Chapter XVIII: Death in the thinly lit spectrum, Smoking in the bubbles, blogging against myself, meeting Quigley, the Second Renaissance, an Understanding of Time.

I'm spacing out in the Bubbles. Faust and Godfrey are as high as Kites. Godfrey climbs up the side of the sculpture, eeriely lit against the neon orange cloud-sky.

"I think I might topple this thing." He says slowly.

"And by 'this thing' do you mean society?" says Faust.

No one else would come with us. Though the fog descended as predicted, and clouded Olympus like a myst of the fantastic, the mortals refused to mount our Everest. There were two girls in the bubble next to us.

I knock on the would-be door jamb.

"Hello, I'm from the bubble next door, would you guys like to smoke?"

Politely, they declined the offer. I was left with the two crazies climbing the sculpture and spouting nonsense. We finished the bowl and made a go at the chapel. Faust started playing on the Grand Piano and it was fantastic. I quiet the soul and obeyed the crescendoes willingly. Up, Up, Here we go, get ready it will fall out presently..........exhale, and down we go.

Godfrey lit candles while I wasn't paying attention. I had run out into the bathroom in the hallway and taken a solid two feet of paper to write raw horrorible poetry that was streaming out of my altered conciousness. The words were meaningless and impractical. But I looked up and saw Godfrey with the candles and almost died.

He was preaching. The twin beacons of church candle's hung over the altar and ebbed through the room and unholy light. For the pious this was a place of prayer. For the dispassionate and apathetic, it was a place of solace. For the rogue, uncultured, unbaptized element, it was a place of great fear. Nothing in the world is as frightening as the halls of something that is charged with more that heat and electricity. Nothing is as frightening to the burgeoning intellectual as the idea of raw, blind, unwavering faith.

It does not quiet the soul of a scholar.

Faust was running out of material to play from rhote memory. Godfrey proclamations were growing more sacrilegious. Much as this was Brown, and much as falsifying the Gospel in the Chapel seemed perfectly in line with the Brunonian Dream, I became convinced that we were tempting and awful fate. There are three things in this world you cannot fuck with lightly. Faith, principally, can accept no ridiculousness.

So I ran up to the Choir balcony and stood surveying the scene. My memory flashed- an uneasy parallel- two weeks before the scene was similar but frightfully different. For a moment I saw the Rave at the loft on Matthewson, and everything was undone. It was an impossible connection, and struggling out of the link, I fell backwards down the stairs and almost killed myself.

I got back (eventually) to the top of the stairs and found the loft empty save for a partially lit closet to the far left. I opened the door expecting lucifer and the Faustian offer. I had it once before. I have been greatly awaiting the return of my demon, though I still know not how to deal with him.

I called the preacher and we went into the closet. There was a ladder and a light in the attic. We were on the top of the Chapel and able to touch the very flagstone that had constructed Brown two centuries before. A single match would destroy though place. A single spark of love in the loft would undone the Godliness of the chapel. It was SO tempting.

But I grew frightened and we retreated down the ladder. Our vibrations were growing wild. I demanded an exit. The two crazies were refusing treatment. I left out the front because I knew the curtain was falling.

Chapter XVI : The Journalist Re-Emerges

I will set you right into the thick of it:

It is ten of nine, the large Mead, McKim and White State House looms alit like Minas Tirith in the balmy November air. It is noticeably, unseasonably warm. I am walking along the river alone clad in my Birthday suit- Emmanuel, black with Pin Stripes, tailored for last year's Semi-Formal as a gift of my Brother. I lack matching shoes so I substitute reef flip-flops that look almost black in the dim light, and seem almost bad ass against the suit that I am modeling.

I am going to the Brown Daily Herald staff party. There are promises of open bar and 'revelry' in the emails that I have continually recieved. I have just spent 5.5 hours programming Tetris for a class I have come to despise. There is no justification. I deserve to get hammered at this party. It is my right.

So I am alone on the patio to the former Bella Vista restraunt set along the hillside to the WaterPlace Park basin jsut opposite the Providence Place Mall. I go in, cheesy Sinatra and the loud babble of small-talk fills the room. I slide in, nervous. I know about five people on the staff, but with any luck and a lot of free drinks, I might know everyone worth knowing by the end of the night. They are carding at the bar, but an editor gets me a Gin and Tonic and lets me sip it gently while he introduces me to some of the regulars around the office. I shake hands and smile. We are practicing a rite that will become ubiquitious to people of our profession:
"Hello there, I'm Zack."
"Peter"
"What do you do?"
"I write Sports and manage Monday's editorials. You?"
"A little bit of everything"
"Oooooohhh. (Eye brows raise) Are you a first year?"
"You got it."
"I knew it. Every thought about writing Sports? You like Sports? Because I am the incoming Sports Editor and I could really use some solid writers..."

