Tall Tales

I've waited far too long to talk about drinking on this blog. And I suppose that really is an instrumental facet in understanding "how we rolled."

At any rate, sometime during sophomore year, I must have had a particularly bad week...or something. When you have a bad week, and you think that you can find some resolution to that bad week through drinking, that's when stuff like the above happens.

The circumstances escape me at the moment, so per usual, I'm just going to make shit up.

I spent a great deal of time that week studying for a big linear algebra exam. My head was afloat upon the stagnant pools of self-adjoint matrices, orthonormal eigenvectors, and the in's and out's of the Gram-Schmidt process. As you can imagine, it was truly a difficult week -- especially when you have to juggle that with whatever responsibilities and obligations come with having a girlfriend (we'll call her Taco Salad, in order to protect the innocent and for comedic purposes). So, with the weekend coming up, Taco Salad and I were going to get straight-up shit-faced. More likely though, I resolved to do that on my own, while she was planning on getting several levels of drunk beneath that.

When you're an under-aged drinker-type person (like I most certainly was at the time), there's only one way to go about getting your alcohol. I'm fairly certain it involves lying, cheating, and screwing your way to get to the top; because it's a very ruthless and cold world out there where only the strongest and most unethical survive. Luckily, I didn't need to resort to those kinds of extremums to get my fix. Instead, I waltzed across campus to meet with my alcohol supplier -- an old employee of campus services that wore a jaunty eye patch that we'll call Gordon Lightfoot. I gave the secret knock to the door of his little shanty on the outskirts of campus and supplied him the necessary secret phrase (it was, "Bucket o' Potato Salad") to gain admittance into his exclusive stash of alcoholic goodness. Gordon knows what I like, and he always keeps a bottle of Absolut Citron, ice cold and ready for consumption, on hand. I slipped him $30, and the clandestine transaction was complete.

I came back to my room absolutely giddy in anticipation of what was to come next. When I got there, I queued up the usual drinking songs, with the all-important "libation track" at the ready. I also called down the usual suspect drinking buddies to my room so that we could start the patented (although admittedly not yet perfected) drinking process. At our most efficient, the process involved six shots in thirty minutes accompanied with the loudest and most obnoxious of music selections.

In my excitement (exacerbated by the stresses of a most unfortunate academic week) I unwisely charged ahead of the pack towards the more uncharted territories of drunkeness. I called back behind me for my friends to accompany me, but it was to no avail. Taco Salad was only casually sipping at her drink while talking on the phone, while John and Terry were in hysterics over some funny internet cartoons. Meanwhile, I continued to drink hard, throwing caution to the wind like I normally do.

Right quick, I was in the bathroom, shirtless and on my back (and inexplicably without any chest hair, apparently), while John and company were struggling to de-pants me, presumable because I had gotten sick all over my jeans (not at all because they were trying to take advantage of me, honest). Those jeans were my favorite pair of all time. Sadly, they would develop a huge hole around the ass pocket much later during that school year. I miss those jeans dearly, and they serviced me so well during its oh so short lifetime.

My friends are a kindly folk, and they know that the cold, hard bathroom floor tile is no place for a mighty warrior, such as myself, to seek the blissful repose that only extreme inebriation can bring. They also know that I am far too heavy and manly to be carried back to my room. And so they began dragging my incooperative carcass across the bathroom floor and towards the exit which serendipitously is right across from my room. Not wishing to have me wake up with any funny looking tile burns on my legs and ass, they were so kind as to put a towel under me (which, as was related to me, also reduced the coefficient of kinetic friction between me and the floor by a significant amount).

For whatever reason, it was very difficult to get me from the bathroom tile and onto the carpeted hallway, as can be seen in the picture below. My butt is just far too big apparently.



Luckily for me, Terry was dating a "very large" and kind girl at the time. Apparently she had twice the strength of any normal man because she carried me the rest of the way and threw me oh so gently onto my futon. Afraid that I would get sick again while asleep, they put my head into a trash can, which I promptly began snoring into (much to the delight of Taco Salad, who was apparently laughing hysterically over that scene).

I woke up with a nice hangover, confused as to why I was naked down to my boxers.