11/28/2005 - 4:22 a.m. | for consequence is a bigger word than you think

Subject: GE barcrawl and such.

GOOD NEWS! MY LUCK IS FINALLY TURNING AROUND! In a George Bailey-like outpouring of support, friends and family flocked in from all over to dump a damn wicker basket of money on my table. �Remember, George: no man is a failure who has friends.� Thank you, Clarence. DO YOU WANT THE MOON MARY (Pretend it is said as such in my inadequate Jimmy Stewart impression) OK, this did not really happen, but clearly karma is starting to mend things right for me. I found a bag of Doritos in the Greg Hall men�s room! Well, no� it wasn�t a full-sized bag� or even one of those vending machine ones� much smaller� and you might say a bag of toilet chips is no blessing at all. But lord it is a lot better than another damn million negative dollars, am I right?! So clearly things are on the up and up.

I spent most of yesterday sleeping and wallowing in self-pity, skipping classes, meetings, everything, getting up only because Lt. Worf was dressed up as a cowboy. But, my time of melancholy was over, and it was back out into the real world to try and solve these damn problems. No, I have no ideas yet, but at least I�m out there looking! Another three hours spent in the Comm library, and I was finally done with the reading. Then I pretty much stumbled by accident into a meeting for a portfolio school up in Chicago. I had vaguely planned on attending it, but I had also planned on collapsing in a heap for a while, and I saw the latter idea as the winner. I was sort of sucked in, though, and who knows? Maybe it�s the direction I needed. Apply to more damn school� Psh, we�ll see.

I came home and didn�t even bother arguing. I knew they wanted me out on the GE barcrawl, and hell, I knew I wanted to be out on the damn thing, too. Besides, having negative money is the best way to mooch shit off people. They were dumping poison into me all night, most of it horrendous shots, but I�ve learned to drink as of late it seems (necessity?), so I�m taking it more in stride, no matter how nasty that �Melon Balls� shot might taste. (The answer? Quite nasty.) We sat and watched some of the free awful softcore Insight Cable provides us with, Broadcast Bombshell in this case. WSEX is not a legitimate name for your television station, friends!

I feel like I drank a lot, but 1) only pussies count (I�m told) and 2) I don�t really remember anyway. We didn�t make it out into the tundra until nearly 11. First stop, Legends. Apparently even among a group as nerdy as the GEs there is a pecking order. And guess what? We�re not far up in it. So we hovered around downing beer and lemon drops and trying not to appear all that awkward. Considering no one noticed us, I guess you�d call it a success.

We followed the pack to Murphy�s next, but the line was huge, and it was freezing, so we didn�t stay long� but not before convincing the people in front of us that Brent Spiner (a.k.a. Lt. Cmdr. Data) was over at Legends right then for some sort of talk. True, he did sort of like him (if you have some sort of advanced glaucoma), and he did turn in my direction when I yelled, �Lieutenant Commander!� in a stern voice, but lots of people turn when I yell things. It got them the hell out of line, though, and then we got the hell out of line in case they caught on. �Oh, you must have just missed him!�

Kyle loaned me twenty dollars (to be returned with a Snacker in interest), and I�ve been trying very hard the last couple minutes to track exactly where that money went. Briefly:

5 in my pocket
1 to a beer at Legends
3 to Antonio�s Pizza (some burrito pizza hell � what was I thinking?)
5 to a round of drinks someone else was supposed to be buying
1 to A-Train*
1 in the vending machine moments ago

*Fucking A-Train! He lurches up to get one of the 20 dollars remaining in my possession. �Dude, can I borrow a dollar?� but you know it�s the type of borrow like with a sheet of paper where you never gonna get it back! Damn him.

Still, that leaves four dollars totally unaccounted for. No wonder I�m so far in the hole! In a single night I managed to vanish four dollars. A fifth of my total funds just absorbed into someone�s belly or the ground or God knows where. It is unnerving!

From this to that, blah blah blah. Sorry, I am sick of this damn computer lab, and the very loud gay black man yelling pretty much all the time. I DO NOT NEED AN ITINERARY OF EVERY MINUTE THERE, EUSTICE It is getting difficult to concentrate, and all these fags want me to keep the lab open longer. I feel like I�ll have to be a right cunt to get them out. Plus, I forgot my thumbdrive with Semisonic�s �Closingtime� on it. That usually sends a pretty solid signal. Word says there a lot of typographical errors in this paragraph. Piss off, Word.

