Play by Play

2006-12-22T13:35:00.000-08:00

The Night Lies Eternal, For the Beauty of Caring, Survival, Whispers on the Wind, Hope Endures, Indefinite Bohemia.

One week ago. One week ago I was desparately waiting for a distraction promised. It was enough to make me go mad. There was the suggestion and the tension of expectation, but for her- she, the still point of the turning world- time was an agent and accessory not the cruel assassin it had long since become for me.

Long afternoons in the CIT. Long evenings in the Watson. I was writing something about Roland Barthes, Cortazar's "Blow-Up" and the language of photography. I called "Multiplicity and the Disjunctive Identity." I had clearly lost my mind to post-modernism.

I was hoping beyond anything I knew or held dear that my distraction - she, the eternally silent images on the wall that I could not read- would appear at any moment and ride me away into a glowingly brilliant sunrise.

She came just in time.

Crushed an without direction, I exited the Sun Lab and crawled soulless back towards Keeney. I was the anti-thesis of all the I was and had become known for. My spark was buried beneath work, finals stress, and cold responsibility. I swiped into Poland and took a long, dreadful look down the hall.

She was glowing, I promise. There was fire at the end of the hall.

(Enter the interlude: Walk to the MCM, room occupied, return to the Triple XXX (222), kick Evan out to Joy, Whispers in the warm winter air, Evan returns, the night will not go unconquered, kisses forever, hold tight and fast, fight for the dawn, a mission for sunrise, glory in the unoccupied morning air, indefinite bohemia)

I needed no more inspiration. The muse's invocation was like new breath in my lungs. I breathed a thousand fires and felt my mind open up a fountain of youth and love. I could write again as I had not been able to write years.

The muse re-found, re-forged, re-invented.

2006-12-11T17:13:00.000-08:00

Misdirection, Playing everyone everywhich way, PennTV Returns, Harvard by the Balls, RISD Parties, Egyptology Help, 99 Problems, Midnight Blogging, the Journalist Triumphant

I'd start at the beginning if I could but there is nothing as accurate or imperfect as a beginning, and struggling to find one, I begin where I can.

You never know where it is that life will catch up you, or where the paths that you've worn in impropriety will cross again the path of your life as it is. In short, I mean that it is always fun, nostalgic, exciting, and entertaining to note that you were in the very space you suddenly are, for an event of altogether different substance. Difficult moments are contrasted with beautiful ones.

I am crossing Thayer at Soldier's Arch and realizing simultaneously that my last crossing was 11 hours before with a beautiful Egyptology student. It was 3:30 in the morning then, the fabric of imagination and enchantment close about my eyes and mind like the curtains closed around an excited soul.

There is no saving my current position: I am back in that most nightmarish of realities which is chiefly the attempt to program some java in the heart of the Sun Lab.

A week ago, I was coming off a weekend of the most joyful impropriety. Taking up the opportunity to follow up a project of my own devising, I found a camera from Media Services in the Sci Li with 2 minutes to spare on a chilling Saturday afternoon. I went over to Pembroke and woke up Sky. He was passed out on his bed from pushing the partying to dawn.

I collected Faust and recruited Blessing for the occassion. There was to be no going back or wimping out. Our committment to a road trip would have to be final.

Armed with a CVS bag of nuclear holocaust survival food, we traveled to Boston in Sky's rumble box Subaru. Even putting on the E-break made the car sound like it was taking a turn at Le Mans.

On the way up, we plotted angles, techniques and clever ways of trapping Harvard students into the same ficition that had made our first PennTV expose so popular with Ivy League bloggers. For all we knew, fame and notoriety had already exposed to the entirety of the Ivy League. Arriving at Harvard, we would surely be either welcomed as heroes and thrown virgins to entertain ourselves, or shunned and rode out of town- tarred and feathered- on a rail.

No such fate awaited us. After a delicious meal at Bartleby's- that most cherished and iconic of eating establishments- we made a go on Harvard Yard. We found suicidal first-year girls and pretentious Stanford Anthropology Grad students. They were neither as smart as we assumed nor as cool. Tepid answers exposed either weak personalities on camera or weak shit coming out of the Harvard social scene. Clearly, we would need to push things further.

We went for coffee to take refuge from the impossible cold. Blessing bore our overt masogynism tirelessly and was unfailable in her ability to solicit subjects for our all-out documentation of Harvard loserism.

Sky maintained a personality of excellent charm and wit. He smiled when things got awkward and comforted people that this was not a scam (it is, incidentally, a scam). By the time we discovered some absolute iconic Tuxedo-Dinner Dress hilarity at Lowell House, we were all set for a full exposure of Harvard's lameness. A girl pointed out that Sky's fly was unzipped, that women were subverted and forced to be submissive by Harvard's male-driven social scene, and stood speechless when Faust hit her with an unexpected blast of Brunonia's most potent feminist propaganda.

By 12:00- I was at Sigma Chi dancing with women of questionable moral values and dodging a stalker under the skillful guidance of Nick G. I was asked repeatedly about pledging and promised Godfrey that I would consider it if he did. I toasted to the evening and the soapy snow falling outside the beautifully lit House as I slid home for bed. Everything in the world was amazing- I was guiding the GuerillaJournalism project and loving it, I was hopeful for a girl I knew, and I was ready to help Sebas become an MCM god. Sky was busy becoming an internet icon under the guise of a Penn student.

and I was drunk- at least, a little bit.

The Osiris Project

Ingredients:

1 Medium Bottle of Jagermeister
4 Cans of Red Bull
As much Marijuana as you can find

Only once I came down from the all-out destruction of the Osiris Project did I realize what it should be called or what infernal combination of chemicals had made possible its impressive potency. The room was strewn with empty cans of Red Bull and the air smelled slightly of Marijuana. Some strange lamp was hanging from the sprinkler system in a contortion so bizarre even Hunter S. Thompson would have been skeptical of its reality.

When I got back from more well-wasted hours in the Sun Lab, I found the room occupied by Sky Sky, Fasut and the Day Warrior. They were watching the Animatrix and tripping balls. Faust screamed occassionally at the anime-rendered depiction of the mechanization of man. Sky looked at me and gestured to a bottle of Jager that I had requested. I smiled, opened the bag, and pulled out a package of four cans of Red Bull.

"Jager bombs." I said.

He nodded knowlingly.

We did two Jager Bombs apiece and then smoked two bowls. The lights began to flicker, dim, and recite e.e.cummings to my twisted mind. I took another shot of Jager and hit another bowl. I did again. We matched rounds of shots of Jager with resin hits and small bowls. In a half hour, time became as lucid and dissolved as Dali portrait. I was tripping hard on the floor mapping out the nerve endings in my brain like they were christmas lights hung lovingly on a tree. They twinkeld, blinked, and recited Ginssberg in my self-imposed silence.

Suddenly, I leapt up and turned off the lights. I put on Trance and set the iTunes visualizer to display pure energy. We spaced out to Apple illustrations or music so profound that I felt my soul slipping away to follow it into the mountain.

I cut lose. I danced for an uncertain amount of time before finally collapsing on the floor. My body was cut into a hundred pieces. Thrown around the world. and then, slowly, reconstructed. I was ferried across the river of the dead and put back together again. I was resurrected and revived.

I was at the table at Bartleby's about to expose the fact that a Harvard student would never do something like I did the night before when it became clear what the process needed to be named.

"Dude" I said suddenly, "let's call that shit we did last night the Osiris Project."

A few days later, while pulling three nights of all-nighters to finish our MCM project, I suggested the title again as a name for our revamped iTunes visualizer. Seb and Sky agreed. We went ahead with three nights and no days of endless programming and MCMing. We built a site, a poster, a statement and a program that matched tagged photos from the internet to song lyrics. We re-invented the medium of the Visualizer and then crashed hard.

We were cut into pieces with lethary, recollected, reborn, and reignited.

We were Osiris.

Blogging, Misdirection, IvyGate

and so it is that my life catches up with me again and I remember all that I must accomplish before the curtain comes crashing down at the end of the semester. One thing is certain: I passed MC 75 with Tribe, and additionally managed to procure a position as TA for next semester's section.

As for my other classes, I have an English Paper to write on Walter Benjamin (aka my hero) Roland Barthes (aka would marry this dude if he was still alive) or Michelle Citron (the things that I would do to her...) and a History Final next week. Just for fun, I have to make a Paint program for CS 15- and if I can survive that- a life worth living somewhere in January.

Recently, I have been enjoying playing the BDH, IvyGateBlog.Com, and my PennTV project all against each other. I write for one about another, blog for IvyGate while laughing that they include my PennTV videos and spending time that should be doing work, writing this post or editting the footage that burns Harvard on YouTube.

Life can have it however it wants it. It has every part of me that I didn't give to a beautiful Egyptology student in the MCM. I will laugh and cry myself through finals. I don't want to go home. To much has happened here. When IvyGate gets a second dose of PennTV it also manages to recieve a post on the lyrical genius of Brown's Pirate Acapella.

I wish there were an easier way to pass CS.

I better go.

2006-12-07T13:18:00.000-08:00

The end of the blog is a girl. She's nice. She's doesn't know what she believes yet. She doesn't know what she thinks of me yet. She doesn't know if she wants to meet me yet.

Sometimes, this girl turns on the computer and starts typing. There are strange things in her head. They need to be written down. She wonders about publishing them. She wonders if anyone else would read them. She wonders if they're worth writing. The thoughts leave her, and she has nothing but a line of growing poetry without a context- and a blank screen.

The girl who will end this blog likes cursors. She likes when they blink expectingly on empty pages and laughs at me when I try to defeat them. I promise I'll never stop writing if she's near me.

She doesn't know what she thinks of me yet.

The girl who will end this blog likes seeing people on the street and making up stories about them. She doesn't know how to describe herself, but she likes trying to tell what other people are. She sees couples on the streets and wonders about how long they've been dating. She predicts their future: the man will get a better job in the bank he works at downtown, the woman will meet a wonderful librarian who she loves but her parents won't let her marry.

She feels bad for the woman.

This blog will be ended by a girl. She likes new mornings (not all mornings are new), coffee in the cold, scarves that whisper 'I Love You,' and postcards from people she does not expect. She appreciates the randomness of life. She loves things not going how they were supposed to but still working out.

She smiles when she's alone for no reason at all.

( If there is no one there and she smiles, does she really smile?)

The girl who will end this blog practices suggestive winks in her bathroom mirror while she's brushing her teeth. She thinks about leaving school and going to New York or LA- to become the actress inside of her. The girl likes books, warm corners, sleeping late on rainy days, pressing her nose against the cold window when its snowing. The girl likes life and wishes that whenever she is happy she could donate some of that happiness to people in her neighborhood who need it. (When she was little she once offered her smile to sad stranger- he took and it changed his life)

The end of the blog is a girl. She's beautiful. She makes me think up situations to run into her. She makes me plan orchestrated, mediatated events where we can co-exist and she can decide what she thinks about me.

She doesn't know what she thinks of me.

She doesn't know if I am worth thinking of.

2006-11-30T20:02:00.000-08:00

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.

2006-11-18T11:51:00.000-08:00

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.

2006-11-17T14:50:00.000-08:00

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.

2006-11-11T09:05:00.000-08:00

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.

2006-11-10T11:32:00.000-08:00

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.

2006-11-06T10:50:00.000-08:00

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.

---------------------------------------------------------

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.

2006-10-29T11:32:00.000-08:00

Faust in his element, The boy under the bed, Buxton one-hand-cigarette-dancing, Boosfest, Lauren, The Hurricane, Mother Fate, the tight knit web of the universe, inescapable.

There is the unique question of where to begin. The notion of the narrative is suddenly challenged by readings in the post modern and my concerns that though I have all day, I still don't have enough time.

I could make it interesting. I could begin with the girl rolling out my bed this morning and laughing as she went looking for her shoes and a sweatshirt she could borrow.

