A sociological safari by the most unlikely of party animals.

On The Spectrum, On The Guest List is a serialized account of my fish-out-of-watering through New York City’s VIP party circuit. Part book review, part diary-of-a-socialite, and part many other things, OTSOTGL is a romp through the befuddling world of nightlife that exposes tensions between method and anarchy and explores the interplay of objectivity, subjectivity, and interactivity.

And that’s just what goes on inside my head.

On the outside, I am groped, I am shat on by a flock of birds, I stab a guy (not related to the groping). Various men insist I am Russian, German, or Croatian (dear reader, I am fourth-generation Texan). I am coereced into wearing the cutest little light-up devil's horns (they're purple!). Elements of a club I visit in a dream mysteriously work their way into reality. And at one point I myself am interviewed as part of someone else’s fieldwork for their own sociological survey of nightlife.

New editions published weekly, until I run out of material and have to go clubbing again. Start with the prologue for some background, or jump right into part one!

But are you really on the spectrum?

Probably. I have no idea. Not officially, anyways. And I likely can get away with quite a lot these days—between the halo effect, and having honed my virtual machine over the years.

But I defy you to read this thing and still think of me as even half-neurotypical. What goes on in nightlife, the aims and the games of others, is so obviously beyond me on some emotional-resonance level:

But the rest offended her—and inarguably, because it wasn’t a gesture but an emotion. She was appalled by its raw vigor that chafed under the old euphemisms and by the too obtrusive fate that herded its inhabitants along a short-cut from nothing to nothing. She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand.

And of course I’m a fool for parallelism. There’s always that.