OK! The barcrawl! We headed from Antonio�s Pizza (TEEZPIKUP) to Clybourne, which was not going to be tolerable at all. As such, Kyle and I hung in the alley downing an awful, awful Pepsi and Evan Williams. Evan, by the way, has tried to class himself up by coming in a glossy cardboard box. Still 8 dollars a bottle, but lord! That box! (They also have a new sexy ad campaign on how good it is to wait for things to age. For instance, minors are awkward and illegal, but then they grow up into hot bitties! Or just larger versions of the grossness before). Anyway, Evan was not pleasing and brought me about as close as I got to puking all night, in that icy alley (Where did the ice come from? Why is it nowhere else?). We were nearly mauled by a pizza man and discovered two mysterious buckets of what was at best very drippy gingerbread batter. With an empty forty bottle floating therein. Clearly, class must be waiting for us in these walls! We went to join our friends. Well, first I followed orders, downed the rest of the piss, and spiked it to the ground �like a football.� I felt strong.

Kyle ran off to talk to everybody, anybody, Jevon started doing laps, trying to find someone to bang (attracting some real horrors along the way), Shelly and Spritz clung to some lonely corner, ostensibly to secure �the perfect table.� I sort of� floated around these various extremes, as I don�t like to sit alone, and I don�t like to talk to people either. Also, much drinking. Kyle was quite generous with purchases from the shot girl, and someone kept passing me a beer (or worse, a B to the E, Budweiser�s supercharged berryfuck hellmouth). I would have enjoyed dancing, but not many were quite gone enough yet. Thank God for the group of people who entered with togas. One of them was a dude fit in a former life but has since become quite rounded� like if you inflated a Stretch Armstrong doll maybe. Yeah, my prose is spiraling. Deal with it. I made it a point to hover around Shelly in a brotherly attempt to keep her from being sexually assaulted� as well as, I must admit, an honest effort to not look one of the creepy assaulters myself � standing there, alone, with my drink, staring.

Anyway, you know how it goes (now sitting in a car in the suburbana tundra that is Kirkwood, MO). Can't through the evening without thinking somebody's wants to do me, right? I hate when they're too pretty for me, and this one was like a Champaign person all over, which means she is vastly more attractive than I am but must have several hilariously over-the-top negative traits to counter the first part. Anyway, she kept giving me eyes (Jevon even caught her flashing a smile, which is really bad news), and then she brought her friend right next to me, ostensibly for the purposes of dancing. What does one do in this situation? Like, she and friend are grinding up on each like inches away from, as I look forward, sip my drink, and pretend I don't notice. Is that what passes for an invitation to dance in this town? Well, then I guess I'm not buying because no matter how overtly sexual their humping gets, in the back of my mind, I'm always like, "You're wrong, man. So fucking wrong." Anyway, we continued playing little eye games for the rest of the night (as she was chatted up by lesser dudes who actually were willing to make tools themselves, and as Shelly and I sort of floaty danced one another - for safety's sake), but we got out before that Evan kicked in and started giving me ideas.

Brothers was our last stop, and we were all pretty lit by this point. Kyle had become that guy, the one that completely traps you in conversation so that there is no hope of escape. Shelly and I parade around, making asses of ourselves in front of the cool GE's. I�m almost positive we danced to Harry Bellafonte. Yeah, well, you're still all nerds! More and more shots were downed, appearing from nowhere mostly, and I watched as like seven different guys took a shot at this one girl at the next table. She shot them down in impressive time. I think she could make nationals with that sort of skill. Moller was around (the other IMSA alum fake-GE), and he was hitting on some nasty butter creature. I contemplated warning him, but he's one of those drunks that like to punch a lot, and I was a little pissed at him for it. We actually stayed until closing time, which might be a first for us. Spritz crept around in the shadows, and I picked some corner to hide in when I could (by which I mean, when I wasn't being accosted for dollars by fucking Adam Bagnall, you know? Yeah, you know...) At least I made it into several pictures. Another GE success story.

By the time we were on the way home, Kyle was starting to talk about marriage again (oh good, that stage), which usually means our ground speeds drops to like a 2 feet a minute. I've heard that noise before, and I've haven't been running lately, so I took off on my own, collapsing on the couch with Lizzie McGuire. The rest of the crew arrived about ten minutes later, and they were in fine form. Well, Spritz had already vanished, and Shelly is still a docile drunk, but now we had two horrible drunken Wilds on our hands instead of one. Jevon, for instance, with all his combat training and whatnot, has an interesting habit of pulling out his death knife and waving it around. "See, if you hold the knife like this, there's no way you could ever stab yourself! Look, you'd have to twist it all around like this!" "Very helpful, Jevon. Now please put the weapon away."

