Word Salad

I recently learned the term "word salad," which refers to the gibberish of crazy people. I find it funny. A friend of mine and Jake's who reads this blog regularly implied that I don't post enough, which is mainly because I'm lazy, so I guess this is a good place to start.

As of August I've lived in Johnson City/Erwin for nine years. Jake and I were driving by ETSU while he was down for Christmas and I had an epiphany. Alcoholics apparently call it a moment of clarity, but Jake didn't say anything at the time so who knows.

The campus strip is an area that I used to see every day, but I probably find myself out there maybe once every two months. There's a new strip mall across from the Krogerplex, beside the strip mall housing Dad's CDs, a mom-and-pop video store with an adult section, and a liquor store (without that last comma it becomes a video store with an adult section AND a liquor store, which is even better). The land it sits on had been undeveloped for as long as I can remember. As I looked at it, I decided I was done with JC. I didn't know exactly what I could really do about it, because I'm lazy and don't have any savings and my credit is shot to hell. As this summer approached and my roommates got married, I considered my options: move to NYC on a shoestring budget and die in the street like a mangy dog or head back home to Morristown and live cheap with relatives to build up a war chest.

I really started to loathe my job, too. I'm pretty firmly established among co-workers as being the person to ask for just about anything and my manager recognizes my abilities in terms of moving up the career ladder, but there are only so many times you can be yelled at because a for-profit business expects payment in return for services before you wonder if maybe you should have stayed in school. Or at least stayed home. At first it was shocking, yet funny; I actually had a woman say "you mean if I don't pay my bill when you want me to, you'll shut off my phone? If I had known that I wouldn't have bought it." Now I just want to strangle people.

I decided in June that I would move back home with the expectation that it would happen by the end of the summer. Now it's fall. Seriously, I'm fucking lazy.

My sister recently moved to Knoxville, so I put in my notice at AT&T (formerly Cingular Wireless) and I'm moving back down that way in the next week or so. I'll either stay with my parents if I find a job close to Morristown or my sister if I find a job in Knoxville. I have a bad habit of not thinking things through, so I really hope this doesn't bite me in the ass.

So, in honor of my impending departure, I'm going to recount various tales of debauchery and stupidity from my nine years in the illustrious Little Chicago. These will be in no particular order with no regard for decorum and to be honest I may be completely misremembering this shit to the point of fabricating entirely new stories.

***

Jake and I rented a house on Mary Street for my sophomore year of school. I hated living on campus my freshman year and Jake didn't want to be in Morristown anymore, so this was the perfect idea. Perfect usually isn't a relative term, but it is here. I'll get more in depth on Mary Street later, but the epic New Year 2K party seems like a fitting start.

New Year 2K

First of all, everyone attending this party is underage. No one is over the age of twenty and there were at least three seventeen-year olds. A friend of mine from the computer lab on campus offers to buy the liquor for us, at no charge from him, but he's only going to be in town for a couple of hours on New Year's Eve, so of course that begins to worry me as the day goes on. He finally comes through and I give him the money and the order: $160 for two fifths of Jose Quervo gold, two fifths of Smirnoff 80 proof, a fifth of Bacardi, a fifth of Seagram's seven, two quarts of Everclear (this becomes important), and really, who knows the fuck what else. (There's a picture of all of the alcohol we had that night and it's fucking ridiculous. Jake has it somewhere and hopefully he can scan it.) I think there are maybe 20-25 people in and out all night and we have two things: enough alcohol to burn down Johnson City and the lack of common sense that makes you think this is a good idea.

There was an empty lot across the street that we used for parking. The day of the festivities Jake and I walk out on the porch around noon and in that lot, we see that someone has thoughtfully dumped their Christmas tree on the side of the road. I turn to Jake and note "that tree will be involved in the party this evening." I didn't mean that in the sense that it was part of the plan; I meant that in the sense that drunk kids are stupid. A friend of ours, who we'll call Boomer, arrives early in the evening to help set up for the party, which involves putting alcohol in either the fridge or the freezer. Boomer was a special kind of crazy, the kind of crazy that sees a discarded Christmas tree on the side of the road and thinks "I need to involve that tree in this party." The seeds are sewn.

