Ethel here with some more to say about Halloween! I was just going to comment on the last post, but I now realize that I actually have some (maybe not so) important details to add. First of all, I must use this time to clarify something: I was not merely a slutty Native American! I was going along with the Peter Pan theme and in reality went as Tiger Lily (I’m not really sure who she is either). Next year I’ll have to be more obvious in my costume choice. I must also thank Trotsky for reminding me about my run in with the randos on the street. Did not remember making a pass at anyone, but I now realize that I indeed did. The important thing is that I didn’t go home with them and not all Bolsheviks can say that about Halloween night. I also have to let my temper come out a bit, because I was not so happy to hear that our gift of beer went to such waste (although I do imagine it was quite a fun time). Just the other day, the giver of that gift brought up that he had left that for the members of 2H. Now, I had seen the empty beer case the next morning, but figured someone had just left it there after drinking it. I certainly did not realize the owner had actually left an almost full case as a kind gesture. Upon realizing this, I wondered who had taken in from us! Being that I always think of my fellow Bolsheviks as being kind people who value their friendships, I never imagined it could have been one of them. So, you must be able to imagine my surprise when reading that last post. I do feel a little betrayed and also look forward to the next time that I can steal your alcohol from right under you, you dirty bastards.
Moving on. As Trotsky pointed out, the group was separated more than once during the night. Here are some things he missed. Most importantly, he missed the hot dog stand. What a damn good idea! Who isn’t hungry after an exhausting walk down franklin st? I sure as hell was and once I saw the beauty that was preservative filled mystery meat, there was no turning back. I had to have one, so, along with a few lucky others, I indulged myself with deliciousness. It was 30 seconds of pure joy. Having experienced bliss in a bun, we moved on to meet up with Trotsky, Caesar and some others. Upon entering the dance party, I noticed some fellas in the back doing what they referred to as the “hoola hoop dance.” Noticing the curious expression that spread across my face, they promptly encouraged me to join. So, I hesitantly began the dance. However, still not able to grasp the reasoning for such a dance, I quickly moved on. In fact, we moved on from the party altogether. At some point along the way to Townhouse, we were separated again and at this point, my roommate and I found ourselves at what I can only refer to as a “table party.” I call it this because everyone was drinking on a picnic table outside. It was different and we liked it, so we hopped on the table and grabbed the franzia (most of which would end up going down my left nostril). The group soon discovered the rotting pumpkins and feeling adventurous, a few members of the party decided it would be fun to throw them into the stone wall and break them. Unfortunately, most of the pumpkin ended up on those who threw them and that quickly spread to any bystanders, including myself. It is difficult to describe the foul smell that was now being emitted by our bodies. I can only advocate that people please not let their carved pumpkins sit for too long, for there is an appropriate time to say goodbye, even if that time happens to come before Halloween.
It’s important to note, in an attempt to show that we do indeed have manners, that my roommate and never fully realized that the renters of the house which we had gotten so much joy out of were not actually at the house. It is an easy detail to miss when franzia and pumpkins find your attention. So, it was a surprise to us that as we walked out of the kitchen with beers in hand, we stumbled upon two shocked and irritated renters. It seemed it was time to leave.
After a quick stop at Mill Creek, where a lot of bruises were created (it’s difficult to keep your feet on the ground after a night of Riot Punch), we headed back to our lovely abode and called it a night. And there, for you, is a little addition to an in-depth look at Bolsheviks Halloween-ing.
Friday, November 20, 2009
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
What The Fuck Happened On Halloween
Okay so I’d like to apologize for the fact that the Bolsheviks have gone largely silent as of late – schoolwork has largely gotten in the way of my recreational writing, but don’t worry it hasn’t gotten in the way of my recreational drinking because I know where my true priorities lie.
