"Shoulders" the professor calls. "Here" says a voice in the back. He makes a check in his gradebook.
"Neck" he says, and a smart-aleck somewhere says "Yo!"
"Head." There's a little silent wave which he notices and records.
"Mind" says the professor. No answer. "Mind?" He pans the room. Absent again. He puts an another X beneath a long column of X's stretching back who knows how long...
...above my right eye. I look like a piecemeal Frankenstein just in time for Halloween. I would post a picture but I look awful, since I have a black eye too. Happened at Frisbee practice Tuesday night. I was leaning out to make a block and caught the back of the guy's hand right in my eye, started bleeding a lot, confusedly I jogged in cleats over to a dorm to find a health aide. Called Drew and he took me in for stitches.
I had so much homework to do that night, and in the confusion I couldn't find my cellphone anymore, but I was trying not to think about these things. When I got home I slumped down, bummed, on the couch.
Then suddenly my ass started buzzing. It was Drew calling me on my cellphone, which was underneath a couch pillow. I was overjoyed. I still had tons of homework left, though, and this kept me up until 5:00 am.
On the way to class in the morning, tired as all get out, my bike had a violent blowout, so I had to march straight back with it on my shoulders. I drove my van (which of course I have no parking permit for, since I live off campus) to class and was late. When I finally got a break between two classes I ran out there to plug the meter again but they had already ticketed me twice.
However, we got our tests back in Real Analysis, a grad level class and probably the hardest I'm taking right now. I am one of 5 undergrads and the rest, 20 or so, are grad students. The prof announced that there were 2 perfect papers. And I won the lottery.
A lot of ups and downs man, hard to believe all this stuff happened over one 24 hour period.
Now I don't want to mislead you, the pastoral scene I just described does not mean my fall break was the same. Mostly I wasted the break hanging out way too late and then trying to recover the next day. For instance, Saturday night Jake & I went from bar to party to another party to Highway Diner finally and I got home at 5:30 in the morning.
We got this idea that we would take my keyboard and set it up in the basement of the new bohemian house party place. It turned out well, it was cozy & dark and people lounged around while a strobe light kept time, eerie in fact, I played Radiohead and people dug that and talked. Then Jake took over and played for a while. I talked to some dude about my number 7 nightmare and he handed over this little book in which he had scribbled arrangements of circles nested in regular polygons, talking importantly and ridiculously about how the number 7 was actually special because only 7 circles came together in that particular way, harmony and light. Blah blah.
Jake wound down and people were leaving, and then this guy says he can play piano too, real modestly. Jake later told me he knew exactly what was coming next. So the guy sits down and turns out to be a professional lounge lizard, literally, played blues and jazz at restaurants, and was incredibly good. I was afraid my keyboard would never let me touch her again. Finally Jake, insanely jealous, asked for a lesson from the dude.
We packed up though, Jake & I & a frisbee friend we picked up at an earlier party, and headed to Highway Diner, where I ordered french toast and got it special-made by the large personality of a chick behind the counter. Along with Duffy's and its famous homeless guy Elvis act this is one of the truly authentic places in Lincoln, one of the places I would take a Lincoln visitor to.
Anyway Sunday night Drew, Jaimster, Jake & I hit the casinos in Omaha. Except for Jaimster (the DealSeeker) we all lost money. Jake was going to lose the most on the night since within a half hour of getting there he had lost $70 on roulette, betting on black with a friend of his. But at the very end he grew his remaining $10 to $20 through blackjack, then put it all down on roulette as we were going out despite our attempts to restrain him. Well he won on black this time and we were all laughing at his bravado.
On the way back he had us in stitches with his overexcited stories of freshman year. Back at the apartment Jake & I ended up talking and yakkety-yakking until 6 in the morning about relationships, abortion, morals, and then when we woke up about politics, war, and America until about 3 in the afternoon.
Just got back from picking up the old Probe from my uncle in Ames, the one I wrecked in the Arby's parking lot the first time I tried to drive a stick. Well I got it back to Lincoln okay. My uncle was very cool about it, couldn't sell the thing for more than a pittance so he decided to give it to me, and I'm grateful: kung-fu, the legend continues. The vanagon will be phased out over the next month, at the end of which I return it to the rents.
Driving back from Ames in the late afternoon was nice. Late afternoon is definitely my favorite time of the day, when the sunlight goes orange and the shadows get long, and the haystacks so to speak look the best. The landscape between Ames and Lincoln was just like a Claude Lorrain: trees in silver tensile detail, rounded hills with cornrows, everything ordered, geometric. It is corn-harvesting season right now. Combines stirred up giant billows of dust which trailed off over the interstate. Dust-moats floated, frozen in the act by a late sun.
Really lonesome travel is about the best thing you can do for your brain. Good thoughts always pay a visit.
Tossing and turning last night I thought I was going crazy, crazy just like Kerouac's nervous breakdown at Big Sur, my mind kept jumping from thing to thing & I couldn't stop it, all were ridiculous things to think about at 4:45 am. I have never experienced anything like it and hope I never will again. Had a convincing sense of not actually existing, but the terrible thoughts kept coming & coming, from somewhere, not me, because "me" didn't exist. To keep myself sane I heard my voice start repeating, "Just think of the number 7. The number 7."
Clearly, when the thought of the number 7 is the only thing keeping you sane, you're not.