The party starts out like most Mary Street parties did; the opening parry where everyone took shots in rounds (we had a limited amount of shot glasses), followed by the second wave, where people start challenging each other to shots (this almost killed me during my 19th birthday party). After that everyone starts mixing drinks or grabbing beers and goes wherever the night takes them.

Midnight approaches and Boomer disappears. Meanwhile, a number of us are in the living room flipping channels to see if any spectacular Y2K-related societal breakdowns are occuring. Someone thinks they see either New York or Greece on fire, but it's a false alarm.

The countdown begins and there is a commotion on the roof and the front porch. At the shouts of "Happy New Year" that Christmas tree falls from the front of the roof, Boomer's unique way of ringing in the New Year. Around the same time, a Mary Street party newcomer vomits on our front porch, his unique way of ringing in the New Year.

The party rages on. A couple of kids fuck in Jake's bed, much to Jake's dismay. I walk out of my bedroom, into the kitchen, and turn to my left. Standing in the corner beside the refridgerator is that Christmas tree. I laugh; such is the Mary Street way. We pull a friend of ours out of the street in order to avoid him being run over by a dirty punk neighbor, saving two lives. If Theissen had been hit by that dirty punk, that dirty punk would have died in the aftermath. (Boomer would later get revenge by making our with that dirty punk's girlfriend, but that happens a couple of months later.) More alcohol is consumed, but the supply is barely effected.

The party wanes. People stake out their section of the living room floor as our gracious hosts prepare to retire to our respective boudoirs for the evening. Yet the night is just beginning. Our guest Jason is very, very fucking drunk. Beyond the bounds of good taste, really. I suggest he lay down. He doesn't respond. I help him to the living room, where he finally takes a position in the floor. He sits up and mumbles. He lays down again. He sits up again and opens his mouth slightly. Vomit begins to ooze forth. I take my leave of the room, as I cannot stand the sight of vomit. Boomer gives us play-by-play as the ooze becomes a steady flow. "Oh god, there are chunks of carrot. IT'S IN HIS HAIR!" Jake and Boomer try to help Arnold to the bathroom, but it is too late for that.

A picture of Jason (Warning: Nasty.)

Jason becomes unresponsive and Jake notices that his lips are turning blue. Attempts to get Jason to drink water end with water dribbling down his chin. He vomits in the bathtub. We're pretty sure he's about to die and are completely unprepared for this. Aside from the legal ramifications, how are we going to explain this to his parents?

Fortunately, another friend of ours, Annaka, has dealt with alcohol poisoning before. She explains what needs to be done: strip the bastard to his underwear and get him in a cold shower. Then force feed him water until he stops vomiting and let him sleep it off. So Jake and Theissen do just that. In the ensuing ruckus of derobing a dead-drunk 170-pound seventeen-year old the shower curtain is predictably ripped from the curtain rod and Jason's dead weight slams Jake into the wall, shattering a towel rack in the process. Theissen later recounted a vivid hallucination he had in the middle of this where he pulled out a 9MM handgun and put Jason out of his misery to end the nightmare.

After an hour or two (or ten, really, who knows), Jason is finally out of the woods. The friends that he came to the party with (two of which fucked in Jake's bed) decided to drive home rather than stay there. Jake had already put Jason's clothes in the wash, so Jason was clothed in a shirt and shorts of Jake's, wrapped in a blanket, and placed in the back of his station wagon. Already after dawn, several of us decided to forgo sleep and have our traditional post-party Waffle House feast now, instead of after we woke up at noon. Returning to Mary Street after breakfast, party goer and all-around wise man Clay put it as succinctly as possible: "that was goddamn ridiculous."

We would later find out that Jason had been tricked into consuming an absurd amount of Everclear over the course of an hour or so by a couple of fat jackasses. Normally, one would combine a half of shot of Everclear with a half of shot of kool-aid, but they were taking advantage of Jason's already intoxicated state by feeding him full shots of Everclear while they were shooting kool-aid.

Jason took the entire experience well. He came back up a day or two later to collect his clothes and explained that he didn't really remember much aside from waking up in the back of his car, wearing someone else's clothes and parked in front of a house he didn't recognize (his friends had driven back to their place and left him in the car while they went inside and slept).

Such was the Mary Street way.