“The car’s on fire, and there’s no driver at the wheel.” This phrase, ominously delivered in the opening of a Godspeed You! Black Emperor song, appears unbidden in my head as we walk across the red-carpeted concourse into the newly opened Cali Beach Club in Surfers Paradise. It arrives there on a more or less daily basis, every time I look at the news and find out that, oh I don’t know, climate change-induced fire tornadoes are speeding up the incubation of the ultra omega variant of the novel coronavirus.

This is not to say, obviously, that the Cali Beach is another link in a frighteningly long and varied chain of ecological disasters, feeding into public health disasters, feeding into climate disasters, into civil unrest. It is rather, a 5,000-sq metre, “premier adults-only playground” (their words), “Australia’s largest day and night entertainment precinct” and “the ultimate Day Club experience” (also their words). The development took around 12 months to realise, at a cost of almost $10m.

Opened on 24 September, the sprawling, Las Vegas-style, open-air rooftop complex comprises several bars, several pools, a cinema, reservable daybeds, reservable booths and poolside VIP areas styled as “cabanas”. The cabanas are also reservable, if you happen to have a tidy five grand or so hidden in your couch cushions.

I was once young enough to have the psychic fortitude to go to nightclubs, and when I attend on 25 September, the club has all the hallmarks I remember. The lighting is low, so that I don’t feel too self-conscious about my ridiculous attempt to guess the dress code. People jostle for position at a bar staffed by God’s most patient bartenders, hoping that if they scream loud enough the staff will correctly ascertain the number of shots they are trying to order. A DJ is playing amorphous club music that never seems to resolve into a single discrete song. Recognisable hooks drift in and out of an otherwise unchanging beat, making me feel like I’m on my deathbed, trying my best to recollect the pop songs of my youth.

But most importantly: it is fun. It is a fun place. People are having fun.

I am not a particularly fun person, so I have brought a fun person with me, and it is working. My unswervingly social, certified “party goblin” ex, George, has agreed to come on the proviso they can smash a few dirty martinis on a newspaper’s dime. In exchange they will act as my shaman, magicking me into the world of people who enjoy themselves at nightclubs.

Unfailingly, George casts their spell. Several people approach them to ask if they are selling cocaine. Still more approach them just to chat, because that’s the sort of thing that happens when you are fun, like George. Two people also approach me, but both times it is men telling me that my “look” is “interesting”. I was wrong about the lighting being low enough – I feel as obvious as a neon sign of a cartoon clown.

Here, on this rooftop, as Blade Runner-esque tongues of flame shoot into the sky and fire twirlers in booty shorts walk through a packed crowd of 20-somethings, the people we talk to are having the normalest Saturday night of their lives.

Amid what feels like an ongoing apocalypse that is gradually increasing in volume, the perfectly ordinary social dynamics of a night out are happening as they have for, presumably, thousands of years.

The punters are dressed predominantly in sexy Halloween costume versions of lawn bowl whites. Young men aggressively yell at each other in a way that could indicate either delight or a threat of violence; young women tearfully clutch at their friends, anchoring each other to the material plane. Someone next to me at the urinal laments that there isn’t anywhere to put your drink down while you’re pissing. A man orders around $200 worth of cocktails and then wanders off, never to be seen by the bar staff again. A young woman in a peach-coloured cocktail dress mimes having penetrative sex with one of her similarly becocktaildressed mates while teetering dangerously close to the pool.

There is a lifeguard – stationed in a chair all evening, despite the complete absence of any swimmers – taking all of this in. He has the unfocused eyes of someone trying to solve a complicated maths problem, or win an argument in their head that they have already lost in real life.

This sort of spectacle, quite literally held above the masses on a fifth-floor rooftop, would be a lazy filmmaker’s hack visual metaphor for one of the movie’s capital T Themes. And it is all about spectacle; the soft launch for influencers and VIPs, held the night prior, featured a man doing acrobatic flips with some sort of aquatic jetpack, while a man beside him, in a dazzling feat of logistics, revved a jetski in a small rooftop pool.

Tonight, at indeterminate intervals, a parade of neon-coloured sea creatures held aloft by performers meanders throughout the space. Mobile strobe lights accompany women in matching swimsuits, carrying what I believe might be bottles of champagne. At one point, a fire twirler emerges Botticelli-style from a giant clamshell.

The spectacle is, frankly, cool as hell. If I were nearly anyone but myself I would probably have a tremendous time.

Instead, I am sitting at the bar drinking a mid-strength beer (the car won’t drive itself back to Brisbane, sadly), listening to a series of customers abuse a very stressed man who is trying to make a dozen cocktails simultaneously, and wondering whether this would look all that different if a big asteroid was scheduled to hit tomorrow.

The car’s on fire, and there’s no driver at the wheel.

• The writer attended Cali Beach anonymously, with expenses covered by Guardian Australia
  

• Ben McLeay is a Brisbane-based bartender who produces and co-hosts the comedy current events podcast Boonta Vista