For us, Halloween really began some weeks beforehand when we as a collective realized something – none of us had ever been in a fight. We decided that we needed to rectify this situation, and that Halloween was the night to do so. How fucking hilarious would it be to see a bunch of dudes in ridiculous costumes engaged in stumbly, drunken battle? Really fucking hilarious, that’s how fucking hilarious it would be. So keep in mind that the eventual goal for the entirety of Halloween was for our group of bro’s (or Brolsheviks, if you’d rather) to find another group of bro’s and, as Caesar put it, ruffle some feathers.
This year, Halloween fell on a Saturday, which meant that everybody in town was going to get trashed and go to Franklin Street, where they’d mill around for a few minutes and then go to some party. Which meant that our goal for the pre-Franklin festivities was to get as drunk as we could without dying.
How does one accomplish this, you ask? By instigating a Liquor Treat, which for the unenlightened is just like trick-or-treating but instead of candy you get booze. To paraphrase Alfred Kinsey, it’s a party.
We held this Liquor Treat at Townhouse, which is conveniently located about two blocks from Franklin Street and also a conveniently anarchic apartment complex where the only thing the landlords ask of their tenants is that they don’t burn the place down.
Oh, and before I continue, here’s a short list of our costumes:
- Santa Claus (myself)
- Snuggie Jedi (The Party Trotsky)
- The Bear Jew
- The Great Mouse Detective (Caesar)
- Sexy Indian (The always culturally sensitive Ethel Rosenberg)
- Slutty Snuggie (AKA the Sluggie)
- Peter Pan
- Hipster Pirate
The Liquor Treat commenced at the apartment of Ivana Trump (name changed), where we were served “blood,” also known as fruit punch with vodka in it. After we’d drank enough blood to make the Red Cross think we were wasteful and/or a bunch of vampires, we made our merry way to Ivana’s neighbor’s place, where we were greeted by none other than a man dressed as a lady.
I can’t really get into what transpired at that apartment, but allow me to say this: Friends, you have not lived until a man-lady has forced peppermint schnapps down your throat while screaming, “Drink up, bitch!” We of the Bolsheviks have indeed lived.
Following the uneventful and non-traumatic stop at Ivana’s neighbors, we went to Ethel’s apartment where, in a sub-perversion of our plan to drunkenly turn our childhoods on their collective heads, she and her roommates offered apple bobbing, except upon each apple, they had written a letter that corresponded to either a shot or a beer. Depending on which apple you picked out, you drank that drink. I oh-so-fortunately earned myself a double shot of Evan Williams honey whiskey.
With the initial buzz in place, it was time for the heavy hitters. We (did I mention there were like thirty of us?) made our way to the next apartment where we were served margaritas, or at least our hosts’ best drunken guess as to what a margarita was, which turned out to be an excessively potent combination of tequila and store-bought margarita mix which did little to cut the harsh taste of the tequila.
Some of us ducked out of this one early in order to head to Caesar’s apartment, which was the final stop on the only-depressing-if-you’re-an-adult cavalcade of drunkenness, where we had to make the final beverage of the tour, Riot Punch.
For the unindoctrinated, Riot Punch is a beverage that first debuted on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, a show that’s always on point with the creative ways to drink (can wine, anyone?).
The recipe is Everclear and Blue Frost Gatorade. Mix to taste.
(I’m going to get on my 88 Miles Per Hour shit and jump back to Saturday afternoon, when we went on a mad dash to find ourselves some powdered Blue Frost Gatorade. Believe it or not, we checked like three different stores before we found enough BFG to properly mix with our gallon of Everclear so that the taste would not be “flaming death.”)
Anyway, we loaded up our several-gallon tub with Everclear and BFG, and even with about eight gallons of water all up in our mix, the Riot Punch still tasted extremely strong enough to power a tractor. By the time we’d reached this conclusion, it was too late and people had started to show up. Being that Riot Punch is traditionally consumed in one-gallon jugs, Trotsky, Caesar and myself filled ourselves up some jugs and got to drinkin’ along with everybody else, who in a rare, tragic show of Drinking Class Division were forced to drink out of cups.