Faust is playing Rachmaninoff in the background. It soothes the soul. I pity the time in my life when these hung-over, still high mornings will have disappeared beneath the pavement of a civilized life. What will I do then? Will I connect the dots and follow life to its inevitable conclusion? (oh do not ask 'What is it?') Will I reject the Americana that reared me and disappear into the jungle of the third, unexplored, uncared for world?

I will live. And I will write today. And the conclusions/actions of the distant future will have to remain the concerns of those temporalities. My life is busy enough, I might say. My experience is clouded and convoluted enough. I need no concerns of futurama. The present and the past are enough to occupy my mind thoroughly.

Saturday morning broke like a scene from the Perfect Storm. Wind and Water everywhere. Up the quad, down the quad, wind was funnelling autumn leaves like lost children into a crusade they would not survive. I see the lines marching down George Street clearly. It was 8:33 in the morning. There was no one in the Ratty. Tranquility pervaded. Brown was how the viewbooks might prefer it to be. Life was slow, rainy, and self-reflexive.

By the time we got down to Rhode Island Yacht Clud, we were all convinced that it was not windy enough and that fate would force us to sail. We resisted. No! It was windy. It was scary. We were hung over, and sailing in a nor'easter with hurricane winds is no way to start a saturday.

Like it was a snow day, we had all drunk heavily the night before. There was a party at Machado. Faust, Sky and Myself shotgunned Busch Lights on the Patio. Anne was across the party. I didn't care. It was clear that she wanted no part of me, and by prideful equaniminity, I wanted no part of her. She was a lost cause- A femme perdue- the cause was not worth it.

The juice was not worth the squeeze.

But I digress. Machado was a decent party. I was dressed as a cyclist with my wallet and my cell phone padding the crotch of some tight underarmor shorts. I had a Ben & Jerry's Cycling Jersey to boot.

It was all fun and games. We left by jumping over the highest wall in the patio and running to The Gate where sweet Hindi girls served me sandwiches that might have been made for the gods themselves.

Sky took us back to the room. We were still recovering from Thursday night sheningans with Godrey and Bramie. Three Joints, Two rounds on the Vaporizer. Thursday was lethal.

In Sky's room, I picked up the Admiral and we smoked another J. Kate, sweet girl and true, was invested in protecting her sobriety and smoke-free living. Unfortunately, the corruption was too strong. We won her over to the realm of the sith and the pot fiend positing her failure on our raw evil and her intrinsic goodness.

But that was Friday. And I was writing to recollect Saturday. The Autumn Tempest raged far and wide throughout New England, and only with the coming of twilight did the foul storm desist. I had the faint notion and recollection that the storm might sacrificed itself for the glory on Halloween Weekend partying.

Saturday night left me in the room tripping on Postmodern theory and reviewing New Media Artwork for an online exhibition. The project was titled "Interfaces of Imagination" and I was frankly getting way too into analyzing digital artworks that others could not understand without an introduction.

As a means of checking my analysis, I subjected the Hindu prince to the project as a whole. He struggled with the artwork but accepted the writing as 'good' and 'informative'. I had a terrible headache. Faust was at Jo's obtaining a necessary bottle of coke for mixing. Goethe was not partying. Sky was still working on his MCM project. Godfrey and Bramie were in Vermont. I was alone, cold, and with a pounding headache.

Things did not look good.

But the human spirit has a strange ability to recover even under the most extraordinary conditions. Within the conviction of my exasperation, I collapsed onto the floor and begin weeping gently about the failure of the Universe to allow its participants the occassional departure.

But fate, the cold knife in the night that stabs souls who are content to die, had a few twists and turns it wanted for me.

I threw on the preppiest clothing I had at my disposal. I popped the color of a white polo. I put on some boat shoes and draped an argyl sweater over my shoulders. I made a note, in italics, trying to emulate some sort of Greenwich scrawl that might ensure my costume's authenticity. "Ask me about the TEA PARTAY".

I set out. Alone. This level was a solo mission. Faust was a half hour late on the coca cola. I took a shot of Admiral than thanked the sailor for his hospitality and did one again.

I went over to try my luck at D Tau but there were about a hundred people waiting in line.
I did a 180 and snuck into Buxton where it was all house music, cheap wine, and cigarettes.

I have tried my best not to judge the Buxton crowd or to reduce them to their classic "Eurotrash" moniker. But unfortuantely, this has grown impossible. Not only is just about everyone in Buxton overtly pretentious, but they also dance with one hand in the air while the smoke a cigarette or holding onto a glass of luke warm, weak Californian wine. Last night, the people in charge of the party in Buxton wouldn't let a song finish. The sneered on Americana and changed tracks more often than Fabio at a fashion show.

I couldn't handle the scene. It was bullshit. The dancing was weak and uninspired. They had the music but lacked the movement. In the definition of fullest irony, they played techno remixs of great American acid-rock anthems. They thought they were avant-garde and lightyears ahead of the culture Americana. I laughed because they had not spent four hours narrating a collection of Video Game art for a class that was so absurdly post modern you had to check your old books at the door.

I bailed on Buxton with Sky Sky and made a go of D Tau from every which way. We tried the backstairs, the upstairs, the backdoor and the window. Fortunately, right as I was makign my last go at the fortress, a friend caught my hand and led me down the stairs right into a steady handshake with a boy I had gone to High School with.

I got on the dancefloor fast. I ran into some friends and smiled with them over 'Gansetts and flashing disco lights.

I was about to leave the party when I ran into an old friend who hooked me up a beautiful blonde girl who look curiously like someone else I knew. Foolishly, I supposed it was this other girl (it wasn't). We danced hard and long, throbbing and grinding on expertly mixed beats from the Fishco DJ. I lost my sunglasses, or rather Faust's sunglasses, somewhere their on the dancefloor. It might well have been my virginity. The pulsating strobes and shimmering neon lights disoriented me from the moment. I looked down and saw a beautiful blonde schoolgirl gyrating somewhere around my waist.

She was wrapped in apron of neon lights. The techno was glowing all around her. I had her name was Lauren when I was introduced. The process had gone something like this:

Friend: ZACK!
Me: Hey!
Friend: Meet my friend here. This is LAUREN and she is (muffled voice with deep bass overlay) my girlfriend. Why don't you dance with her.

I did. We danced all night. I was with her on the dancefloor for anywhere between 1 and 2 hours. It was unbroken and quasi-mystical. We approached one another in the same instant. We were kissing for the rest of the night.

We went back to my room with trail of friends for shots from the Admiral. When I got back to the room Faust and Blessing were out of control. Faust had clearly smoked WAY too much. He was ranting and raving about savage burns he had employed on the women who had come down to Poland looking for me.

Lauren was looking pretty and sexually-charged. I asked her mutual friend for more information. She explained that Lauren and her had gone to boarding school together. I laughed and turned to Lauren.

"You go to Ethel Walker?" I asked.

She nodded.

"Do you know AJ Callie from Trinity?"

She nodded again now blushing.

"That kid and I were best friends." I explained. "He's my boy."

The mutual friend started laughing uncontrollably.

"Zack you idiot," She explained. "This is AJ's girlfriend. Didn't I tell you that?"

*************************************************

Go back to the beginning. Go back to this morning. A girl rolled out of my bed and went laughing after her shoes and my sweatshirt. Think about it.

2006-10-22T23:01:00.000-07:00

Character Studies in the Modern Vernacular, Sculpting Time, Aftermath, Drugs and Drunkness subsides to Shangrai-la, Voices of Artists, The objectification of Knowledge.

Character Studies occupy my mind. A couple of weeks ago, Faust and I took the ferry back from Newport up Narragansett Bay and back into Providence. A French couple sat behind us, kneeing me in the back and speaking French in hushed overtones.

We fell asleep, and forgot about the tourists until we got off the ferry in its obscure , post-industrial terminal, and set about trying to figure out a way back to Brown. There was supposed to be a bus that went into Kennedy Plaza, and perhaps, by College Hill.

There was no bus. Faust and I stood there like homeless people pondering our next move. We considered walking back, but it was too far.

"Besidees" Faust added. "Is there even a sidewalk around here?"

The French Couple was equally concerned about getting back to central PVD. Disturbed, the man walked over to us and asked, in broken english, if the bus was coming.

"We hope" I responded.

He looked confused.

I repeated myself slowly. Taking the time to sound out my germanic-latinate language for his untrained ears " That's what we hope." I said again.

His wife came over and asked what we had said.

His response was forward and easily understood for us preveyors of the Brunonian Dream.

"Esperamus" he repeated. Faust and I laughed ourselves to sleep.

Hope is everywhere in Rhode Island. State Motto. School Motto. First College Dormitory. Name of Public High School. Cornerstone of Rhode Island history and heritage.

We hoped the bus would come, and it did.

***********************************************

Today's adventure took us to the RISD Museum for a solid dose of modernity.

We got in for free waving our Brown IDs like valid press passes. We hadn't been in the first gallery for more than five minutes before we were swept into a tour of the Gallery's modern collection and a 60 minute survey of 20th century art.

At the time when Margaret Stills, Associate Curator for the RISD Museum and RISD Alum, made her calls for the "tour," Faust was engaged one on one with a painting called "The Mountaineers and the Bears." Some woman behind him was explaining in that the painting was a proto-cubist work that Braques and Picasso had actually emulated. Its author was a remote Parisian Bohemian who chose love-making with a Russian Princess to humping fame and celebrity in the celebrated world of the Electric Revolution.

We were swept up into the dialouge of Ms. Stills, and forced to read small quotes from the Gallery's artists whenever we neared some of their works. Stills maintained that she loved hearing the voice of the artist when she was near their works.

"I need to hear Duchamp when I see his work. I hear them calling to me, and their voices inform the art's authenticity."

Her eyes fluttered like a drug addict behind half-moon glasses. She seemed like some sort of failed artist caught up in the body of Harry Potter's Professor Trelawney.

The tour was Faust, Me, and a Knitting Circle of six geriatrics who nodded in intellectual agreement with Margaret Stills. We sampled some van der Zee, some Cezanne, some Jasper Johns, and some works that challenged our understanding of art as a whole.

There was a piece labelled ready-made that was composed of a rock and some hair clippings collected from a Harlem barbarshop. Stills laughed and maintained that she knew the artist well.

"He won that genius grant a couple of years ago." she explained. "You know, the MacArthur Grant?"

The knitting circle of art historians nodded. I spaced out. Across the Gallery was a television set with a string of texts repeating across the top of the screen.

"PEOPLE ARE THE PRODUCT OF THE TELEVISION.
THE TELEVISION DELIEVERS YOU TO THE ADVERTISER
THE ADVERTISER CONSUMES YOU
HE IS THE CONSUMER
YOU ARE THE CONSUMED
THE TELEVISION MAKES PEOPLE THE MASS MEDIA
AND CONSUMES THEM."

I started tripping out. Was it hot in here? Or was I up to my neck in Modernism. This rock with some hair glued on was doing nothing for me. Jasper Johns was dodgy enough. This was out of control. I was on the verge of tripping out noticeably. If only I could get back to "Bears and Mountaineers." I be fine if I could get there. This stuff here on the other hand...

Faust and I escaped to posters of Olneyville Art-Rock concerts and raves. Had I again missed the cultural renaissance I was convinced was coming. I am a renaissance man without my renaissance. When/Where will it come? Is Providence the cradle that shall bear me?

We wandered through a tripped out exhibit called Shangrai-la la land. There was an alien in a bathtub melting through a spickot as he remained torture by a TV set. I was instanteously aware of the words scrolling across the TV downstairs.

I AM A PRODUCT
THE TV MAKES ME TO BE CONSUMED
THE MASS MEDIA IS THE CONSUMPTION
OF THE MASSES

More craziness inside of the Exhibit reminded me of our mantra. When things get too weird, Faust and I remind ourselves that it was "A GOOD THING WE DIDN'T DO ANY DRUGS."

It was that sort of an experience.

We got out fast. No sort of Classical Art could make up for this insanity. We went back to room and I pounded 150 pages of Lolita. No hope for the restless. Goethe fast asleep next door. Faust on the phone with a friend from Fordham.

I want somebody to love- whether or not I have found truth. Rain consumates happiness and lethargy.