A word I stumbled across the other day in a study about the wife of a Japanese farmer in the 70's:
anomie (a-nuh-mee): (1) Social instability caused by erosion of standards and values. (2) Alienation and purposelessness experienced by a person or a class as a result of a lack of standards, values, or ideals.
So there was a Design Studio celebration today & someone thought it would be funny to order a root beer keg from Mum's Liquor. Came complete with tap and ice in a big red Budweiser trashcan. To this someone else added a beer bong, and sure enough wouldn't you know it we ended up behind Kauffman taking bong hits on the sidewalk. Some typical UNL student walks up, bewildered at first, asks if we have a permit to do this or what? Sure, we say, and offer him a bong hit, and straight off with a "heck I don't care" he agrees to. But he realized soon enough what it was & left without finishing.
Dream in which a former math prof of my explains what his real research is, some exotic space-time metrics. Only in real life nothing of the sort of course as he is an abstract algebraist. I could still write some of them down in the morning, total nonsense of course, like the time I dreamed of the "bivs" function. Too much math man.
A funny night driving around in the vanagon with Jake, Holt, Andrew, the Jaimster, and some other random people we picked up, going to the mall in its closing 20 minutes to pick up a hip flask for Andrew & Jamie (who thought about getting it monogrammed), hitting bars, and then off to a house party.
After parking the vanagon downtown we took a bike taxi up to "The Bar." These things are only meant for two people abreast but we crammed five in there. The chick pulling us was pretty cool about it; she worked hard but we gave her a big tip. "The Bar" was quiet outside on the veranda; we fled when this one latch-on chick we know showed up.
At Iggy's they were giving out little glow bracelets. One broke, and the fluorescent goo started leaking out, so I took the end of it like a paintbrush and started slinging it on the bar floor, making a blacklight Jackson Pollock.
At Bodega's Jake stuck a Heineken label on his forehead and we went up talking to girls as if it wasn't there. If they mentioned it we would just give them confused looks, ask "What are you talking about?"
We hit up Jimmy John's for day-old bread, which was a mere 45 cents per loaf, and good. On the way Jake jumped into pretty much every bush on O Street. He also started going up to groups of chicks and telling them it was my 21st birthday. I played along and got kisses from 8 different girls (on the cheek, okay) out of it.
Driving to the party we stopped along the way and threw open the van doors to people on O Street, tryna get chicks to hop in. "How stupid do we look?" was the general response to this.
The party was pretty good. Jake and I took turns playing the crappiest piano I have ever run across, half the lower notes (the important ones) were one-time usage only. I got a 9th kiss on the cheek for playing some Coldplay for a bohemian chick.
At 3:30 in the morning as Jake was jamming out in a cowboy hat this weird blond Beck-looking kid with lambchops came and started freeflowing to it. He was decent. They synched up a couple times, but then Jake realized he could mess with him and started playing louder and faster, and the guy started talking louder and faster until he was screaming nonsense and then left. Jake finished the night with his Troll Song which had me in tears I was laughing so hard.
This weekend went to an Ultimate Frisbee tournament in Fort Collins, Colorado. We were almost all rookies--so was everyone else, at least they were supposed to be, but it turned out about half of them had played on national caliber Ultimate teams. So we got our butts kicked. Except for Wyoming, we beat Wyoming, woo.
We stayed at an ex-UNL player's house in nearby small town Wellington. From there it was a walk of about 5 blocks down to the T-Bar Inn. A local bar peopled with rustics and farm implements on the wall and a jukebox with nothing more recent than 1980 in it. I decided to hit on this punk-looking chick named Rachel--just for practice, you know--and she got so into it that I started to get scared. She was 23 (she said), had already been married 3 years and then divorced (aah!), came to the T-Bar every weekend (uh-oh), and when she drug me out to the dance floor to the mellow twangs of modern country pop she started booty-dancing, badly. It was ridiculous; I didn't know what to do. So I just kinda stood there and hoped she would get the message and stop.
I don't remember how but I eventually escaped that situation...in the end she forced me to take her phone number. Definite parallels between the whole thing and that scene in Swingers where Vince Vaughan walks up to that cigar-smoking girl. Only I couldn't tear my cellphone in half afterwards.
Ultimate people constitute a strange subculture. It is a sport which virtually no one watches except those who play it. Most people confuse it with disc golf, and take us for a bunch of stoners, but in fact it is intense and extremely competitive at these tournaments. But among ultimate players there's a lot of cameraderie off the field. We went to a big party thrown by one of the CSU guys, there were about 150 people there, doing boat races in the back yard and making such a commotion that of course the cops came and busted it.
At these parties there are many strange rituals, most of which I have yet to witness. They chug an Ultimate disc sometimes, that's about 40-60 oz, or about 4 beers. There's also this thing called the landshark. Someone strips naked, pinches an disc upright between their butt cheeks, and then they get carried around by teammates like a coffin and its pallbearers.
Well, it was a cool weekend, even though my face got sunburned so bad it is now peeling off in brown strips, and it set me back on homework. We got back to Lincoln at 1:30 am Monday morning. I had an English paper due that morning as well as a test in the next class. So as things turned out I went through the day on 1 hr of sleep. Yeah that sucked. But Monday night I got--get this--16 hours of sleep. Have recovered now but honestly I dunno if I can keep this sorta stuff up.