And let me tell you my fair proletariat cattle, drink we did. We discovered that about two cups of riot punch could easily send its drinker on that magical journey from “comfortably buzzed” to “completely and totally fucking trashed.” I honestly have no idea how much Riot Punch I drank due to the fact that I was drinking out of a jug, but let me just say I drank so much that I had to pass the second half of this post off to the Party Trotsky.
Anyway, that comes later. At this point in the story came the dancing. We were listening to your typical mildly indie dance music (Justice, MGMT, Daft Punk, Crystal Castles, etc.) plus ironic rap music (Read: Lil’ Jon, Ludacris, whatever else we liked in middle school) when Caesar had the ultimate in good ideas: he put on “She Wolf” by Shakira. The people danced. Then, he put on “Party in the USA.”
That’s right. Party in the Motherfucking USA.
A quick retort to those who say that the song “sucks,” or is “poorly written,” or is “stupid and annoying and whoever likes it should die.” What’s not to like about this song? It’s about the two greatest things in America – partying and the USA. If you disagree, fuck you you’re wrong.
Anyway, at the moment that PiTUSA hit the speakers, the place erupted. The floor shook. The blind were healed. Everybody danced their fucking asses off and sang along to the chorus which we all know even though we pretend not to. In the interest of full disclosure, we were all stratospherically drunk.
At this time it was about 11:15, so we decided to head up to Franklin Street to see everybody’s ridiculous costumes, and then head to a bunch of random parties to continue our heroic drinking binge. That’s when I made a fatal mistake. Trotsky grabbed me, partially to hold himself up and partially to get my attention, and held up his Jug O’Riot Punch, and simply said, “We have to finish this.” There was like a quarter of a gallon left, as we polished that shit off promptly.
This is the part where I blacked out and as I’m wont to do when completely shit-bombed, headed crookedly home and passed out. This is also the part where the Party Trotsky takes over in order to atone for giving me the beverage that set me over the edge.
Excellent summary of the events of the night so far by Castro, although he failed to mention one of the more terrible instances that seemed to keep happening to various members of our group, particularly Castro, Sluggie, and I, that instance being the fact that in every single apartment the temperature was comparable to that of the surface of the sun. Seriously, I was sweating like no one’s business at every available moment, most likely due to the fact that I WAS WEARING A BLANKET. Regardless of this minor problem I encountered, the night was going swimmingly as we approached our Grail-like quest of making it to Franklin Street, and the closer we got, the more people began to appear out of nowhere, and it appeared that we would soon be involved in what appeared to be slightly controlled chaos, on a town wide scale. I was correct.
We made it onto Franklin Street, with most of our group in tow, and so began the gawkfest that would define the rest of the night for me, with slutty (insert random job, person, or pretty much anything you want) being the costume of choice for the ladies, and a wide array of hastily made, slightly ironic outfits for the fellas. We picked our way slowly through the crowd, the majority of which was stumblingly drunk, but since this description also matched us, the speed and the demeanor of the crowd agreed with us considerably. Many picture taking opportunities were taken, my favorite being a picture with one of the many Green Men wandering the streets, and the brilliant display of dance moves from said Green Man, courtesy of Mr. Charlie Kelly. These pictures would be the downfall of our group, as each time someone stopped to take a picture, everyone else, obliviously drunk as to what was going on, continued on their merry way down the road, therefore losing the picture person in the crowd, which according to news reports later was as large as 50,000 people. So understandably, we lost more and more people as the night went on, and the “group” that I was walking with had a constantly changing roster. It was around this moment when I received a call from a dear friend of mine, who had decided to visit on this the most ridiculous of night in CH. She was farther down the street, and I told her to wait, I’d somehow make it there, and in about twenty minutes of cajoling the rest of my group to pick up the pace and hustle down to meet my friend, we finally found each other outside of New York Pizza. Greetings of love and happiness were exchanged, exacerbated by our mutual fucked upness. I discovered later that she was actually engaging in a myconically orientated journey that night, and I imagine the constantly changing and flowing stream of gaudily dressed people was built expressly for the purpose of the psilocybic meanderings. I plan on making a journey quite similar to this next week, but that will hopefully be the topic of another post.