"Just give in you fool...this will only take a moment."

2006-10-21T22:26:00.000-07:00

Beauty, Living through the Speakers, Higher and Higher, iPod = iGod, Federal Hill, Contentment

I am in love again, could I say it was for the very first time? A solid dinner in Federall Hill left me full and contented. I fell asleep after I had to abadon my Father on the road to the Expressway as Grady was demanding service. Dad and I had a great meal up in a locale that was at once kitsch and fundamentallytrue.

In the aftermath of a drunken night, I am find myself trying to convert. It is a 2:30 in the morning and all I need is a field goal to solidify the evening.

Mis-steps at every possible avenue allow me to believe that Karma owes me a good turn. I have watched the night find its way into the dark corners of the world and re-emerge triumphant. Smiling like a Count Dracula with fangs dripping blood in the midnight air.

I wanted her, and her, and her over there. Its as if, if I decide I want them, fate decides they shall never want me. I piece together a quiltwork of oops and what-ifs in the fairy-inspired drunkness of the night.

We never got to the real party. We were in the wrong room. The real party was dancing 35 deep in a room across the quad. We were deep in the Rugby Lesbian Frat and wondering which way was out. Goethe emerged like the messiah amongst the trash and bile that surrounded the rooms. It was all techno and lingerie and women you preferred to see in clothes.

I took a hug from a distant friend in the corner and introduced myself through her to the only other attractive women at the party. Goethe came from the same backdoor I had taken in.

He and I crossed through a hallway that was fundamentally sacrilegious. It was all graffitied and a tagged up every which way. On the walls proclaiming "ZDI" and "Brown Women's Rugby" was the phrase "Crotch Munchers '06".

I vomited falsely in the midnight, flourescent air. What the fuck were they talking about. I had the feeling that some sort of sick sexual degradation was necessary to gain entrance to this women's frat.

I needed out.

Goethe and I took the nearest exit to the frat across the hall. I thought it was Sigma. It turned out to be A E Pi, a Jewish establishment well-known for throwing mediocre parties and holding it down for the glory of Hilliel.

Caleb hit us up with Dodgy cheap beers called Genesees. Goethe and I made do while a fellow Jewish A E Pi-er explained their maintance of the frat's Shukkot despite religious code against such behavior.

I smiled, and joked. Goethe pounded 'Gansetts on my behalf and explained that I was already past due.

There is no need to elaborate on the details herafter. It was all "Goodnight", cokes, smiles and hugs. Girls went by with water bottles winking at destiny and promising no hangovers in the morning.

I went after Dallas as though I was Santa Anna. I could never succeed. She was promised to a jock somewhere above my stature, and the radical writer/poet element was not enough to win her over.

I could not woo Anne either. She was drunk. She was disobedient. I wished that she would come back to Poland with me and talk with Emme. But she wouldn't.

I curled up in a sheet listening to Death Cab and praying that death would take me quickly. Another wasted Saturday at Providence. What the fuck do I care if there were parents and the Beirut?

I wanted something. But Brown gave me nothing. Like before, only again. Nothing was different. Thayer Street means nothing to the sober and saddened. I was alone and isolated.

What does it even matter?

2006-10-19T20:40:00.000-07:00

Sadness, The girl and the Athaeneum, Letter to an imagined friend, Tetris for your girlfriend, mood lighting.

There is a girl here that I like who goes everyday to the Athaeneum. It's a short walk. Out of Keeney you take a left on Benevolent, walk a block down to Benefit, and then take a right straight on to the Athaeneum.

When I see her and she smiles at me, I have dreams that we are in love, and that she only smiles that way at me. I dream that we are both in the Athaeneum on a windy autumn afternoon. I go to find a book in the high stacks in the old second story and find her nestled in a corner reading a poem that I am extremely knowledgable about. I take the poem from her and read it beautifully, eliciting smiles and winks and love eyes that are only meant for me. The librarian comes upstairs to quiet me, because I have grown loud and impassioned. She has no choice but to hurry us both from the building. I make apologies about my behavior, as my library love laughes and laughes again. She is uncontrollable. We walk down the narrow Providence streets arm-in-arm like postcards of students that Hallmark deseminates for aging academics. We are perfect, and the day neither ends nor begins.

It exists only as the palpable reality of imagined conciousness that is available to those who are in love.

2006-10-16T07:54:00.000-07:00

Monday mornings are lonely in the Brown Computer Science labs. At these times past the witching hour, its just the purists and freshman hacks like me. It thought you might be interested to know that we had Barak Obama ( Democrat Senator from Illinois) to Brown this past week. I waited in the line on the Green for four hours, and still did not manage to get in (more on this later).

In anger, I teamed up with a certain St. George's alum and my roomate to lead a brief, but glorious riot on the steps of the auditorium. We had about two hundred angry disappointed Brunonians chanting in unison. About 1500 more students who also were waiting in line hurried to join or to watch the simulcast in Sayles Hall next door.

They sent the police in, and tried to calm things down. When they dispersed the crowd, the nameless St. George's alum managed to get in on the last handpicked ten students for the last row. Disappointed, I walked around the building with two friends, and tried to appropriate a new way in.

We got our chance when an elderly VIP made her way in one of the "EXIT ONLY" doors on the far side of the building. It lead to the front row and to the RESERVED seating section. Catching the door just before it slammed, I made my way into the reserved seating. My friends and I busted out pens and notebooks, and began explaining to whoever asked that we were with the Brown Daily Herald. A couple friends of mine starting yelling my name across the auditorium and asked how I had got reserved seats. I tried to ignore them, and pretend I didn't know them but it was no use. An informed usher checked our names against the press list and escorted us to the foyer.

We were supposed to be kicked out completely, but thanks to some clever new excuses, a ten-minute hideout in the bathroom, and some solid acting, we managed to convince the ushers that three students who "snuck in the front of the auditorium" had taken our seats. The ushers took pity, and let us stand in the back of the auditorium when Obama finally arrived to talk.

The next morning (friday 13th) the George's student came by with the ProJo. Our riot was a central component of the article on Obama.

2006-10-14T11:49:00.000-07:00

The Candid and the Contrived, Gfx, Going to far, Pirates of the Caribbean depression, Post-it notes for life, 2 pounds for a dollar, Stella.

It is a beautiful afternoon. I have the strange foreboding that days like these are numbered in the autumn annual for fairness and equality of distribution. This might be our only one.

Fear and Loathing everywhere last night. Fear and Loathing at the French House. Fear and Loathing in Keeney. Fear and Loathing at the Avon with a hint of acid-freaks in the front and a bottle of rum and coke in a Newbury Comics nalgene near the back.

Thayer Street is decadent and deprived.

I had strange experiences last night. I fell in love. And I didn't know her name.

Twilight cliches will not excuse my night of impropriety for the singular sensation of being lovestruck. I have been in love before, and this, in comparison, was tepid. Nevertheless, the warming sensation in my body when I saw her, the uncanny inability to speak when I hugged her. My sudden seizing up, my instaneous lack of witticisms, my tongue hardening up-- it was all new and unexpectedly paralyzing.

A few flashes of time and space later, and I was at the Avon for a midnight movie. It was hot. I was drunk and tired. I was hungry. I got up suddenly and made my way over to the concession stand.

The fuckers at the snack bar said the concessions were closed. I started waving a 20 and demanding popcorn. They told me again that the vending of movie concessions was over.

I asked where I could find a bathroom. They laughed and shoed me away. I went back into the theater and thought about peeing on the wall. Fuck these people I thought. Screw these goddamn independent film-I'm-too-cool-for-you concession nazis.

At that very moment, I spied a sign on the staircase somewhere near the left side of the theater. It looked like it had been made of bakelite sometime during the height of the art noveau movement. "Rest Rooms" with an arrow going up the stairs. I was halfway there.

I went up the film noir staircase at a hop. Suddenly, halfway up the stairs, I stopped. There were lights flashing behind me. They caught me. I could make a run for it or give myself up. I decided on the later and turned around to expose myself to their guns and ammo, germs and steel.

It was an old vaudevillian theater sign with lights running a set pattern around the prephierary, and the words "AVON THEATER" written in some sort of classic italicized script. I smiled and continued upstairs, around the corner, into the men's bathroom.

It was loud as all hell in there. There was a speaker hidden behind a door, and I could find it. It was somewhere in the ceiling like a big electric snake in the sky.
"Pretty we would both be completely twisted" it whispered, "but there was no going back, (back, back, back on echo), WE WOULD HAVE TO RIDE OUT."

I went over to the urinal. It was one of those classic six foot solid cast numbers that dropped all the way into the floor like some sort of well.

I came out of the bathroom, there was a candy machine that had not been there before. It was one of those old cigarrette vending machines with the rods. I dropped in 50 cents and pulled on letter e, two mini-toberlones dropped into the tray and I released the device.

I put another 50 cents in. I pulled on letter e, it refused to budge. I pulled the other rods to make sure they worked. letter b worked fine. Two York peppermints dropped into the tray and I stashed them away.

I was out of quarters now. I went back down stairs adn slivered down the row until Io got to where Joy was sitting. I handed her a York peppermint and threw one at Evan. he flipped out, and began screaming I hushed him and went back to watching the film.

We were twisted, but no one cared. I was pretty sure that soemday, in someway, I would be watching a film made by one of us, and with any luck, I would be even more thrashed then I was on that night.

2006-10-09T11:12:00.000-07:00

Karawane becomes Eskimo Video Game, Late back to Keeney, Screw your Crew, Four Square was only the Beginning, Two and Oh, Doug Interrupts, Cleaning up licentiousness.

Screw your Crew.

The party was called Screw Your Crew. You were paired with your crew and you were meant to find them a date that they could 'screw'. It was a sort of voyueristic, vicariousness that I liked and looked forward too. We had to dress up with ties and khakis- I felt like I was going home. I was going to an upperclassman party that I held keys to- I was out of my mind.

But the night did not start at S your C. No, it started somewhere further down Thayer at the MCM house where I was busy chugging out an intimidating art project with little time to go. It was called 'Karawane' or rather, it was based on Karawane, a sound poem concocted by Hugo Ball in 1917, at the dawn of the Dadaist Revolution. My simple task was to 're-interpret it using New Media technologies.' What this basically meant was that I need to re-invent the avant-garde.

I have a hard time re-defining re-definition.

On Tuesday, after completing my studies in Computer Science and taking off on a trip to Rome with Godfrey, the idea for my re-intrepretation became shockingly clear. I would make a video game. I would put Hugo Ball's classic dadaist piece inside the framework of childish, video entertainment. And this would cheapen it. This would trivialize it to a point that might be misunderstood as parody but in essence would de-value Karawane in the same way it tried to de-value conventional art.

It was some sort of a vision, and I spent Wednesday and Thursday night fleshing this out. I got a free video game maker called Power Game Factory and used its default (only) characters to stage a strange neo-dadaist one player, scrolling scenery SNES classic.

Hugo Ball was defaulted to an armed eskimo. His critics, or what I might attribute as his critics were supplied by snowmen that were more than metaphorical. This was Switzerland after all. This were not as simple as they seemed.

But this was just the creation element. By the time Thursday rolled around. I had Evan down in the MCM studio with me testing out the game and giving me his feedback. We were pushing through and Evan liked it.

He told me that Faith, my crew, had screwed me with a date that I had explicitly requested not to have. I had respected her wishes for not matching her up with a friend, but apparently these things were not going to go both ways.

I hooked her with Sky Sky, and upon learning that her and Tucker were having a thing, brought the Swim Team Legend as well. He was dressed for the occasion and even lent me a tie. He and Sky were great friends and we cautiously made our way up Thayer with a singular goal in mind:

Screw your Crew.

The Keene Street abode already had near Camelot-like prestige in my heart. It was home. It was protected. It was safe and well-armed. You could roll into the Sailing House for a beer and a cheeseburger and roll out with a life vest and a crew of your own. It was cozy, and so past disrepair that we constantly referred to it as the Animal House.

I remember once giving someone directions to the house during a routine visit to the premises.

My directions were short and sweet.