I stroll over to the open bar with my empty G&T and order another one.

"Another Gin and Tonic?"
"Yes, Please... (I register that this is an open bar and that they are letting me order without an ID) Actually, better make that two (wink, a dollar into the tip glass. I will not be carded or bothered about drinks for the rest of the night)."

I turn around and give my spare to an Arts and Culture Writer who takes Photography and the American Novel with me. We joke about Holmes, our TA, discuss his brillance, and ponder his sexuality. She introduces me to her friends, teases me for being a freshmen and suggests intimacy.

A psuedo-mentor, who emailed required praise to me on a Staff requirement, comes over to assist in my drunkeness.

"Dude, we need to do some shots."

We approach the bar. Virgil raises his hand and orders seven Spacenators. I ask him what a spacenator is. He shrugs. An explanation comes later in the night that one of the bartenders invented the drink while messing around in the back one night.

We do a line of seven shots with some other staffers. I shake hands and make more friends. We do another round. I buy a Cosmopolitan and a Gin and Tonic for two beautiful senior girls who can't seem to find their IDs. I smile at the bartender and wink again. She laughs and gives me my drinks. I turn around and do likewise for the girls.

I end up on the balcony overlooking the stirring River Basin and the city of Providence. I smoke Camels with the outgoing editors and joke about their new directions in life. Justin is trying to get a job. Robbie is off to Columbia Journalism. Katie is off to Georgetown Law. I smoke cigarettes and feel badass.

The Journalist is re-emerging. I re-becoming myself.

Hell is 26 hours in the Computer Science Lab with a program that will not finish. Tetris is due in 3 hours, and I am NOWHERE near finishing this thing. Seriously, I have spent hours talking with the TA's trying out code, and really getting absolutely nowhere. God has forsaken me. (I mean that was obvious before this, but now its serious.) God has sent me to purify in this techno-centric hell. I will burn my eyes on a LCD Samsung Monitor until the cones of my irises have been so scorched that I will never again discern between colors again.

This is my penitence. This is the purification of my soul: 27 hours coming up on programming this shit with NO hope for the future.

Can I still drop this class? Can I still pass? I have a 100 right now but fuck me after Tetris has had its course, I might have to drop this class.

Inevitably, someone complained that I had not been keeping up with sober recollections of full scale University debauchery. I apologized, and promised to write more. Enter this post...

Last night was a classic. It wasn't that anything good or fun or exceptional happened, it was more that I got vastly out of my comfort zone, drank to correct for strangeness and ended up spouting wonder on the steps outside my room at 3:30.

It was the last day of sailing for the season and an absolute beauty. A weak northwest wind wound its way through an empty Cranston harbor and puffed longingly against sailboats set against glorious sunsets.

There is much to hope for on nights like that. All of Friday evening lies in front of you- undisturbed, unexplored, undiscovered. I had the quaint idea that I might not drink. I might sit in my room and try what I tired last weekend instead. Edit films until the wee hours, let soccer players who live upstairs have sex til 4 and keep me up crying that it wasn't me.

I did drink. Surprise, Surprise. I ended up playing Mario Kart Drinking on an N64, but frustrated that I could not win or place second for a shot, I got desperate and did 6 shots in the next half hour. I was toasted but not krunk. I rolled through the center of campus drunk and hoping to see Po Ab kids dressed in Western Business for Brown University's Simulation of the Model United Nations.

I had no luck. We rolled back to Keeney and smoked a bit.

Faust and I had already made a go at the green menance. He packed a bowl and asked me if we should do before or after I worked on my MCM project. I said we'd leave to chance. I pulled PLEASURE out of a shuffled stack of Tarot cards and we went off to it.

When I got back to Keeney from whatever it was I was doing (Sigma? Josiah's? Buxton? Grad Center?) I met up with some friends and let them cut my hair. It is half bad. We sat in the hallway and watched clips from Fantasia. Why not? If you are stoned, drunk (i.e. Krunk) and a post modenr heir of the counter culture revolution, then these are the things you need to be doing.

(I look across the quad, with leaves hovering in the crisp November air, and see one of those amazing girls that I would die to be with. She is beautiful always. She is smiling always. She is a Texan, a southerner, and she holds a secret fire New England men cannot resist (understand that the heart of the New England girl is a book of Shakespeare and a pre-destined calculus). She is gone now. Off to something better or more desirable. I am soon after her.)

Riders on the Storm communicates the gentle jazz that is trying to make sense of my stormy soul. Who am I really? Who can I love? I fear finding the truth but missing out on someone to love. What will I do then?

Morning begs off into the afternoon, and I have commitments. Tonight will be no better. I am considering a night of movie-watching in Providence or a trip to Boston. What will suit me? I don't know.

Better go. Life is waiting for me outside the door.

