Frisbee team co-captain Matt and his outrageous British accent are leaving Lincoln for good in less than a week, so Saturday we threw a surprise party for him at Lincoln's only sushi bar. As we waited in the back behind folding Japanese screens I came up with a great prank. I poured soy sauce into a wine glass--lots of people were drinking wine--and told people I was going to get Andy to drink it. Andy's a freshman punk (and hence underage) who of all people deserves to be had the most. No one believed I could pull it off, and I was going to wait for the right moment to spring it on him, so they forgot.
But about two hours later with a beer in one hand I casually handed him the glass and asked if he wanted to drink the rest of my wine. Without even smelling it--we figured you could smell the salt from about 3 feet away--he took a big gulp, all eyes on him. He was drinking water for the rest of the night.
Later I challenged Craig (Mark's youngest brother) to a wasabi eating contest. The game as I imagined it is like chicken, you keep matching your opponent in quantity at each stage until someone backs down. Now I don't know if you've ever had wasabi: it's like taking a flamethrower to your sinuses.
We started with about twice this much on a cucumber roll, and both of us made it through tearless. The second round was three times as much and as I stared Craig down, laughing as it started to kick in for me, his face and eyeballs turned red, tears welled up, and he gagged. I thought he was going to puke but he made it through and then conceded; he'd had enough. But to beat him I had to show that I could eat more. We rounded up all the rest of the wasabi on both trays--it dwarfed the roll, there was more wasabi than roll, even the owner of the restaurant conceded that it was a ridiculous amount. The crowd counted to three and then I was in a world of hurt for about fifteen seconds.
I didn't make any attempt at all to keep a poker face on, I just tried to remain standing. My face must have been all screwed up like an evil wry tribal mask. Like Craig I almost tossed the cookies, and when I finally got it down and looked around I felt weak in the knees, and my hands were shaking. Someone took pictures and I will try to post them.
Well this was just the launching pad for the evening. I tied a balloon to Matt's collar that said "Good-bye" (might as well have said "One night stand?" we joked) and we all trooped off to another bar. When the bars finally turned us out on the street, the balloon suddenly broke free and off it went into the night sky, all of us shivering and waving to it in the cold.
So then we went up to Matt's apartment which is on the eleventh floor of a downtown apartment building, and commands a great view of Lincoln. If you can call a view of Lincoln Nebraska "great," that is. For this reason the random group of intellectuals who followed us from the bar got to talking about Lincoln, the sort of way I used to think about Munich when I would climb the belltower for $1.50 and look down on it, immense but somehow vulnerable to analysis.
One guy with bulging eyes and fish-lips covering bunny teeth kept telling us "this town needs to be rocked," and had some big plan to wreak Merry Pranksters mischief among all the straights and stiffs. That someone would actually try to change this place & people was an idea I'd never even considered before. Since the day I saw Lincoln as it is, it's seemed hopeless & I've known I would leave, never to come back again.
There was another weird guy up there who looked like a cross between Michael Jackson and Milli Vanilla, with a leather jacket and mop-hanging hair, who seemed content with the fact that he was here, working in the library and trying to make it big as a guitar player. I found him super annoying.
I also saw a guy who used to live at 12th and D earlier in the semester--one of my favorite hangouts, not as good as Joe's house parties back in the day but still strange & good--even though I didn't recognize him at first. He told me that house has been a non-stop party for about 30 years, and has been the birthplace of quite a few bands; it would be interesting to read the history of that house I think.
Anyway as things were winding down my friend V got into conversation with a skinny but fierce-faced guy hugging a vodka bottle about an old friend of hers, a travel agent who used to be a normal dude but now has apparently gone nuts on acid in Albuquerque. What a wild world we live in--I tend to forget that.
I am trying to persuade my roommate to become king of Greenland. He is a forceful enough guy, a leader type, and besides is mostly Danish, which is good because Greenland is part of the Kingdom of Denmark. Since 1979 it has been self-governing though...the door is wide open. Greenland is lonesome for its hero.
Besides there are only 59,000 people in Greenland. This is about a quarter of Lincoln's population. With a little determination, hard work, and some hobnobbing with the Inuits it shouldn't be hard to convince 30,000 people he is the man for the job. Then just think of it: a frozen wasteland over 3 times the size of Texas at your command!
Today was a beautiful day esp. for November Nebraska. This is just the cat playing with the mouse before it kills and eats it, I guess, patting it around a little. (Somewhere I heard that most mice die of a heart attack before they're ever eaten.)
Anyway snow is on the way this weekend. But today a golden late fall day, we played frisbee behind Kauffman on the notorious hump that used to be Bancroft. The gravesite of my first ever college class. The sun was glinting off the grass and I noticed a million little spiderweb gossamers in the grass of the hill. If you looked close, you could see more floating down out of the sky, and I thought, have they always been falling and I never noticed? Were I to sleep standing for a year would I awake buried to the neck in them, my punishment for never noticing before?