(Currently: Driving to baby cousin�s birthday party. Mom�s tornado of psychotic rage finally touched down, and Dad and I, like those stupid rednecks that try to film the shit on their camcorders, got sucked in bad)

Shelly kept trying to go to bed, but there�d be a crash (the loveseat flipping over onto Kyle, for instance), and she�d run back in to see the trouble. Kyle �Sob Story� Wild began crying and making hilariously pained faces for sympathy. Jevon, not falling for it, pulled down Kyle�s drawers to examine the wounds, of which there were none. Kyle quickly forgot his agony, and we were back outside running around with the BB gun. Jevon, not used to being back around civilians, also has a bad habit of casually waving a gun around in one�s face during conversation. I managed to hide it eventually and distracted them with fireworks in the street. Jevon put a colander on his head for protection.

Neither of them could stand very well, so I appeared leaps and bounds ahead of them in terms of sobriety. I was well willing to drive us to Steak and Shake, but I unfortunately mentioned this while Shelly was still up and about. She did not approve, so a good portion of the evening was spent arguing with her. Personally, I still feel I could have gotten us there and back totally fine, but I guess it was for the best. Kyle and Jevon would hear nothing of it and ran to sit out in Kyle�s running car, laying on the horn and screaming. Smacko can confirm this, as well as the fact that the two Wilds came bursting in his place yelling about what drugs they could get for free. Answer: None.

They stormed back in while Shelly and I argued (occasionally I stopped to point out various vestiges of their sexual encounters � Astroglide and �Ultra Pleasure� Trojans � as evidence they had �gone all the way.� Shelly more or less told me that I was an idiot, she already having told me on Tequila Night and me having forgotten entirely that series of events entirely). Clearly she would not release her death hold on me (even as I pulled her out and gave some mad floor burn) so I gave up. The Wilds were appeased with thoughts of McGriddles in the morning. Like that was going to bloody happen.

It was three now, and while I felt fairly alert (Jevon breakdancing downstairs didn�t hurt � he was kicking around cymbal lamp for 45 minutes as far as I could reason), I still had seven damn pages to write, so I popped an ephedrine just in case. Didn�t do shit as far as I could tell, but then I did bang out six pretty good pages in 2 hours, so who knows? Well, by �pretty good,� I mean �filled with intense bile for the class in general and specifically its shit terrible reading material.� Pretty much I wouldn�t give a fact without taking another dump on the author of How Brands Become Icons (Douglas Holt, you stupid cunt). I�m not sure why I did this. The book was quite redundant, and it had a pretty stupid theory (that Coca-Cola, Budweiser, Volkswagen, and the like did not become huge brands because they made good ads but because they used �cultural branding� to ease tensions caused by changing times in American history� through the use of �identity myths� in function with �prolific worlds� blah blah blah more made up vocab), and it liked to shit on these same brands for not continuing to use this strategy even though it had been only invented by this drunk retard like a year ago. Oh, that was why I did that. I�ll be interested to see my grade.

(Currently in front of my grandpa�s grave�)

Slept for a few hours, finished up my shit, printed it, and went to drop it off in class. Unfortunately, they weren�t taking them until the end of the period, so I crept up to Bertie.

Me: Hey, could you turn this in for me? I have some stuff to do. [That stuff being �Star Trek,� but I was not about to tell her that]
Berite: Yeah, sure � what TA do you have for discussion?
Me: ????
Bertie: You don�t know which discussion group you�re in?
Me: ????

Hahaha, oh God I�m so fucked. Definitely have not been to discussion group ever. I just told her to toss it in a random pile and let God sort it out. By the way, in case you were wondering, to accurately portray �????,� one must purse their lips while kind of squinting � like they just had something really sour. However, all roadblocks were out between me and the weekend pretty much, so I was pleased.

The rest of the day was spent in a daze at work (although, sadly, like everyone I know went to see the opening of the new Harry Potter movie then, which leaves me pretty high and dry � and yes, Shelly, I would have liked to maybe run into Hillary because, yes, I do find her attractive, however strange that might be) and then Kyle and I feasted on Silver Mine while watching the shitfest that is Blade: Trinity. I NEED MY IPOD TO HUNT VAMPYRES Yeah you do, sexy.