Believe me, I was thinking the same as you: what does that mean, and whatever it means, it can't be anything like what it actually sounds like. But indeed it was that and so much more. We arrived to a house that the owners--a group of graduate students or other early 20-somethings--were in the process of remodeling, and so it was completely stripped down. The only things available were a bunch of glass jars, a keg of PBR, and some tables. Yep, you guessed it: good old fashioned beer pong and flip cup, just like the undergrad days.
The beer pong and flip cup tables were in the same room but separated by an annoying half-wall, which is not something that you can typically do anything about in any regular house. However, in this instance, the ~20 folks there had had their fill of unending cups full of beer, and it was time to move on to the main course.The sledgehammer.
Not too often in life do you get to go to a place where you can drink and they actually want you to destroy things in the process. So here we were, with this close-to-once-in-a-lifetime chance to enjoy smashing stuff that you don't own like a bunch of 8 year old boys.
Everything began slowly, as I think people weren't quite ready to believe that we were actually going to be allowed to do this. Everyone was reluctant to make the first move (i.e. hole in the wall), but after a few tests to check where the studs were and some additional encouragement from the home owners, things got underway...
The idea of a hole in the wall as a good thing made for some great laughs...
And after approximately 20-30 minutes, the room finally began to open up...
After we cleared up the rubble a bit, we figured a few games to celebrate wouldn't be so bad. We have a shovel and some pieces of wall, and an open window--oooh, how about baseball? So we threw some things to hit up in the air and began swinging away.
That's me playing baseball. I'm wearing an industrial-strength gas mask--others were wearing medical breathing masks--since it became a little difficult to breathe with all of the dust/cancer floating around in the air. It was pretty nasty, and without a doubt contained plenty of things that humans aren't meant to inhale; typically this isn't a problem since the stuff stays, well, in your walls.
As a finale, the next stop following the swing shown above on the right is that piece of drywall being struck a bit high and shattering the window. A couple of the homeowners seemed less than pleased with this last occurrence, but others found it hilarious ("We needed to get a new window anyways."). I, for one, was definitely nearly on the ground dying of laughter.
After all that, we shared another beer and then headed on home. It was... ridiculous. I've never been a part of anything like that, and I can't imagine it happening again. We all loved destroying things when we were little, whether it was a fort, a jenga tower, card house etc.--anything that was 1) meticulously built, and 2) not yours. Perhaps that was more among boys, but the girls at this party certainly enjoyed themselves too.
Either way, adults don't get to destroy things too much anymore in a socially-acceptable manner, and it's not something that's easy to set up unless you've got some extra printers to take out to the field Office Space-style. So here's a cheers to having the opportunity to break down a couple more walls that separate adults from their childhoods of creative destruction.
