift left elbow to the uninvited guest behind me, I turned around to find that the offending party had made a quick getaway. My butt was left to sense his penis like a phantom limb for the rest of the night.

5. The dénouement

Have you ever woken up cursing? The next morning, when my eyes drifted open, I was somehow already exhaling the clacking end of the word "fuck." Even my unconscious mind knew this was going to be rough. Looking back, I am fairly certain that it was my own stench that woke me; I smelled like a combination of rotten juice, menthol, and Davidoff's Cool Water. I didn't feel like a Carrie or a Samantha — I felt like an old-timey blues singer, weary bones and all. My cats wouldn't come near me. I once read about a cat that could predict the deaths of nursing-home patients; I think my cats sensed that something within me had gone to a better place.

In short, the feeling was certainly not right. Thanks, Kool and the Gang, but no thanks; I'm sticking with boxed wine and The Golden Girls from now on.