It seems like everywhere you look, everybody is always saying “No”.

Everybody’s saying “can’t”, or “don’t”, or “shouldn’t”.

No Smoking.

No Trespassing.

No Parking.

Keep off the grass.

Stay out of the fountain.

Use your ten-centimetre voice.

Don’t kiss and tell.

She’s out of your league.

There are rules for driving, rules for cycling, rules for public behaviour. But, the Entrance Bay Campground, just south of Cultus Lake, on the other hand, the weekend after Canada Day, was a place without rules. And it was there, amongst that lawless sea of tents and campervans, that Leon and I pulled up in his thirdhand Geo Metro on a gorgeous Friday afternoon.

It had been, in every sense, a last-minute decision. After the fallout surrounding the Steph debacle, my confidence was at an all-time low, and I wanted nothing more than to get as far from the city of Vancouver as I could, so, in a moment of whimsy, Leon and I packed up a cheap tent, a couple of Wal-Mart sleeping bags, and departed in search of adventure.

And, apparently, we weren’t the only ones.
The long weekend, it seemed, combined with reasonable temperatures and a dedication to celebrating our nation’s birthday had made the campground an utter madhouse.
It was filled to capacity, with people of all ages. Grandparents. Babies. Teenagers. Wholesome suburban families coexisting with reams of half-naked, screeching twentysomethings playing ‘Boxhead’ and strip-poker. “HAPPY CANADA WEEKEND!!” an obnoxious, red-and-white banner read, at the entrance to the grounds.

Now, I’m going to take this moment to make a potentially embarrassing admission: the mania surrounding Canada Day has always been something of a mystery to me. While I enjoy a good party as well as anyone, and I’m extremely proud of my country, it has always been somewhat unnerving to see our nation’s heritage distilled down to six-packs of Molson, high-fives, and the desire to fashion our country’s flag into a cape.

But, despite my reservations, the reckless abandon of the site was simply overwhelming, and, in that moment, intoxicated by the possibilities, I made a vow: this weekend, I would drink heroic amounts of alcohol. I would engage in sloppy makeouts with women I didn’t know. I would take a stranger to my tent, and have cheap, meaningless sex with her. I would do all of this for the simple reason that I never had. All my life I’d been following the rules, and so, this weekend, I was determined to break them all. I was launching Ian Hannon V2.0, and nothing was going to stop me this time.

The following morning, after breakfast, reconnaissance, and the consumption of several beers, Leon and I were ready to explore. As I stood at the edge of our tent, thoughtfully slugging back a drink, I was approached by an inebriated fellow wearing boardshorts, a red foam hat, Canadian-flag sunglasses, and, most curiosly of all, a single woman’s shoe. As our eyes met, he thrust his arms skyward, opened his mouth, and shouted: “Whoooooo!”

“Whoooooo!” Leon and I replied.

His face lit up.

“WHOOOOOOO!” he cried, and then wandered off, satisfied that, apparently, we had engaged in some form of meaningful communication.

Naturally, I was tickled pink. I hadn’t experienced behaviour this stimulating since the Olympics.

As we began to stroll toward the beach, I caught my first glimpse of our closest neighbours, a trio of numbingly attractive blondes in a 5-person luxury tent. They smiled and waved, and I, in my infinite charm and grace, attempted a grin, and then spent the next solid minute staring at the ground.

We made our way to the beach, slugging back beer, and picking our way through the mass of people, attempting to find somewhere to sit. Eventually, drinks still conspicuously exposed, we found an empty spot on a log next to a family of four.

“Happy Canada Day, guys!” I exclaimed.

“Uh, you too,” replied the father, a stern, shirtless man in his forties. His wife and children played close-by.

“You guys having a good weekend so far?”

“Um. Yes. Yes, we are.”

“Cool! Glad to hear it! Hey, is it cool if we sit here?”

He shook his head.

“No.”

**********

We spent the rest of the afternoon simply wandering the grounds, exploring the beach, and stopping to have encounters with the hundreds of people we encountered. There were simply too many distractions; too many friendly inebriates, too many drinking games to be played, too many illegal narcotics to purchase and consume, in some attempt at societal rebellion. This weekend, I was breaking all the rules, starting, apparently, with any pertaining to sobriety. By the time we reached our tent, I was exuberant. A beer in each hand, system loaded with a combination of narcotics I dare not name, a maple leaf tattoo on each cheek. The world was warm and twinkling, my steps were less than steady, and, it was in this state that I met Alexis.