"Go way up Thayer past the CVS and take a right on Keene Street. Look for a house that has a ton of people in it and looks pretty wrecked... no, that IS the sailing house."

I got there at 11:00. We were a little late. The girls had been curling their eyebrows and what not for an additional hour and a half. I was just happy to arrive at the debauchery. I took the first drink that I was offered and did not look back.

Sky and I held down the bar in the basement with Charm and affability. We were serving Rum and Cokes, Cider and Schnapps, Vodka and anything, Jager and Anything, and the Mystery Special that people kept asking for. The house also had its own signature cinnamon punch, four kegs of beer and Gin and Tonics floating around upstairs for those who knew what was goign on.

The bar itself is worth mentioning. It was construct from the hull of a Laser sailboat and used the cockpit of the boat as a hold for the alcohol. I had heard about this legendary component of the Sailing House far before I ever reached Brown. At my Level I's the instructor knew Stoner very well, and laughed over his use of a broken down laser as the means of a bar.

It was still considered genius however, and Brown's sailing reputation of late was tied uncannily to this sort of architectural genius.

I called up the girls who were back in my hall, and invited them up. I was dressed to the teeth and proud of it. I was in a Po Ab school blazer from freshmen year, a standard blue button down, Berks, Khakis, and a pink tie that Tucker had lent me for the occasion. Sky was in a kick-ass argyl suit. Godfrey was in St. George's apparel, and was almost comatose by the time the Upperclassmen on the team came down and start demanding that we take shots of Jagermeister on the whistle.

I love Jagermeister.

We kept pushing it in the basement. There was a long thin table down the eastern-side of the basement that was designed for flip-cup. We had 25 people to a side at one point. 25 People vs. 25 People.

It was incredible.

It was at this point that the girls started to show up. I was serving drinks at the bar when a bunch of old friends came in and started demanding drinks. I told them that if they didn't like their bevarages, I would drink it.

I drank about three different drinks that I had made for Dallas alone. She smiled and winked at me, but still refused to drink.

I got my friends together upstairs and we started a dance party. Godfrey was past due. He was grinding with about five different girls at one time. His eyes were 100% closed and he may have been unconcious.

Nevertheless, the Sailing Team was busy taking snap shots of Godfrey and preparing to torture him with photographic evidence the next day.

Midway through dancing with my date, I skipped out to go try a shotski, a ski that had six shot glasses glued to it.

Unfortunately, by the time I got to the Shotski there was no one else willing to take a hit. I saw the upper classmen and demanded a Jager on the whistle. They gave me a good long upwind beat, and I stumbled out of the withdrawal.

Shannon, a beautiful girl who I had been serving earlier downstairs, caught me. She was looking angelic. She always looks angelic. She told me she was drunk, but I doubted it. There was still the twinkle in her eyes that you lose when you've been drinking. There was still the mystery of sobriety mixed lightly in the stratosphere of her eyes. She was not quite gone yet.

She told me that she had to go. I thanked her for staying or coming or whatever. I was happy she was there right then and I explained that she probably should not leave. She smiled and kissed me. I kissed her back and pretty soon, we were kissing right there on the dancefloor.

Doug 'Fuck Moderation' came up behind me smelling like a Central Park hobo. He started rubbing my head, (AS I WAS FUCKING KISSING THIS BEAUTIFUL GIRL), and laughing in a high pitched squeal. HEEHEHEHEHEHEHE!

She didn't want to kiss anymore. She explained again that she was drunk and that she needed to go. I kissed her on her cheek and asked for her number. She gave it, winked and me and asked me to come see her sometime soon.

And she was gone.

I started punching Douggie. He told me that his intervention had made the kiss happen. I stormed off disgusted toward the front room. Then I found a four-square ball and started playing. We were all having a good time, and I was on the 4-square rampage.

In the middle of a game, Godfrey ran outside and started vomitting. Conservative estimates explain that he hooked up with anywhere from 3 to 7 girls on the dancefloor.

He was now blackout drunk.

I too progressed toward that event horizon. I was suddenly walking down Thayer with Dallas and screaming at the people in Via Via to open up.

"All we want is some pizza sir, we mean you no harm"

We were further down the street and Dallas' friends were explaining that she had a boyfriend. I was out of luck with that girl. And I quickly wound up angry and alone on Wriston trying to remember where exactly Keeney was.

I ran into Liz, and important element for Later stories, who told me that I looked beautiful. She gave me a black and mild and told me to finish it. I smoked it to the plastic.

She laughed and started groping my face she told she was at Brown to find a rich man and marry him. I asked her if she would be happy. She said yes.

She laughed and made ago on a passing security gaurd. I winked at her and at destiny and walked back to my room.

2006-10-07T12:26:00.000-07:00

Yes Virignia, Ninja's in Keeney, Phyton by the backdoor, Rome in the Rain, Dreams of Brave Ulysses, Enlightenment through Cream.

Occasional sobriety leads to a rationality that clears the mind wonderful. The lucid, understandable state of thing presents itself as a time to review what my body has been up to. My memory alone seems to have remained intact, my mind having lost since lost control of motor reflexes, and given up on moderating tomfoolery.

This will be the week in review then. I am currently back at home in the NPT after another week on insanity in the streets of Providence, Rhode Island. It is the time to recover and recollect.

(I let Cream's Tale of Brave Ulysses drone on the macbook behind me.

...now, sing in me muse.)

Tuesday is a good place to start. Monday was mundane and uneventful. I went to classes and took notes, and learned. I finished my computer science assignment with the help of a skilled CS tutor. This is important to note. If I did not finish this Comp Sci stuff a full three days before it happened, then none of the wonderful things that I am about to relate could possibly have happened.

Tuesday, though, I was talking about Tuesday. On Tuesday Mr. Knowles dropped by for a casual smoke and some weed at Rome. We were under the lattice in a steady rain packing bowls and smoking until we literally could not smoke anymore.

The feeling came on soft and fell like a crescendo. We were lit somewhere outside of Keeney and needed to put things together.

We were back in my room watching Flying Circus with the girls from across the hall. They reported that there were ninjas stealing across the quad. We didn't believe them. We went outside and discovered six Japanese assassins climbing up a drain pipe and into the second story window over the door.

We ran upstairs, chasing them around the building in our elevated fashion, wondering if the god damn ninjas were real or if we were just simultaneously concocting the most powerful vision of our lives.

Confused, Evan grabbed one of them and held him against the wall.

"Who are you guys?" Evan demanded.

The ninja refused to speak. He pushed Evan back and assumed an attack stance. Evan fought him off and pushed him back against the wall.

"What the fuck are you guys doing?" He continued.

Knowles pulled Evan off the Ninja and let the ninja tear up the stairs to Archibald. Laura took the trail and rushed up the stairs after him, we caught up and chased these characters until they barricaded themselves in a room on the second floor and we assumed that were waiting until we lost interest.

We tried to smoke them out- like dogs. We thought about lighting up but there was a sprinkler overhead. There was a rumor that they didn't work, but who wanted to test it out?

It dawned us slowly that these guys might not be just waiting inside. They had scaled drain pipes in, they could kung fu their way out.

2006-10-02T22:27:00.000-07:00

hello

2006-10-01T12:00:00.000-07:00

Amborsia by the backdoor, Sleepy Hollow in the MCM, October, If Your Going to San Francisco by Trance, Hunter S. Thompson/Jefferson Airplane Techno.

After definitive misadventures on Friday night, I was dedicated to a sober saturday. The regatta at Yale had not gone particularly well. Nick G, my Hanover, NH skipper, and myself were WAY too heavy for the 3-5 knot breeze we found at Yale Corinthian Yale Club.

Fortunately, Will "Turbo" Turnbull, dropped some serious heat and won the A division. We finished third over Yale, Harvard, and Salve, but below Conn. College and URI.

We booked it back to Providence in time for me to spending 3 hours cleaning up my room and doing laundry. I scrubbed my floor with a sponge, then with resolve cleaning spray and finally with Clorox bleach wipes. It was spic and span. I was absolved of my great sin by cleaning so thoroughly.

The night grew later. Knowles got back from MIT, and we talked over Riots in Keeney with Evan at the Ratty. It was inevitable that some serious carnage go down a Brown. It was inevitable that radical freshmen, (i.e. me, Evan, and Jeff) holed up in Keeney and brought national media attention by rioting in the dorm and demanding withdrawal from Iraq and bigger cups in the dining hall.

We decided that we would request water from the government, hit it with high amounts of acid and then distributed it to the detriment of our classmates. Things were turn ugly, people would begin tripping out evil. We would leak a story to the press that the government had given us acid-laced h2o. We will embroil the world in cynicism and controversy.

We would prevail, and when the citadel fell, there would be no leadership nor retribution we would part of the maddening crowd, incapable of leading a riot or of any culpability.

We got back to my room and drank a six pack of Newport Storm while watching an episode of Family Guy that featured Brown University heavily.

Theresa showed up at 11:30 and demanded to know what we were doing. She told us about Ambrosia, the top-notch party that was going on in Faunce House. It was the definitive hipster-cognazanti-rave. It was upstairs, and there was a line of more than 200 people waiting to get in. The line went up the stairs and onto the Main Green. There was no way that I was waiting in this line.

Jeff and Evan abadoned me to the dream that I would get into a party people had been waiting for two hours to enter. I snuck halfway through the line on the cause of bathroom needs and then switched to the far stair-case and tried the backdoor. It was a no-go. There was heavy security and the GHM staff wouldn't have anyone up the stairs.

I explained that I had already been up. They explained that I needed to go around.

Pretty soon, I was going to be completed twisted. I had one more shot for the killer rave before I gave up, called it a night and slept in my recently cleaned sheets or played Pacman on the screen at the MCM.

I went into the mail room and checked my mail. There was nothing in the box. I remembered a second stair case near the mailroom. I tried a few doors. There was nothing. Then I found the stair case at the far end of the mail room with the words "FIRE DOOR" stenciled in red-lettering onto the hunter green metal door.

I pushed through. There was no alarm, but there was a stair case. It looked like an abadoned access shaft in an old mine. I climbed to the second floor pushed my way down the Chaplin's hallway and through another door that said "DO NOT OPEN BETWEEN 1 am and 6 am - ALARAM WILL SOUND."

I was at the top of the line to the party. Three or four guys were suppreseign the top of the line that was surging forward for admission. I walked up to the cashiers and gave them my money. A guy asked for my ID and then asked if I had already shown it. I said yes, and he hit me up with a red bracelet for buying drinks.

I walked into the party able to do more than most of the people in there. I had not waited in any line. I had outflanked the insanity of waiting it was nothing but dancing ahead.

I went over to the bar and bought a drink called "God on the Beach." It was a combonation of cranberry juice, orange juice, and tequila. I couldn't deal with it. I threw it away.

*******MAJOR SIDENOTE HERE***********
*I have only thrown away three drinks in my life. The first was a WRETECHED tequila *that Tom Rodelli of Sherman Street, Newport and Paris, France mixed. The second was *a Mount Gay Rum at Marisa's house on Spring Street, Newport. This drink, this *terrible concoction- was the third.
*************************************

I went back to the bar and bought another drink. It was called "Hades Hjinks." It was Red Bull and Vodka. It was delicious and it glowed like enriched uranium under the blacklights. I saw a TA and bought her a drink. We danced for a long time until I had to go to the bathroom and found Schuyler.

It was a beautiful evening. It was the best party I had been to in my life. I wasn't drunk, though I had been drinking. I was depressed, though I had been thinking. I was out of control on the dance floor. I was dancing for truth and happiness. They were one and the same. I didn't care about the girls or the glow of dance lights around the room. I dropped my scarf onto my eyes and danced blind. There was more than enough guidance in the music.

I saw friends and waved, blissfully happy in Ambrosia. I saw Gillian in the midst of her 20th birthday. I saw Caroline dancing with an alumni and former TA. I saw Jamie snapping photos with a Digital Rebel XT. I saw Schuyler with a posse of potentials. I saw Mara and welcomed her with a huge hug.