As my friend and I continue to exclaim over finding each other in such a ridonkulous crowd, other members of my group wanted to continue down the street to regain various members of the original Townhouse liquor treat crew, who were apparently scattered every which way. My friend was going the other way, in an attempt to meet up with other mutual friends that had decided to make their way to our humble town. So we said our goodbyes, parted ways, and continued on, both on our individually mega fucked up planets. The mission of our group was to make it to Vespa and grab a friend of Caesar’s. We got there, went in, and proceeded to hang out in what I believe was the kitchen of Vespa. In our defense, I have no idea why the hell we were in there, but the kitchen was right next to the bathrooms, so fuck you it made perfect sense at that point to conversate in the kitchen, rather than a room we were actually allowed in. Just as we were about to start stealing random bits of food, someone who worked at Vespa began mean mugging us hardcore, so we exited and instead sat outside and bullshitted for several minutes.
At this point, I had a tiny, inconsequential encounter with Chapel Hill’s finest. While sitting outside, we spotted our dear friend Ethel with a group of acquaintances across the street. Me being the friendly friend I am, I decided the natural thing to do was to go across and discuss where the hell everyone had gone too, and also just to join Ethel back up with our limited group. As I set foot onto the street, I realized this would be more challenging than I had assumed. The time was about 1:00, maybe, and the streets were in the processes of being cleared of all those god damn collegiate hooligans, this being accomplished both by driving large vehicles down the road and forcing all those who didn’t want to be crushed out of the road, and also by having copious amounts of policia in the street, physically making everyone get the fuck out of the street. I thought, of course they’ll understand I just want to cross the street, and have literally no interest in standing or walking down it, merely across it. I gingerly started my way across, hoping I’d go unnoticed, but about 1.5 seconds into this charade I was spotted by a typically pissed off, slightly balding specimen of police beauty, and was told in no uncertain terms to “get the hell back on your side of the street.” I’m gonna throw some praise on myself, and say that while I’m definitely one to pull stunts that some would call stupid and which I choose to call ballsy, I weighed the pros and cons of running across the street after that outburst from my copper friend, and the cons won out. We arranged, via shouting, to meet farther down the street, at another party.
We vamoosed our seating at Vespa, and made our way onto Roberson, the site of a friend’s party. I stood outside and chit chatted for a while, and then I believe Caesar and I, although this could be completely wrong, discussed the fact that we needed more alcohol, and decided to check out a party across the street, at which we knew a total of none people. Entering the house presented us with the images of a dying party, with the few people inside gathered on the dance floor, doing some various white people dance moves. We moved to the kitchen, and despite our ingenious plan to get more alcohol at this place, there wasn’t any to be found in clear sight. Disappointed, Caesar and I moved towards the door, when suddenly a bottle on the counter caught my eye. It was a nearly full fifth of Kahlua, the drink of choice for put upon stoner dudes, and for my mom when she wants to sneakily drink with her morning coffee. Anyhoo, the situation presented in front of me was too perfect to pass up, and I gathered my robes/blankets, and crammed the bottle down the front of my costume. We peaced, and successfully made our way across the street and back to our friends, me being extremely pleased with my thieving ingenuity. We decided to make our way back to TH to continue drinking and go over what had happened so far. We began the long walk back to TH, which was fairly mundane, and except for Ethel making a few passes at some randos on the street (gotta love that; classic Ethel), we made it back to TH in one piece.