She was one of our impossibly-attractive neighbours from the 5-person tent; blonde, petite, bubbly, a girl who the words “out of my league” don’t even begin to describe. The three of them seemed to be having a wonderful time as Leon and I approached, having produced a picnic table from God-knows-where, and immersed themselves in a rousing game of Beer Pong, which, for the uninitiated, is played thusly:

“Hiiiiiiii!” they shouted as we approached.

“Hey guys,” I grinned, adding, with private shame, “Pound it.”

“I’m Alexis,” said the blonde.

“Well, Alexis, you know you guys have your picnic table on our property,” I replied, mock-serious, “and that’s totally uncool.”

She giggled.

“I guess you’ll have to play with us, then!”

“I dunno,” I replied, eyebrow raised, “I’m pretty awesome at Beer Pong. I need to know you guys are up to the challenge.”

They cackled fiercely.

“We’ll see about that!” Alexis shrieked, “bring it on!”

“How did you do that?” Leon mouthed, and from then on, things get rather hazy.

“One of these days, man,” I shouted, in mid-scrap, “you’re going down.”

After the third round, my memory becomes notoriously sloppy, a fact not helped by the copious amounts of party drugs coursing through me. The remainder of this account is pieced together from the testimony of witnesses nearly as intoxicated as I was, and through the aid of poorly-composed photographs that I hope never get released to the public.

It is around this point that, according to witnesses, Leon, in the depth of considerable crapulence himself, cried:

“Let’s hit the beach!”

Alexis grabbed my shirt-front. Or, my shoulder, according to some accounts; apparently, by this time, the whereabouts of my shirt were questionable, at best.

“Just one more round.”

I allegedly waved at Leon and the girls, saying something that sounded suspiciously similar to: “we’ll be there in a sec”, and then returned to the table for another round.

Suffice to say, we never finished the game.

I remember very little of the events that followed, save for the fact that, at some indeterminate point afterward, we got into an actual mock-battle. Jump-kicks and fake Kung-Fu moves. We laughed, and showed off our toughness, eventually grappling over some imagined slight. Our faces were almost touching as we wrestled back and forth, and then, somehow, all of a sudden, we were kissing. It’s possible that I initiated it, I’m not sure, but, somewhere up there, I was sure I could hear DJ StrangeLove cackling.

It worked after all.

“Did you want to check out the inside of your sweet tent?” I asked, lamely.

And, for the first time that weekend, somebody said “Yes”.

I awoke the following morning, face-down on the floor of the tent; nauseous, sweating, incoherent, still in the grip of last night’s booze and drugs. But I had done it.

My first one-night stand.

For the first time in my life, I’d engaged in cheap, meaningless sex with a stranger. I reached down into myself, searching for the sense of accomplishment that I was certain would follow, but, to my surprise, found no such thing. Instead, there was only a deep and puzzling emptiness. And it was then that I discovered the downside to meaningless sex: that, well, it’s pretty meaningless.

This was a totally unexpected result given that she was the single best-looking woman whose genitals had ever touched my own. As I stumbled back to my tent, in addition to the worsening hangover, I began to feel rather horrible about the whole thing (a mindset made all the more horrible by the realization that a used condom was still stuck to my leg, and I hadn’t noticed for close to an hour). What a rip-off, I thought. So much of our society, our advertising, our everything is geared toward this ideal of purely physical intercourse. And yet, when it happens, other than the merest sense of masculine pride, it’s barely rewarding at all. What a total crock of shit.

Later, when I awoke from a deep coma, Alexis had gone. Vanished back to wherever she came from. Perhaps she was ashamed. Or, maybe, she just felt the same as I did.

Leon and I passed the drive home in silence.

I pondered the weekend, the city, my uncertain future. Sure, I’d had a one-night stand. I’d broken a bunch of rules. Though, it occurred to me that, perhaps, the rules in question weren’t society’s at all, but my own. I wasn’t doing this to sleep with random strangers. I was doing it for my own personal growth, to overcome a lifetime of social anxiety, to become a better human being, to prepare myself, so that on the day when I met the love of my life, I’d be ready for her. But rather than working toward that goal, I was instead simply flailing in the dark, wheeling about like a man set on fire. As much as it pained me to admit, I still had absolutely no idea what I was doing. It was as though, after everything that had happened, I was starting all over again.

It was a terrible feeling.

Then, I remembered the look of her naked.

“You okay?” Leon asked, after awhile.

I grinned.

“Hell yes.”