They closed the bar at 1:30 and then dropped a blazing set of tech-house and trance. It was seemlessly mixed. It was hipster-rave music of remixed Jefferson Airplane and "If you're going to San Francisco." I went into the bathroom looking for Hunter S. Thompson. He is my virgil. He is my Whitman.

Ginsberg needed an idol too. He confessed in poems what he owed to the Brooklyn poet.

"What thoughts I have of you tonight Walt Whitman." What thoughts I have of you tonight, Hunter Thompson.

I sang out the words to "San Francisco," and wished that the Jefferson Airplane would never stop.

I left with five minutes to two because I knew the end was near and I wanted to revel in the glory of an unrivalled party.

I tripped on joy across the green and down to Keeney. There were policemen on corners looking concerned. I didn't care what they were doing. I was safe, sober, and sublime. It was all so surreal.

I got back to the room and downloaded the Anthems of Ambrosia. I danced with Laura, the Louisville, Kentucky belle, and enjoyed the returned melodies of remixed 60's counterculture classics.

I loved the moment and wished it would never end. I promised to stay up until at least 4:00.

We went to the MCM building at 3:00 and started to watch Sleepy Hollow. It was a tribute to New England and October. The month of memory, and of fall. There will be great beauty here. We all knew that. So we slept on and off through Tim Burton's masterpiece and Evan alone was glued to the pixels. He screamed out "Oh my GOD!" with plot twists and bizarre imagery. He ohhed and ahhed like a girl at her first horror movie.

We finished a five and walked back to Keeney straight down Thayer. There was no traffic. The lights changed at their leisure and we were alone in the world.

We got back to Keeney and broke apart. Moira (r unpronounced) went upstairs to sleep. Joy was already unconcious. Evan gave in and crashed.

I did not go to bed. Neither did Laura.

We waited out the sunrise.

2006-10-01T11:29:00.000-07:00

Black and White, Dallas and Libraries, New England Anthanaeums, Gin & Tonics, Prophets in the bathroom from the desert of the real, cliched ultimate misadventures.

Friday had left me with much to mull over. The Black and White Party at Sigma Chi had been pretty solid. Something like 1/3 of the sailing team was in the house. I was taking strong drinks and pats on the back like the good 'ol boys had something planned for me.

"Yo, it seems like EVERYONE is sigma chi."

"There is a reason."

Smile, Wink, Handshake, Laugh.

"Here, grab a drink."

I drank through two rum and cokes that were sugar hinted karkov with cola food coloring. They were thick and I wasn't really feeling it. I made the switch to a gin and tonic but that wasn't much better. What kind of crazy, self-righteous WASP partier would cruise around a dance event throwing back G & T's anyway?

The apparel was formal. Hence the name, Black and White. I was in my ubiquitous Emmanuel Pinstripe suit. I had already worn it three or four times but did I care? These people wouldn't remember my clothes. We were all moving toward that event horizon were what you were wearing was irrelevant. On the dance floor, people were grinding up against each other everywhere.

It was incredible.

I dance with Dallas. We had talked earlier about libraries and anthanaeums. Now we were dancing intoxicated like the bacchites she might of read about.

The place was out of control. I had two more beers, and found preston to give him an extra on the dance floor. Andrew Brainerd showed up and in order to get him in, I told the brother at the door that he was pledging to Sigma at MIT. They bought it, and quizzed him hardcore while I sat drunk off my ass in the door jamb gesturing jeff and julie in.

I went back to the room at 2:00. I had to race at Yale at 7:00. I needed to sleep. I ran into an old friend in the hallway. She looked lost and confused.

"My roomate sexiled me!"

I laughed and gestured her into my room. I told her that she could sleep with me and she agreed.

This is where things began to get interesting. My invitation to sleep over was a literal one. I was not reading anything into it, and I certainly did not expect any sort of serious thing to go down. Evan was in the room for fuck's sake.

NOTHING was going to happen. I feel asleep with this beautiful girl and felt happy.

I was drunker than I thought. About 15 minutes later, I was projecting over my sleeping fellow and throwing up on the floor. It was disgusting. I was unprepared. There had been no time to think this out. I was blackout unconcious until the floor was in focus and vomit was streaming out of my nose.

Not cool.

The poor girl under my arm who was evidently sober at the time and had no laugh method built into an intoxiation to laugh away this ridiculousness.

I picked up her shoes and threw them to the door.

Evan woke up and asked if was OK. I said no, and he went back to sleep. I went to the bathroom to wash off and recover. It was 3:00, when I went back to the room the girl was getting up to leave.

What the fuck could I say.

"Sorry, I'm an idiot," might have been appropriate. Or maybe, "I am so embarassed."

But I don't think that I said anything. What could you expect me to say!

I mopped up the floor with a towel and waited for the 7:00 am alarm. I wished the morning would never come. I hoped that this was all part of a vivid drunken dream and that I would awake with the floor clean and without the stench of vomit in the nostrils.

It was real. I found out at 7:00 when I woke up hung over, and mopped up the floor some more.

I felt bad leaving the room like this for Evan, but I had no choice. I had a regatta at Yale in two hours, and I needed to leave now.

I left a note for him to figure things out simply.

"Evan-

Be Liberal
w/ the febreeze.
I will fix this
when I get back
from Yale.

Z"

2006-09-29T00:40:00.000-07:00

Fighting blindly through the veil, Onion Rings that do not agree, Jager and Coke or my Shirt, My Kingdom for a Horse.

Disenchantment pervades. I have found myself drunk and lonely in Keeney for the last time. Is their any hope for meeting the Humanities major of my dreams. Does she walk in Elysian fields past Thayer and Waterman?

Rum Night for freshmen sailors and invited guests took a turn for the clear best when Knowles and I returned from Shore's with a handle in possesion and the experience to do it again. Our approach was amateur, and in hindsight, unconditionally hilarious. We were too busy pretending to be 21 (or 25 as Jeff's ID said he was) to hear the cashier ask for our proof of age.

Knowles fumbled the ID then begged pardon and placed it firmly on the counter. It was CLEARLY not him. She rang us up and wished us a good night anyway.

Further down the tracks it was possible to see the hilarity of our misadventure. We cruised back to Keeney and Jeff took a shower. I went to Thayer for cups and Dr. Pepper. Rum night was on as of 9:3o- there was raw ridiculousness by 10:15.

At some point during the evening, I formed the fullness of my alcoholic vision. I had been wasting away in the desert of the real looking for a way through the thin veil into another world.

For the longest time, the content of this higher reality alluded me. I knew that I wanted out of conventional reality and into a higher state, but what exactly was I seeking. What was beyond the veil? What was I trying to get through to?

Two summers of research on the matter left me with a penchant for rum and unapolegetic high tolerance. I was working harder but coming no closer. Midnights on rooftops, street corners or at pool parties were of no consequence. The veil was the sheet I could never touch, and its hidden world was opaqued with the curtain of inescapable reality.

Recently, while reading Hawthorne at the Rock on a weekday, the truth came blazingly clear to my mind. The veil separated my dreams from my reality. My hope in drinking was constantly that the rational framework of conventional reality would turn into the inexact science of imagination that manifested in dreams. I wanted the girls of my dreams, the future of my dreams and the feeling of my dreams. I wanted to realize the potential of my dreams, and for whatever reason, alcohol or drugs seemed the best possible means of breaking that barrier.

Gradually, I began to see the flaws of my pragmatic paradigm. I was drinking heavily but not breaking through. I was getting high but not cutting through the veil. Reality, indefinitely, seemed to chain my ambitions and desires to a etheral construct. A rational framework threatened to subordinate hope to its cruel logic.

Reality, at least in connotation, is always harsh and difficult. There is nothing pleasing about reality. It is always abrasive. It is never perfected.

Dreams are why we sleep at night. Exhaustion is a subconcious reminder that terrible and inspiring visions lay just outside of reality when you close your eyes and let the engine of your imagination take over. But they too are imperfect- manipulating dreams violates their piercing vision. Ignoring dreams is ignoring the prophecies of your soul.

Tonight, I recognized in fullness what and where the ideal man must live. At the cross roads of dreams and reality, the modern imaginative man can live happily and in great contentment. But blending the two realms is impossible. They are exclusive and incapable of balance. They are seperate and not given to sharing.

Instead, one must live in the very curtain I was once trying to cut down. The enemy of my past is now the hero of my present. At the intersection of dreams and reality one can fully indulge the senses and the emotions simultaneously.

In the veil, live is worth the living we've always hoped for.

2006-09-28T14:06:00.000-07:00

Collegiate Racing in Newport, Sober Saturdays, Front page with a photo, Sprinting for Comp Sci, Smoking in Rome.

Saturday fleshed out another, now characteristic night of alcohol-free events. I sat in my room reading and talking with hallmates about dating, date-rape, and the police brutality scandal that had recently been on everyone's mind.

SDS was instigating a witch hunt-like hysteria within unprepared. Their "Speak-Up!" campaign was an excuse for radicals to take shots any the institution point-blank without any need of evidence or prior reports. Their emails bore an almost laughably anarchistic sign-off.

"Stay interested, Stay involved, Stay angry."

I was angry about another night dedicated to recognizing the foolishness of the University. Saturday's were getting weaker by the weekend, and that wasn't just because I was sober.

I went to bed at 2:00 despite a concrete knowledge that I would have to be up by 8:00 the next morning to catch a ride to racing in Newport.

In the morning, a stiff wind welcomed fantasies of successful rookie sailing. I checked the NOAA website and found out people were prescribing a howler for Newport. Winds possible 20-25 knots with gusts up to 35.

I was stoked.

Dougie met me and my Argentian skipper at Louis' on Brook Street. I had a bagel and some cranberry juice. Doug got a full order of blueberry pancakes.

We packed into the 'DeathTrap' and coasted out of Providence. It was first time out of the city since August 30th. It would be my first time in Newport since college began.

Doug did a steady 95 - 100 on the freeway. We crossed into Massachusetts five minutes out of PVD. We were back in Rhode Island fifteen minutes later. Early morning traffic on the island slowed things up a bit, but I knew the back roads and we were at Sail Newport by 9:20.

I had learned to sail at this very club. I had learned to race in this very harbor. I had taught others how to race and how to sail from powerboats on this bay- I was undeniably home.

I was in my element.

Rough conditions on the ocean gave 23 knots of steady breeze, serious chop, and steady six foot swells. We were dressed to the teeth, spray jackets, pants, gloves, rash guards, boots, thermals and stapped life vests. For a bit of Brunonian pride, I wore the crazy lame hat some alumni had donated for the incoming class of 2010. Our allegiances were clear. It was time to race.

Friends and former best friends made up a contingent of our competitors. There was Jared Stearns, back from the days when he and I were the best junior Laser sailors in Newport, and Ben Quatromoni from Abbey Soccer. Rachel Johnstone, my fellow Cervantes scholar was also in the mix sailing for Connecticut College. Marisa, girlfriend to co-worker/drinker/sailing instrutor Josh G, was also present sailing with Quatro for URI.

It was like old times. Only in Newport can you go to a regatta and see everyone from your childhood.

Doug and Susan took the first set on the water as the A boat. They came back soaked and told us it wsa lightening up.

It was not, by any stretch of the imagination, lightening up. Sala, my Argentinian Skipper, and I rocked an intense down wind sequence for soem practice. We parcticed some bullet tacks and some serious hiking. The racing started quickly and the course was simple. We kicked it off a small line to a distant upwind mark, then cruised back down through the line to finish.

Sala and I blasted it off a 5, a 7, and then nailed a sweet bullet in the third race. On the upwind leg near the mark, there was a crazy rightie that dropped the layline two boatlengths if you could read it. By the third race, I was calling our layline dead on, and we rocked a conservative downwind leg to chalk up a solid bullet. We nailed a 5 on the last race, after losing serious boats in a ducking war.

In the secodn set, Sala and I really opened up on the downwinds. We started plaing hte board (up or almost all the way up) and ooch to catch waves on the downwind. We passed Connecticut College on the downwind in the fifth race and chalked a second and a third for the afternoon.