At this point my memory becomes a little fuzzy, but apparently I called the Bear Jew and Ivana Trump, who had been at some other unknown locale, and got them to come over to Caesars. After this, we decided to leave Caesar at his humble abode and went to meet Sluggie and Ethel, who had broken off from our group and ventured to Mill Creek for more drinking and dastardly deeds, but not before the Bear Jew, Ivana, and I passed by Sluggie and Ethel’s apartment, where we discovered a poorly hidden case of beer on her doorstep. We found out later that this was actually beer for the inhabitants of the apartment, but who gives a shit, we had a free case of beer, and I introduced my friends to a game I used to play a lot at my former school, that game being beer can baseball (BCB). This is sort of self-explanatory, but it consists of someone pitching you a can of beer, diving out of the way, and then you slamming the can of beer with another object, preferably a baseball bat, although I’ve used golf clubs and random branches in the past and can vouch for their ability to hit a beer can at high speed. This game is always fun, and we took to it with a distinct visceral pleasure, since we didn’t really have any monetary investment in the beer we’d stolen, and we were all still drunk/exhausted. After partaking in such a world changing event as BCB, the small group of drunken friends we met at Mill Creek hardly impressed, no offense to them. It’s just hard to compete with the childlike joy of hitting a full can of beer and seeing it spin off in the air, spewing its contents like a grenade over the landscape. Ivana and the Bear Jew decided to head back to his place, and I joined them in their long walk. At this point, it was around 2:30, and anyone who was outside that night around that time knows what happened around then. Rain. Fucking rain. Fucking torrential rain. I escorted the other two back, and then started my long, wet, cold journey back to my dormitorio. Honestly, the rain wasn’t really that bad until I made it onto campus, it was then that the Biblical floodgates opened and God decided to piss all over the remainder of my walk. Anyways, sorry for the complaining about weather related events, but in truth it put a ridiculous cap on a completely preposterous night. Well done Bolsheviks and Bolshevik related peeps, it was a classic night, and one that lent itself to being written about, two weeks later. Sorry for the delay, hope your night, if it didn’t intercede with this account, went as swimmingly as ours did. Peace in the middle east, I’m out.
For us, Halloween really began some weeks beforehand when we as a collective realized something – none of us had ever been in a fight. We decided that we needed to rectify this situation, and that Halloween was the night to do so. How fucking hilarious would it be to see a bunch of dudes in ridiculous costumes engaged in stumbly, drunken battle? Really fucking hilarious, that’s how fucking hilarious it would be. So keep in mind that the eventual goal for the entirety of Halloween was for our group of bro’s (or Brolsheviks, if you’d rather) to find another group of bro’s and, as Caesar put it, ruffle some feathers.
This year, Halloween fell on a Saturday, which meant that everybody in town was going to get trashed and go to Franklin Street, where they’d mill around for a few minutes and then go to some party. Which meant that our goal for the pre-Franklin festivities was to get as drunk as we could without dying.
How does one accomplish this, you ask? By instigating a Liquor Treat, which for the unenlightened is just like trick-or-treating but instead of candy you get booze. To paraphrase Alfred Kinsey, it’s a party.
We held this Liquor Treat at Townhouse, which is conveniently located about two blocks from Franklin Street and also a conveniently anarchic apartment complex where the only thing the landlords ask of their tenants is that they don’t burn the place down.
Oh, and before I continue, here’s a short list of our costumes:
- Santa Claus (myself)
- Snuggie Jedi (The Party Trotsky)
- The Bear Jew
- The Great Mouse Detective (Caesar)
- Sexy Indian (The always culturally sensitive Ethel Rosenberg)
- Slutty Snuggie (AKA the Sluggie)
- Peter Pan
- Hipster Pirate
The Liquor Treat commenced at the apartment of Ivana Trump (name changed), where we were served “blood,” also known as fruit punch with vodka in it. After we’d drank enough blood to make the Red Cross think we were wasteful and/or a bunch of vampires, we made our merry way to Ivana’s neighbor’s place, where we were greeted by none other than a man dressed as a lady.