College is filled with pretty girls. You see them across the room and look at them longingly while they toss their hair over their shoulder and pretend not to notice you too.

Maybe, if you are lucky, they do notice you. They might look up- quickly, with a stare that almost knocks you right out of whatever day dream you were having about them. It is practiced. Or so it would seem. In a hundred mirrors around the campus every morning, beautiful, pretty, cute college girls are practicing their glance with pursed lips and electric eyes.

It was not my intention to write anything about girls, my convictions about girls, or anything girl-related today. Indeed, I came to the far library, past the main branch and the art building, so that I might pound out the kind of knock-them dead papers that I have so frequently been attempting.

I did not predict that the beautful girls I was avoiding to focus on my writing would also be here.

Fuck.

iDay, byDay, Long Nights, SPG boycotts, Loneliness, the End of Days, Loki with the keys, Sick of the Games, The Hunt for Matthewson, Reconciliation at the Cable Car, MIT

There is more to tell in this blog than a mortal writer could ever attempt. The MacBook has been acting up recently, and I was already 56/ths down with the greatest post of my life when the floor fell out from under me and the computer crashed.

It was a betrayal I could not bear. Everyone else, it seems, as already betrayed me. Friends in Boston, Friends in New York, Friends at the Hockey Game, the Cast Party, or making out with French Boys while swearing they love you.

I get tired of the hypocrisy. I skipped SexPowerGod and regretted it even while I was deciding to not go. Why didn't I go? It was my kind of party. It was sex, techno, and near nudity- God himself may have designed the event to get me out of the funk I am so deeply sunk into. I skipped SPG and editted film in the MCM until the wee hours. Godfrey showed up, himself deep in a paper about Mill and looked over my soldier at a project I am calling GuerillaJournalism.

We got bored, and booked it back to Keeney with the briefest of stopovers at Jo's for Chips and Hummus. While there, a friend showed up trashed out of her mind, and wished us sailors luck racing our "little yachts" in the morning.

I tried to sleep, Alone, Back in my room, with no Faust to bounce ideas off of or to fight with. It was 2:00- the fiends got back from SexPowerGod and began copulating upstairs to a palpable squeak-squeak that kept me awake until 3:30. I thought about going upstairs and having my way with the pair. No, I decided. Better not. My Karma is bad enough already, I need not make it worse.

Saturday November 4.

8:22 caught me with my pants down and a knock at the door. Preston was pissed. I was supposed to be a Loui's 20 minutes earlier. If the alarm had gone off at all, my anger and spontaneity had promptly shut it off.

We hauled ass to Boston. We had a regatta at MIT on the Charles and little time to fuck around. We listened to lame hip hop as we switch lanes on 95 at 90 mph. We got to MIT's sailing pavilion with half a minute to spare until registration ended. We signed in, got dressed, and crashed on the dock to sleep off early morning lethargy.

The racing was wild. Fucked up conditions dropped the breeze anywhere between 0 - 9 knots. If there was a puff anywhere on the course, you had to get to it. Missing any extra breeze was the difference between top 5 and dead last.

Our starts were good. Only once did I seriously blow a start and that race we sat in last until I managed to cut off two boats on the beat to the finish and retain my cred.

It was the first college regatta that I skippered. In all fairness, it had been at least two years since I had competively skippered a regatta. The Techs were fun, and the Sailing Pavilion was classic- the only problem with the entire situation was that there didn't seem to be a consisten breeze all day.

We dropped a fourth on the first race then mid-fleeted through most of the afternoon. At times, inexplicably the breeze would die out right around the windward mark and create a clusterfuck of drifting boats. This was the hell I could not endure. For two straight races I was third off the line and fourth to the windward mark, but died in the dodgy breeze and had to fight for redemption.

On the last race of the day, with Preston and me cold, tired, and pissed, I got a good start off the pin side and shot out above the fleet alone with a Harvard boat. We kicked it out left looking back at the fleet by the boat who were CLEARLY not moving. Voting on a cross together, we port-tacked the fleet by a mile and went solo into the 1-2 about 15 boatlengths from our nearest competitor.

My boatspeed was good. I kept the quirky Tech bow down from the wind and sail eased to the corner of the boat. We banged corners out left and crushed around the mark in first, already distancing ourselves from the Harvard B - Boat.

We opened up the race on the down wind then struggled to make our way back upwind to a finish line we could not find. Finally, we found the balls delinating the finish, worked our boat though the tepid river waves and sliced on home.

We were first by 7 boatlengths. We could retire for the day and the winter on a silver bullet.

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Later that night I played a drunk in a sort clip of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. I was moonshine, in a dress, and I took pulls from a large glass jug while making off-hand comments about moons, thorn-bushes and hoes.

I finished up, still reeking from a day on the water and kicked home. I was a real drunkard by 12:00 but with no cause and no direction in my life. I retired by 2:00.