Brown secured Bronze on the regatta, finishing over URI and Tufts but just under Salve and Connecticut College.

It was an absolute blast. My legs never hurt me so much in my life.

------------------------------------------------

Later adventures in Providence living left me with a story on the front page on the BDH (above the crease this time) and with a finished play on lightsabers and genitalia for the Production Workshop. Thinking a head had left me prepared for my classes and feeling secure. MCM was fucking my mind every which way, as I struggled to understand Dadaism and the poetry of Hugo Ball.

Karawane, the sound poem of Ball's days in Zurich, in cubist costume and with powerful Germanic gothic typeset challeged everything I knew. In the end, I was left with a Yoko Ono quote to figure things out.

"Draw a map to get lost" was all the future Lenonite had to offer.

I smoked up with friends in a secret location near the University called Rome. Where we were I had no idea, but I was quickly on my way to mapping out lost living, and I didn't care what consequences the experiment might play out on my mind.

Yale, Jager, and RonDiaz Rum glisten in the future.

We're all friends here.

The casualities will continue until the war ends.

2006-09-23T15:09:00.000-07:00

Fellini, Truth in the Witching Hour, BoxersArgylSweaterVestPinkPoloRedAllStars, Keys on the Shoe, Curtain Call, Nudity, Harvard Beats Brown, Victory in Society.

Illicitness.

My Dad used to tell me "Never swing at the first pitch."

It was my constant mistake. Fly balls to center field and grounded hits to the shortstop turned into double plays.

Life at college makes me aware of the same philosophy. You can never take the first thing you are offered or hell itself will follow behind.

For me, for my example, it was lady destiny that I took too soon. I knew I would. I lack discipline and covet the beautiful things of this world with haste. I took my go too soon, and I was left cursing that vehicle of glory. The erudite become the pretentious when made aware of their genius.

Reconstructing last night creates a composite of alcohol as my anti-drug, my sparkplug and my kryptonite. I didn't know where I was when it wokre me up this morning and I only had the poster of Clark Gable on the far wall to inform me that the room was not mine.

Knowles and I got back from sailing with a hunger. He had lost his Brown ID and now had no meal creadits. I offered to un-used meals- but we opted for dumplings with Henry on Thayer Street instead.

Schuyler met us at the Happy Dumpling and accompanied us to the Sailing House on Keene Street. There were burgers and beers available. I didn't care what happened later. It was raw happiness at the Animal House off Thayer.

I showed Shuyler the Laser Bar in the basement. I showed him the team pennant and the multiple keg taps. I invented a mythology for the house and explained its importance in the annals of Ivy League Yachting. I took another beer from the fridge and brought extras to the boys outside who were waiting for the freshmen to bring out more beers anyway.

We wound up at Pembroke finding old Abbey friends and intiating the new ones. Jay Popham will not remember last night. But I will remember helping him forget it.

Headaches in the morning reminded that we had had more to drink than ever before. There were the first four beers at Keene Street by 9:00. There was long pulls of Bacardi in the hallway of fourth floor Wooley. There was shots of vodka with Schuyler. There was wine somewhere. There was more beer at the Diva party. There was weed wafting somewhere up the stairs.

But I didn't really care what was available. We were all in the same boat. Freshmen desperation manifested in grossly pre-mixed beverages and messy pre-gaming.

I had nothing to hide; I was dressed in a tight pink polo, an Argyl sweater vest, boxer shorts and a pair of red chuck All Stars. It was all for the best.

It would all be for the best.

Drinkning in MoChamp became dancing in a New Pembroke Lounge. I was kissing in hallways- taking beers from Frankie and wishing him a happy birthday. I was back in the dance kissing, and demanding that Joy in soberiety, not judge the misadventures of my debauchery.

I will never live them down.

We were back in Em-Wol on the fourth floor like the weekend before. There was toplessness and boys from Harvard who swore they had never partied like this before.

We gave the Crimson gentleman shit and the obliged our assumptions that Brown parties harder.

It does, definitely, I've had it from the Horse's Mouth.

We were leaving the drunken techno grind that was Em-Wol fourth floor. We were dancing down Thayer street in boxers and tights. The police tipped their hats to kids who were breifly the smartest people in the world, and now would never be any longer.

We were back in Poland and I was demanding the speakers from Evan in coitus. I told him the people needed music. He disagreed. I dragged the speakers across the quad and locked the Apple Laptop to the grating. The Party was on.

Bottled water from two stories up ended the sheninigans. I was begging mercy from a fellow CS 15 student and he gave it on account of expensive computers and Andy van Dam.

We were upstairs in Archibald 5th floor raving like mad men.

It was snowing.

I was asleep with a wonderful girl watching Fellini.

I was waking up in an unfamiliar place and begging forgiveness.

I was asleep in my room at two o'clock, and the sea-fever came over me.

I got up.

2006-09-19T09:21:00.000-07:00

Magic Bus, Melancholia, Desperate Paper Writing, Alarm Clock Failure,
And Dactylic Hextameter.

More misadventures in the realm of Sobriety. Keeping myself clean for a History Paper that has consumed my concerns for almost a week and half, I found myself at the cusp of completing the four page asssignment last night before the Midnight target I had set for myself.

The Boom/Click of Reformatting destroyed that dream and left me gasping for breath. I was doing laundry in the O-Zone. I wanted to toke up outside and be done with the paper that had consumed my soul.

There was nothing to be done. The Re-Formatting was unreversible. Only 2 and half hours of correction would make it work. It was the only way.

Eventually, I went to get my clothes out of the dryer. They had been in the machine for nearly an hour and half. But the clothes weren't dry. There was no heat in the machine.

Vaguely I remembered the Out of Order sign on the machine when I put my clothes in. At the time it seemed like a move to reserve the dryer. The place was packed with people. I couldn't afford to wait. I put the clothes in the machine, the money in the coin slot and watched it begin to revolve.

Out of Order? Nice Try. I knew how to see the work of shiesters and charlatans.

By Midnight, with no clear end of my paperwork in sight, I realized that the machine was indeed out of order. I got money and started the drying in another unit.

It would be a long night. I would get the clothes later.

I would be up when this hour of drying was complete.

By 2:15, I had finally finished the paper and created a new intro. I closed the computer and went back to the room.

I remembered the laundry and picked up the clothes. On my way I secretly expected all of my boxers to be gone- stolen no doubt, by the manifested figure of my dire fate.

The clothes were all there though, and I came up to my room with a basket full of freshly washed shirts, jackets, underwear and more.

I went to sleep, conciously setting the alarm for 9:30 AM.

There would be time for another once over and a for a revision. There would be time to print and correct last minute errors in the text. The essay was due at 10:30 exactly. There would be time.

Dreams gave way to pure sunshine. I gave the alarm clock a glance and jumped up. Liquid Crystals displayed the time for all the room to witness- it was 10:30.

I hopped up- panickedly printed my paper and dashed out the door. There was no time for revision. There was no time to even ascertain that the paper I had printed was indeed the final draft of the essay in question.

NO TIME.

I ran up to the Pembroke Campus a good 1/2 mile up hill. It was five blocks. I did it in about one minute. When I got into the classroom, the Professor was finalizing the pile of papers and looking around the room distractedly. I feigned a trip and slid the paper into the pile.

I retreated, and prayed that the horrors of the last 24 hours might somehow yield true genius and a high letter grade.

The pessimist in me however reveals another sentiment: the righteous expectations of my soul are highly unlikely.

2006-09-17T14:59:00.000-07:00

Brazil, Pushing Macs at the Bookstore, Losing the Battle to Berman, Visits from Laura,
DISENCHANTMENT

Saturday became the matyr of sobriety. I just didn't want to drink anymore. Alcohol felt like a putrid concoction of wastefulness and nightmares.

It was available, but I was uninterested. I wanted pot, but it was unavailable.

Evan and I wandered around Campus trying to connect the dots. A last alliance of Tucker, Schuyler, Evan and Myself formed the core of kids who weren't getting drunk or were not drunk as of yet at least. We strolled from Keeney to Josiah's to Wriston to Keeney and then off to the Avon.

It was midnight, film geeks were assembled on Thayer like oprea aficionados awaiting a performance at the met. The doors were just opening as we walked up. Tucker and Shuyler had long since abadoned ship. Sky Sky had gone in search of a bellydancing girl and Tucker was giving in to invites from the swim team to a thing off campus.

Evan and I alone, artistic purists in every sense, were willing to throw a lost saturday night to projected shadows and integrated sound.

The film was Brazil, a blazing, dystopian Christmas Carol that tripped out like hard drugs delievered visually. I couldn't deal with it. I sat there identifying parallels and actors and subliminal directing touches that connect the film to other Gilliam or Phyton projects.

The movie got out at 2:30. I would not sleep for another two and half hours. Evan and I could feel the movement of ducts on the main green. It was impossible to deny the singular genius of Brazil.

Why was it called Brazil? Why was it set at Christmas? What purpose did the Santa motif serve?

Questions unanswered and unexpectedly profound. The film was a sort of summer reading assignment for people with nothing else to do.

In many ways, the sheer fright that Brazil's dystopian paper golem unleashed on me was exactly what Hunter S. Thompson was seeing in Fear and Loathing. Looking around the Circus Circus and getting the "fear," Thompson was watching our movie. Ironically, or predictably I suppose, Gilliam had directed both of them. There was no way to tell which way I was falling but I was falling fast.

Laura's visit on friday, less than 24 hours prior, had been a sudden splurge of sunshine in a dark, dystopian state. I was disenchanted with Brown. I am disenchanted. Drunk people wasting away fridays and saturdays in the quest for being so fucked up that they wouldn't remember their actions the next day. Was memory so inconsequential? Did they really care so little about what they did? Were their actions so restricted under normal conditions that they required alcohol to predicate foolishness and stupidity?

Is alcohol freedom? Are inambitons the negative products of a taboo driven society?

I didn't give a fuck. I wanted no part of the debauchery- it wasn't even debauchery. Passing out in a bush and needing emergency assistance was stupid not romantic.

I walk around waiting to find that artistic, intellectual core that is the promised heart of Brunonia. Does it even fucking exist? Is it even worth finding? I have followed no name streets to classrooms that the world has forgotten looking for the Ivy League dream I will be forever in debt for?

Disenchantment is spelled like suicide on an emotional surface, and while I continue trying hunt down the fragments of broken dreams and photographs, I wonder if it has at all been worth it.

Do the people in the Library at 2:00 on a Sunday morning party til the sun comes up the next day? Are we in the midst of a class struggle? Is their any pot left in Providence? Midnights make the mornings look brighter than the day before, and I have felt no better finding best friends at Faunce for studying.

She left a book on the table and an addiction to cheap cigarettes in my body memory. I will burn in the conflagration of caring. I will burn her book and delete phone numbers that link us.

I will be free.

I will be re-enchanted, if the dream will take me again.

2006-09-14T23:22:00.000-07:00

Nipple Clits, Porn, Erotica, Writing, Film, Getting Published in the BDH, Sailor Parties and ridiculousness-

I write from Kirsten's room somewhere deep in Unit Six. I had violated boundaries beyond the typical. I had applied, asked what type of clothing i would assign myself I said a G-string, I had been approved.

Talking Heads playing in the background. Reminded me that the boys who had started the Art Rock Revolution had gone to school but 1500 feet from the room I was writing.

The Sailing Party left me krunk and crazy. Where the fuck was Geoff? I had been doing so well. Studying well, taking notes, gettign up for classes- doing what I was supposed to.

But there is no solve-all for Alcoholisn. Kirsten found me on the floor outside her room and took pity on the drunk that the Sailing Team had kicked out onto Thayer Street. She gave me a water and a computer to write this ridiculousness on.

She was at once an angel and the muse of the beauty in which I revolved in.

Fuck Yale, Harvard and the Rest of the Ivy League- They do not know drunken debauchery with a consentual sexual element.
Women;s Peer Consuleours at Brown invented Intercourse (true story, I learned about it at HI 110), and I, some people in Keeney, and the Sailing Team perfected it.