A very sad thing happened a few weeks ago. The little brother of Dave, our frisbee team captain, died in Iraq when the truck he was riding in ran over a landmine. You can read a little bit about Jamie in this Daily Nebraskan story.
Only a few weeks earlier I met Jamie at a party. Dave had been telling us all for about a month that his brother was going to come home, and since he had turned 21 while in Iraq, they were going to celebrate hard. A real homecoming. From the way he talked about him you could tell Dave loved him like an older brother should, I heard all about him on those long frisbee trips. When I finally met him at the party somebody yelled a congratulatory "Hey, he's back from Iraq" and Jamie just had this look on his face like he wanted to forget that, didn't say a word but took his silent beer to another room. Jake saw this of course keen observer of people that he can be sometimes, told me later that night as we talked of politics and war--we stayed up till 6 am talking I recall--that that look was the first time the war had become real for him.
When I heard the news it was not war but death that suddenly became real for me. Previously it had never pierced my sphere of existence, I have been more fortunate than most in that, I guess. Admittedly, it's still remote, but I see the effect on Dave who's my friend. And the night I heard I dreamt of my own little brother. If you're reading this I love ya bro and I'll see you at home for Thanksgiving.
Well it has been 73 degrees in Omaha since August according to my old xml weather feed provider perceive.net. Lest you get the opinion that it is balmy up here (it is not, why am I here, why) I am switching over to the apparently new boy genius weather xml feed, which is available for Lincoln. I am quite certain this just made your day.
A weekend of ultimate in Arkansas and now I'm exhausted, and sick. We drove the vanagon all the way down there and got lost in the backwoods of Oklahoma. We weren't even supposed to be in Oklahoma, what happened is that I missed an exit and ended up heading onto the turnpike, which as you know only lets you off at 20 mile or so intervals. I was going to retrace our steps until my navigator (a non-American) thought it would be more exciting to try to get there via thin red lines instead of the thick blue ones. Well coming from Missouri I should have known better.
Anyway it rained torrentially, one of my wipers broke and then both when Dave & I stopped to try to fix them. I jimmied them together with hair band ties but from then on they did nothing. I could hardly see ten feet ahead half the time. Sheets of rain rendered everything blurry, and I hunched over the wheel to get as close to the sight of the white line as I could. Darkness swallowed us, fog attacked from outside and inside, collecting on the inside of the windshield. Defroster could not keep up and I resorted to sleeving it periodically. There was a terrible feeling of approximation in the way I was driving--an ambiguity about whether or not I was on the road that I almost couldn't bear. And it hit me, this is it, this is your life right now.
We passed through one small town after another and sometimes had to turn in random places to keep on the same road. Once we discovered we had been going south for thirty miles when we thought we were going east. Something I can't even mention here happened in a small Arkansas town ten miles from Fayetteville--hilarious story now actually--I can tell you in person if you remember to ask. Finally we got there at 4:00 in the morning, 3 hours later than we should have, and had to get up at 7:00 for the tournament.
It was a Halloween tournament and most teams played in costume. We went as Braveheart i.e. kilts and blue facepaint which Mommer sent me, ran downfield on the pulls yelling "Freedom!" at the top of our voices and a lot of other silly stuff. We went 3-1 on the day. The third game was super intense like nothing I've ever been a part of before, a couple moments were just pure animal.
That night of course there was the customary enormous house party. Saw some wild costumes: a girl in a full-size Mr. Potato Head with big velcro face parts, a super drunk guy dressed as a present with the label "To: Women, From: God," and a dude whose upper torso was an extended rectangular box over which a plaid shirt was stretched. I'm not sure how he could see in that. For some reason I laughed until I almost cried every time I saw this, it just made no sense.
We saved this party twice. The first time, they ran out of keg cups, and we had snagged some earlier and brought them along. Later when things were dying down we replaced the crummy angry rap which no one was into with the Blue Album--a sure bet with any group of geeks, and ultimate players are mostly geeks. Immediately people started coming in, singing along. By track 5 the first people were dancing but then angry rap was demanded again. Angry rap which no one there really enjoyed as music, but Americans continue to think is the only kind of music you can dance to. Well they got their booty pretense in after that and chicks were dancing on tables. Whatever. How come you weren't dancing to it before hmmm?
The second day I was sicker and we lost to a team of Oompah-loompahs, but oh well, that's the best UNL has ever done at that tourney. Got back to Lincoln at 1:00 in the morning and then the fun continued, I had to hit the books for a history test that same morning. Ug. Test went okay, but riding to campus in a cold rain was awful, like breathing in flames of pneumonia.