Most settings, the key is paying attention to indicators of interest/disinterest. If someone isn’t engaging with you beyond grunts, looks visibly uncomfortable, etc. that’s your cue to gracefully exit.

This is the hard part for a lot of people, properly gauging interest after initiation and knowing when to move on. If it’s not intuitive, unfortunately there’s not much else you can do to improve this other than practice.

Sometimes you can find more casual philosophy-focused discussion/reading groups too - I know a few have a presence on Meetup in my area. They meet at a pub or something and discuss a particular topic for the evening.

Naw, screw that - we need more people trying to make this place fun. If by some chance it is Ottawa, I’m sure they’d find receptive folks at The Dom/House of Targ/Arts Court/The Mayfair/Rainbow/AskAPunk/Tuesday Club/PROBE/One of the festival committees (except poutine and rib)/Spectrasonic/Awesome Ottawa/Canada Council for the Arts/White Rabbit/SPAO/One of the Zine collectives/Gladstone Theatre/Ottawa Little Theatre/Brass Monkey, for some reason/T’s Pub/Swizzles/Enriched Bread/Absolute Comedy/Cafe Dekcuf/that one house in Barrhaven (iykyk)/CKCU/CHUM/probably quite a few others I’m not aware of. Heck, you could bug the Night Mayor, what exactly is he up to these days?

It all really comes down to what you consider fun. Are you going to have the same degree of options as you would in Montreal and Toronto? No. But if you want fun, there’s things to do, places to check out, people to meet and a not-insignificant number of folks who want more of these.

Off the top of my head:

1. Start researching your local ordinances and bylaws. Like someone mentioned here, there might be a reason your town dies after 2200.
2. Think about the kind of things you want to see in terms of nightlife. Does that mean live music? Block parties? Techno night at the clurb? Kink stuff (seriously)? Theatrical performances? Hash and coffee socials (sort of a joke, but thinking through the logistics of such a thing has been my daydream du jour recently)? Etc.
3. Find others who would be interested in the kind of stuff you’d like for nightlife activities. Start talking $ and logistics - are there any grants you could try and apply for? Fundraising activities? Where are you going to do this stuff? What do you need in terms of insurance? Do you need to address any pesky bylaws, and can start working with your local government to try and tackle that? And so on.
4. Make a plan and act.

The big starting point is really just defining one or two things you want to see, and working to get to the point where you see them. In the course of this you might be surprised by what you find (someone mentioned good ol’ Ottawa, ON as an image of the place you’re describing - but there’s actually a decent amount of stuff, both above- and underground, you can find when you start poking around).

What up, fellow Ottawan?

Trying to dive into the local music scene was my approach - mostly because I suck at trivia.

“@!#?@!, motherfucker!”

It’s a term that’s taken on some additional baggage/meaning. Originally it simply meant someone who was involuntarily celibate - wants to have sexual relationships, but doesn’t. Now it usually refers to someone adhering to a kind of peculiar set of ideologies around that (see: social value theories taken to some often ridiculous extremes; good ol’ fashioned misogyny/perhaps misanthropy; etc.).

There’s a kneejerk reaction to incels in the latter sense because so much that comes out of that is pretty awful. That and it’s often folks who engage with the latter stuff who are more inclined to identify with the term incel - most others who just fit the former definition just say they’re single.

IMO the latter usage is just more proof that we are failing and continuing to fail men, badly, in terms of community and mental health supports.

I’d ask how you define evil in this case. To me, an act is evil when the net detriment to the planet and its contents (including humans) is greater than the net benefit it creates, and the actor pursues said act knowing this. I’d argue it scales with the nature and context of the act. It’s hard to say this isn’t real. But yes, we all have the capacity for evil, and also can be complicit in other evils by dint of normalized behaviours (without necessarily being ‘evil’ ourselves)

I do agree that an absolute Evil doesn’t exist, the same way an absolute Good doesn’t exist. But we’re a pile of writhing meat puppets on a moist, moldy rock - we don’t exist on that level in the first place.

So from ages 16 to about 22, I was the guy who would get blackout drunk and into wacky situations. This is one of them.

I had just moved to a little town in Ontario with some buddies from BC. We moved into our apartment on Halloween, and one of said buddy’s cousins was having a party. I tossed on my army jacket, put some blue hair gel on my head, deemed myself a punk and headed out with my 26 of Jamieson in tow.

The last thing I remember was telling the host “Nah, I don’t need a cup or chase, I’ll just keep drinking from the bottle.” Things got hazy, then suddenly I was in a holding cell.

Let’s take a step back for a moment. This wasn’t my first time inside a holding cell - but this was literally my first night as a resident of this place. I had only a vague sense of where my place was relative to the rest of the town. I did not memorize the address. I had no family or support network there, other than my two friends. And I had exactly zero knowledge of the journey from the party to the cell.

So naturally, I start screaming, asking why I was there and what I did, trying to squeeze through the bars, etc. etc. Cop comes by, says “If you don’t know why you’re here, that’s why you’re here. Just get some sleep and we’ll talk in the morning”. Still freaking out but recognizing there wasn’t much I could do, I passed out on the slab.

In the morning, the cops got me out of the cell, and explained that I had passed out on someone’s lawn on what I learned was the other side of town from the party. When they picked me up, I apparently told them I had no fixed address, and they took me in. As I was apparently very cooperative they handed me a ticket and sent me on my way.

So there I was - it’s about 7:00 AM on November 1st. I had blue-smeared, slept-on-a-concrete slab matted hair, I was in that nasty ‘still drunk but also hungover’ pocket, outside of a cop station with still no idea where I was relative to my place. So I just start walking.

Eventually, I make it to the centre of town. I notice a big gathering of people and stumble over to see what it was. Some guy sees me, and hands me a protest sign. After a few minutes, I realize it’s an anti-New World Order protest of some kind. I look around for some place to drop the sign, and see a sudden flash. Someone took my picture - and the dude was wearing one of those press passes around his neck.

My second day in town, and there was me - haggered, literal gutterpunk looking ass holding a protest sign at an unhinged protest, with a picture taken for the local newspaper. Neat.

Eventually I find my house. I walk in, and my buddies are like “Holy shit, what the fuck happened?”. Apparently, I got so drunk I fell off the porch and was just generally being a fool, and got kicked out of the party. These guys then took me to try and get some pizza in me at some place. At a certain point, I just dropped my piece on the floor, left the building, and the rest is history.

I don’t talk to those guys anymore. I don’t drink whiskey from the bottle anymore either.

What’s funny to me is that this isn’t even my first unhinged drinking story from that place - I found myself on the wrong end of a 12 v. 3 brawl at a chain pizza restaurant over someone calling my buddy a chicken nugget, the day we went to sign our lease - but that’s a tale for another day.

Weed’s soooo much better, kids.