I spent the early part of the day trying to make sense of Computer Science. I ended up drinking away my confusioon. Accessors and Mutators were suddenly shades of the same colored horse.

Would I get up in the morning? Will I get up in the morning? I have NO idea. It will be a question of my intoxiation, my feelings in the morning, and whether or not the Alarm clock wakes me up.

I published my first article to the Brown Daily Herald today. It was on the front cover- can you imagine? I think I might write again. I think I might write again for the people who read this absurdity and wonder Where I live, Where I am going, and how I plan to get there?

My sentiments exactly.

2006-09-11T18:13:00.000-07:00

Ever read a history of the internet?

Ever read a history of the internet on weed?

It's September 11th- I always wrestle with this occasion. When the towers first fell, I was living in a small town outside Boston. The airport was directly next to the town. I remember walking over to the fence that separated the Airport from the town and wondering how something so awful could have come so close to me.

Media manipulation, an imperialistic presidency and the subversion of American liberties have died this holiday black. I once believed in the power and comraderie that Bush as counted on for support. Once. After the horrors of this day became a pretext for invasion and colonization, I have fear that I have had to put the patriotism of America on hold.

People died today. They didn't know where they were going or what was going to happen. Heroes were formed. The world was changed. Things were altered indefinitely. But at what cost to Americana?

Before the attack, media attention was sparse and barely sustainable. After, people turned blindly to 24 hour news networks that promised answers and up-to-the minute updates. At the time, having the most up-to-date information was a badge of pride. I know what the Pentagon just released- I believe that there is another press confrence in about 4 hours time.

But now, attacks over and averted become spurs for motivating a populous driven by fear. People in middle America fear terrorist attacks more than New Yorkers. In the election of 2004, New Yorkers voted heavily for John Kerry. They didn't buy into Bush's plan of protection and continued service. They didn't buy the fight in Iraq as the defense for America.

Farmers in rural nowhere, America bought the Christian, oil-for-freedom defense strategy. Most of them had not even seen an Muslim in their entire lives. Like the ideological purists that had first attacked the US five years ago, the protected muslim-hating elements within a shell of ignorance. The Christian Right watches Fox News like the Islamic extremists watch Al Jazeera. They are similiar elements of opposite polarities.

And somehow, despite educated moderates in both realms, the purists win out in support and ideological instigation. The extremist agenda wins over the cause for consideration.

-------------------

Good classes today.

EL 171 - Photography and the American Novel hit a nerve that was simultaneously touched on by MC 10 and ultimately expressed by Professor Tribe in MC 75.

"Is the Media the Message?"

I find myself connecting otherwise dissimiliar elements in the cause to synthesize my education. There is much to learn. I have to read a history of the Internet, an introduction of Java Parameters, and some translated first-hand medieval documents for the Crusades chapter tomorrow morning.

And what of entertainment? What of fun, girls, sex, orgies and alcohol?

They are for other days. I already smoked up on the green and tripped out alone to electronica in my room.

The hipster labelled seems to have tracked me down and to have expressed my core values to a group of otherwise individual individuals. Becoming a label feels like joining a team where you have no position. Will I lose my name? Will I become a phrase? A label?? A listless distillation of essence?

I got work to do:
1 Comp Sci Assignment due tomorrow afternoon
1 Set of internet readings for Modern Culture & Media
1 Crusades essay to work/move forward with
1 Chapter of Andy van Dam theoretical work to get thru with

2006-09-09T12:38:00.000-07:00

Vaporizers, Midnight Chemistry, and Absolut Belated Birfday -
Brown University Blows My Mind

We started off at Josiahs for a late evening snack. I was sure that it was a Quesdilla night, but much to my disappointment, I discovered that the Stir Fry was actually on the schedule.

We left Jo's and walked up to the Store 24 on Thayer. I bought cups, a bottle of Dr. Pepper, a bottle of Coca Cola (classic) and a bag of Fritos.

Only later in the evening would I fully understand the importance of the Fritos.

We started pre-gaming in my room with a half liter of Bacardi that Paul had brought up on the visit from Portsmouth Abbey. Mixing first with Dr. Pepper (the preferred mixer for Rum of any sort) and then with Coke, Poland House found itself lookign warm and effervescent.

We- Dave, Collen, Joy, and myself- began the evening by going up to Tuckers room were he had recently installed $100 of qualitity dance electronics. They were just chilling in that room so we rolled further into Keeney and found ourselves with Mischa on the fourth floor of Jameson overlooking the film noir Providence cityscape.

Mischa was deep on the pot. Using a German manufactured Vaporizer, Mischa vaporized his already high quality weed to create a pure, transculent THC that slowly filled up a large plastic trashcan on top of the machine. Once the thing had filled completely, Mischa would take the bag off, attach a mouthpiece, and offer the device to a ready circle of parisioners.

I took several hits, while putting away the Miller Lites that some kid was distributing out of a backpack. By the time, I had found Evan downstairs and brought him back to the party, things were COMPLETELY out of control. Seven or so Freshmen guys were circled around the 15 inch MacBook Pro and were tripping out to Steve Jobs designed visualizations.

I got a call from Schuyler and met him back at my room on the second floor. He was with Julie D, of Portsmouth Abbey fame, and together they had purchased me a bottle of Absolut.

Across the top of the bottle, scoth tape over the Label were the words

ABSOLUT BELATED BIRFDAY

So we hit that, and within a few moments, all of the Absolut was gone. A flashdance party formed and rode the instant intoxication. Dave found a six pack of Budweiser in the fridge and distributed it. I was dancing on the desk and singing songs with people who didn't know where they were.

When the Party finally broke up (on account of drought) I was whisked away to Wriston Quad and into the melee that is Fraternity Partying.

There were WAY too many people at Phi Psi so I went across the Quad to Sigma Chi and began dropping names until I struck solid gold finding a member of the sailing team and telling him that I needed to talk with Preston inside.

Dave and I were in and off. We took a couple of beers and watched the quirks of an alternate Beirut. We got out, tried a second pass at Phi Psi and finding myself again unable to get in, sat outside with Rachel, Kirsten and Chantal smoking cigarettes with some other people that I did not know.

I vaguely remember reciting a version of Ginsberg's 'A Supermarket in California' for the masses.

We got in. I danced with Maggie, of B.U.S.T. , and with some other girls whose name came to me miraculously in the sweating air.

I went outside with Chanti, Kirsten and some other people. I began to slip out of conciousness.

I felt very cozy and cuddly.

I felt like a care bear.

2006-09-08T11:06:00.000-07:00

Gradually, I started to see what space Chantal occupied in my mind. She was like my dreams- ephemeral, intellectual- at a level that was vastly beyond my abilities. Me chasing her, me following her, lusting for her, hoping for her and wishing for her, was like coveting my ambitions. She was perfect, and I, in definitional imperfection, was no match for the erudite francophile.

And it was all symbolic. After dropping off my test assignement for the Brown Daily Herald, and picking up my first "real" assignment, I was outside of Tealuxe on Thayer waiting to meet with lady destiny.

I burned my tongue on tea that was too hot and had a hard time singing or talking for the rest of the night. I smoked three cigarettes on the stairs of Faunce House and couldn't remember the limitations my body had set for itself. I wandered aroung the upper campus, with beautiful Chantal, and I couldn't find intimacy.

But this was too be expected.

She is my dreams. She exists in a future paradigm that I can neither see nor understand. It was obvious that I couldn't compete- no one could. She was busy giving out her number, teasing other, even more accomplished men, and trading quirps with wise men many years older.

I didn't know how to compete. I had no idea how to summit the insurmountable.

So we walked around the campus, talking and confessing. I was taking photographs, perhaps trying to visualize fully what my dreams looked like. Perhaps trying to sketch the shape of my ambitions more fully.

There was no hope. No hope on Thayer or off it. There was no hope on the Main Green, and no hope near Carrie Tower. I retired with Chantal to her room. It was 1:00 in the morning.

I left with a hug and the knowledge that we were best friends.

Just best friends.

2006-09-08T05:41:00.000-07:00

"Are you aware that you have a light on in your trash can? ... Oh wait a minute, that's the sun."
-- Dave "The Libertine Libertarian" Gagnon in an Early morning drunken stupor

2006-09-06T21:28:00.000-07:00

"Are you fucking serious? You were BLASTING classical music!"
-- A member of the Brown Democrats, clearly securing another vote against the GOP

2006-09-05T22:54:00.000-07:00

"Dave Gagnon is now single."
- Headline of the new feed on Facebook

They changed facebook while we were sleeping. It was like some sci-fi film where overnight, everything you knew and held true was now gone. Since Saturday, the Brown campus had been beset by tragedy. In a freak accident, Steve "the Croc Hunter" Irwin had been impaled by a stingray barb through the chest, and promptly died. Added to the universal tragedy of Pluto's demotement, things on college hill were not well.

After a brief introduction to History 110 - "The Crusades", I was left to piece together the immense tradition that was walking through the Van Wickle Gates. Fortunately, I found friends on their way to the event, who were armed with packets and information, and confident that things would be alright.

Walking down the hill, the conversation turned suddenly to facebook, and the outrage that something so universal could be so quickly erased. They hadn't exactly erased Facebook, but the re-formatting took the soul out of the thing. I felt lost in a digital newsroom of sorts when I first booted up. A series of headlines and feeds greeted me to "the new Facebook."

And across the top, in bold letters, the call sign of the apocalypse reared its ugly head. Highlighted with a pink heart and bolded for posterity, was the message "Dave Gagnon is now single."

The world had changed fundamentally.

We strolled up College Hill and through the iconic gates into the University. It was formal now, we were all Brown Students. We only had one way back out of those gates, and it lay a good deal off in the distance.

Faculty members in full academic regalia appaulded our entrance and marked the occasion with hopeful faces. As Jeb took pictures with a disposabal camera, there was a sense of grandeur and satisfaction. I was at once honored and humbled. I had truly arrived at Brown, I was truly expected to make something of myself.

Lunch followed lectures that should not have been given. At the Ratty, the Facebook dialogues continued. Dave had recently discovered that a group of his former friends had de-friended him on account of a political change of heart.

After spending time at Brown for but a couple of days, Dave changed his political status on Facebook from 'Conservative' to 'Libertarian'. It was an almost laughable change. On Facebook, profile alterations of this kid were virtually unoticeable. There would be almost no one to notice such trivial things unless the person in question was so ridiculously plugged in, that they monitored the "Recently Updated Friends" with near fanatical devotion. This was unwaveringly absurd. Political views were conversation starters, not cause for war or strife.

But this kid, apparently, was a crazy motherfucker. In fact, as Dave explained thoroughly at lunch, the kid in question was a proto-facist whose grip on reality centered mostly on wire-taping and other applications of the Patriot Act. He loved it. So when Dave switched view points, this kid shit an brick. Exercising Mussoulini like precision, the facist from Bates formed a coalition of the willing to de-friend Dave and put him in his place. Their prescribed motivation was that Dave had absorbed liberal bullshit on College Hill and fallen into the political purgatory that was Libertarianism.

(Interesting sidenote on this kid, he supports the Death Penalty for small misdemeanors like theft, shoplifting and jaywalking. Stuff like Drunken Driving requires medieval quartering, or death by public hanging. Just some additional ideological information. Just something to thing about.)

Anyway, I ran out of lunch to catch CS 15 with Andy van Dam at MacMillan Hall. Known for his absolute CS prowess, Professor van Dam made a dramatic entry. Kids from his classes had formed Pixar after graduating Brown. "Andy" in Toy Story was actually named for him- a frightening bit of information for a kid who believed that the course would kill him already.

----------------------------

A few hours later, and I was at the Avon on Thayer watching Little Miss Sunshine with Evan, and Dave "the now single man of Middle Keeney" Gagnon. About 1/4 of the way through the movie, things started to go directly to hell. The projection went out of focus, then out completely, and then the feed turned into the pure white light that is film manna.

It was a beautiful film. Profound, stirring and absolutely appalling. Combined with the light rain falling outside of the theater when we left, the feeling of the experience was sublime. I was tripping on intellectual provocation and the midnight drizzle stimulation.

It was a powerful experience.

Around the corner on Thayer, we found a man playing the Saxphone and narrating his "famous one minute Oprea" between bouts of classic brass and smoking breaks. His glasses were duct taped and thick with scratches. But he was Providence, Rhode Island invested in the body of a man, and for a dollar or two in the hard shell saxphone case, he would tell you your national fortune.

We strode down an empty Thayer and through a deserted Main Green that only hours before had hosted Pizza tasting and before that, Convocation. We had indeed been called together. But were we already drifting apart? There was no one here on the agora academia, and it was only 11:00. What was wrong with these people?

--------------------

Midnight conversations with Kirsten left me in a mood of utter contentment. Over Quesidillas and Nantucket Nectars we had already achieved intimacy.

I had known her already by many names. She had been "Shrooms" in the reflections of a drunken night, and a chorus member in the adventures of other evenings. But now, with her nursing NeuroScience, a smoking habit, and a love for DARK movies, there was more to the beautiful girl than I could ever imagine. I was meaning to be pretentious in any regard, but Kirsten, like the talent that is Brown women, blew me away with her staggering wit and great insight.

And she was beautiful. That is worth mentioning, because it is always worth mentioning and because I had already "accidentally" described her as Liza Menilli-like, which was unfair.

We sat on my bed discussing disconnects with Alma Mater and the trouble with Brown decadence. We thought about finding the Brunonian Dream and what it would mean to other people.

But already, in our shared experience, the specter of the dream was forming. It had been Sunday night on the top of the V - Dub where we could see everything we needed to sustain college living, looked over Thayer Street like Olympian Gods, and stayed up drinking and smoking until the materials necessary had been exhausted.

There was only one way on and off the roof. And that, if nothing else in my collected fragmentary drunken allusions, had to be the main nerve of the college dream known as Brunonia.

2006-09-04T21:04:00.000-07:00

Saturday, Sunday, Monday

For a while, Friday - Saturday was all soccer games and Genny 14s. Without classes to steady students or Pluto to guide the stars, we were all like crazy people wandering aimlessly.

The soccer had team had unleashed a media blitz on the campus and made it socially mandatory to attend their first game. I walked up with Evan, Alanna, Neko, Laura, Dani, Emmy and Jinaabah, my constant companion. The game took a while took a while to get going. In the meantime, I sat next to a crazy Swimmer named Tucker who sat busily descrbing the techniques of swimming and the excitement of leaving among such eligible bachelors as the Swim Team might be considered.

I was excited when the game started. Brown looked good, disciplined, and without weakness. Its offense and Defense were equally skilled and had no trouble coordinating. Brown went up 1 - 0 in the 28th minute off a cross from the right flank. USD equalize before the half was out, but we left anyway. It was far too cold to stay.

Walking back, I called Travis and asked him what he was up to. DelBonis was having some people over his room and had "a fair amout" of alcohol available.

We got DRUNK.

---------------------

Saturday night corresponded with my salvation.

She was a sweet little brunette whose name had been running around my mind like a song whose catchy chorus wouldn't leave alone.

But I got her, in the end, I got her for a space and time that can only ever be ours.

Saturday Night's affairs were centered around a Freshmen Dance and a party at Delta Tao afterward. Evan kicked it off a little early, by making an appearance at St. Anthony Hall, and in the process losing my keys. (The truth was, we were quite lost, a little drunk and without any sense of direction. It is at times like these that indentured servants like keys tend to excuse themselves from dire situations and flee closed pockets.)

Evan was dressed as a Jedi in a bathrobe that I had lent him. I was dressed as Al Pacino from Scarface with a pimp, pin-striped suit and an Italian dress shirt that I unbuttoned far down my chest. The dance was supposed to be a superheroes gala, so neither Evan nor I were dressed properly for the occasion.

It was unnecessary.

Inside the dance, raw debauchery had broken out in all directions. Self-aware hussys had seized on the opportunity of superheores to wear virtually nothing. Thuggish jocks and frat-boys-to-be were shamlessly shirtless and entirely self-absorbed.

Grinding to the bass-driven rap only amplified the anonymity. Without seeign the face of the girl I was groping, my decisions seemed strangely uncomfortable.

I was also sober. That is worth noting because everyone else was QUITE drunk/high/hallucinating/tripping out various pharmacueticals or perhaps more illegal substances.

I got a text from Chanti and saw that she was on her way to the sordid affair, dressed as QuailMan, and already quite drunk. There were already forty QuailMen in the assembled mob of people inside the dance. I had no way of finding her or anyone else I knew in the dim, dimly light dance hall.

It was then that Fate, the finger of pointed destiny, rescued my obscure ashes.

Out the darkness and the dancing, Chantal formed quickly. She smiled and took my hand.

We danced for 45 minutes.

Exhausted, the Jersey girl required a smoke and a breather on the Pembroke Lawn. We left the dance and I nursed the growing nicotine addiction in my chest.

So I was at the dance, then in a room in Poland, then realizing that my keys were indeed missing and that I had know way of bringing her back to my room, I took her to the party at D - Tao.

-----------------------------

2006-09-03T20:41:00.000-07:00

"Evan, hurry up. It's there across the way. The fucking portal to truth we've been waiting for. It's a fucking rave and it's off the hook."

2006-09-03T19:21:00.000-07:00

My smoking habit has picked up substantially as of late. A couple of nights ago, I was under the arch a Wayland smoking the air with English Aristocrats. A night later, I was puffing Marlboros with a girl so cute and intelligent, I dared not leave her side.

Her name was Chatal, thought, at the time i met her, I thought her name was Chatao and had immense trouble pronouncing it. On Friday, we had spent the better part of the witching hours talking about hopelessnes and the end of the American Republic. I was intoxicated by her brilliance. She was brash, pretentious, and all-encompassing.

She was me, and seeing her there in the midnight mirror, I wanted her more than anything else.

But there were complications. A ghost of friend, Eric, haunted her steps. He, like me, was in love with the spirit of informed youth invested in the body of Chantal. She was the flower of New Jersey, and how badly did we want her.

The saga of Chantal took the ups and downs I might attribute to Virgil, Homer or Milton. At each turn in the story, I could feel myself slipping into a classical caste. I was Dante, and Beatrice was beyond reach. I was Petrarch and Laura was havign none of me.

I was me, and Chantal was the greates thing since sliced bread. Stars dim when she sleeps in Elysian Fields. Rough waves calm when she puts her hand to the shore. Uncouth men, who have spent mornings, evenings and autumns chasing dreams, give up those ambitions to chase her.

But this is neither here nor there. Lost in a developing Smoking habit, I worried that I might never escape.

At every possible opportunity, I was smoking Cloves or Marlboros or Cohibas with the girl of my dreams.

-------------------------------

Saturday came on hard, like a unexpected guest that had plans for you and him, and would never excuse you for sleep. Looking for food, Evan and I found ourselves indebted to Jinaabah for the chance to eat better food at an elite minorities conference.

Chantal was there. The damn siren was dressed in a neon yellow soccer jersey with the name "CHANTI" across the back. I imagined strolling through the cocktail tables and pausing for a moment in front of her.

"Chantal, I want you more than anything."

I would kiss her in a style Clark Gable would've admired.

But this was Brown. That would be some sort of Sexual Harassment. It would not be wonderful or romantic. It would offensive and awful.

I feared the loss of the romantic in me.

So Evan and I sat through the Third World's annual 'Rapping and Dining' luncheon. It was great. I settled many of my personal squabbles with the concept of Minority support. I learned about the imperialism of Americana and the rooting out of indigenous Native cultures across the world.

Coca Cola killed the Conch Republic and other depictions of mass-marketing in the US choking out the beautiful delicate flowers of other cultures.

But this is another digression.

It was early and I was still drunk. The night before had spent drinking beers with Travis, Brendan and the assorted sophomores that I had met on a visit to the University. We walked over to New Pembroke from the soccer game, which had been remarkably well-attended. Travis was out on the corner of Thayer with a Bud Light and a long board. He guided us back to the room and we began drinking. We were watching 'White Men can't Jump.' We were all white men who couldn't jump.

At 10 past 10 I asked Travis if I could get a run to the liquor store down the street. He asked Brendan if he had his fake and if he was willing to take on the job. He said he would. I sat outside of 'Spirtus Fermenti' awaiting my 30 rack of PBR. Only at Brown would the liquour store be called 'Spirtus Fermenti'.

We drank til the end of 'White Men' then rolled back to Poland. I was carrying the 30 in my left hand down Brown Street with cops smiling at me. Did they know I was underage? Did they care?

We got into the room and did a round of Peaches. Chantal called an explained coincidentally that she was drinkign downstairs. I went downstairs and got her. I brought up the dregs of a party in Everett 106 to Poland 222. I put on music and cracked open the 30. 35 people were dancing in my room with no time to spare.

When the beer ran out the boom town started to disentegrate. Schuyler came in and asked if I had anything left. I smiled and popped open the microwave where the reserves sat warm and waiting.

The FlashDance left people with powerful buzzes walking all over the lower campus. I stuck with Chantal, the kid that followed her everywhere and a girl with a shrooms obsession. Shrooms looked a lot like Liza Menilli. It was fun. Outside, a kid named Adam was smoking a Cohiba and passing the Vanilla tobacco to whoever wanted a hit.

I took a couple in the courtyard and began discussing life and death with the group. Fast forward two hours and I was in a lounge near Archibald talking about the death of the American Republic and the flaws of a two party system. Shades of the same color. A disinterested public that had politics dictated through the media like we were in 1984. Fear and Loathing were substituted by apathy and moderation. Nothing but the fear of attack motivated the mainstream.

It was a bleak national analysis. But I had been smoking lots of cigarettes, and things were bound to get grim.

Prophesizing for the Eton Boy, Talking Lolita with Joy

2006-08-31T17:44:00.000-07:00

Day I - August 30, 2006

Ted offered me a cigarette just as we were leaving Keeney on our way to a party at a frat.

"Zack," Ted said in a distinctively pure Enlish accent, "Were you christened as Zacharias."
"No man," I hurried to explain. "I was christened Zachary."
"Ah, Zachary," The Brit continued, "Now that is a prophet's name."

He offered me a cigarette and told me to prophesize. Was he drunk? I had no way of telling. Drunk though he may be, the British gentry are renowned for being able to hold it together.

He was holding it together.

I pulled softly at the Marlboro blade, letting the smoke fill my lungs, then drift down my throat and into the chest. Ted, citizen of South Kensington, and emperor of Eton was demanding fortunes.

So I gave him some.

I told him that he would be successful at Brown ultimately, but not without much trial and tribulation. He told he was an exceptional student, and that he would have no trouble rocking the University's courses.

"Ted, my man," I explained slowly, "we're all exceptional students, That's why we're here."

He laughed.

"Tell me more prophet."

I told him more. The clock struck twelve and we slid into a frat party of Wriston Quad. The frat boys didn't notice Joy and I until we were well past the bouncer and deep in the crowd downstairs.

Unfortunately, there was no beer at the party.

We went back up the stairs, pushed through the opened Emergency Door, and out into the Quad. I called a friend who was year older and asked for a party. He gave me walking directions to another frat with the promise it would be fun. When I got there, Joy and I shook hands with the assembled members of the house, and took hospitable beers. I talked with my friend and found about a liberal liqour store and a way to get pot quickly should the need arise.

Realizing suddenly that Joy had left the party, I bid adieu to my friend and the boys at the frat whose names I knew. I slid up the stairs, ran through the door and caught Joy standing there in the rain smiling because I'd came.

"That's cute," she sair, "It's nice to see someone care."

----------------------------

A couple minutes later and we were on my carpet. Joy was telling me about Lolita and Ian MacEwan while I tried to control the sensation of mental orgasm on account of the unprecendented intellectual dialogue. She went back to her room for a moment, and waited as I crashed on the floor spouting nonsense about commitment and satisfaction. Eventually, we found ourselves tired and disagreeable.

I said goodbye and excused myself from the tumult of social interaction.