I can’t really get into what transpired at that apartment, but allow me to say this: Friends, you have not lived until a man-lady has forced peppermint schnapps down your throat while screaming, “Drink up, bitch!” We of the Bolsheviks have indeed lived.
Following the uneventful and non-traumatic stop at Ivana’s neighbors, we went to Ethel’s apartment where, in a sub-perversion of our plan to drunkenly turn our childhoods on their collective heads, she and her roommates offered apple bobbing, except upon each apple, they had written a letter that corresponded to either a shot or a beer. Depending on which apple you picked out, you drank that drink. I oh-so-fortunately earned myself a double shot of Evan Williams honey whiskey.
With the initial buzz in place, it was time for the heavy hitters. We (did I mention there were like thirty of us?) made our way to the next apartment where we were served margaritas, or at least our hosts’ best drunken guess as to what a margarita was, which turned out to be an excessively potent combination of tequila and store-bought margarita mix which did little to cut the harsh taste of the tequila.
Some of us ducked out of this one early in order to head to Caesar’s apartment, which was the final stop on the only-depressing-if-you’re-an-adult cavalcade of drunkenness, where we had to make the final beverage of the tour, Riot Punch.
For the unindoctrinated, Riot Punch is a beverage that first debuted on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, a show that’s always on point with the creative ways to drink (can wine, anyone?).
The recipe is Everclear and Blue Frost Gatorade. Mix to taste.
(I’m going to get on my 88 Miles Per Hour shit and jump back to Saturday afternoon, when we went on a mad dash to find ourselves some powdered Blue Frost Gatorade. Believe it or not, we checked like three different stores before we found enough BFG to properly mix with our gallon of Everclear so that the taste would not be “flaming death.”)
Anyway, we loaded up our several-gallon tub with Everclear and BFG, and even with about eight gallons of water all up in our mix, the Riot Punch still tasted extremely strong enough to power a tractor. By the time we’d reached this conclusion, it was too late and people had started to show up. Being that Riot Punch is traditionally consumed in one-gallon jugs, Trotsky, Caesar and myself filled ourselves up some jugs and got to drinkin’ along with everybody else, who in a rare, tragic show of Drinking Class Division were forced to drink out of cups.
And let me tell you my fair proletariat cattle, drink we did. We discovered that about two cups of riot punch could easily send its drinker on that magical journey from “comfortably buzzed” to “completely and totally fucking trashed.” I honestly have no idea how much Riot Punch I drank due to the fact that I was drinking out of a jug, but let me just say I drank so much that I had to pass the second half of this post off to the Party Trotsky.
Anyway, that comes later. At this point in the story came the dancing. We were listening to your typical mildly indie dance music (Justice, MGMT, Daft Punk, Crystal Castles, etc.) plus ironic rap music (Read: Lil’ Jon, Ludacris, whatever else we liked in middle school) when Caesar had the ultimate in good ideas: he put on “She Wolf” by Shakira. The people danced. Then, he put on “Party in the USA.”
That’s right. Party in the Motherfucking USA.
A quick retort to those who say that the song “sucks,” or is “poorly written,” or is “stupid and annoying and whoever likes it should die.” What’s not to like about this song? It’s about the two greatest things in America – partying and the USA. If you disagree, fuck you you’re wrong.
Anyway, at the moment that PiTUSA hit the speakers, the place erupted. The floor shook. The blind were healed. Everybody danced their fucking asses off and sang along to the chorus which we all know even though we pretend not to. In the interest of full disclosure, we were all stratospherically drunk.
At this time it was about 11:15, so we decided to head up to Franklin Street to see everybody’s ridiculous costumes, and then head to a bunch of random parties to continue our heroic drinking binge. That’s when I made a fatal mistake. Trotsky grabbed me, partially to hold himself up and partially to get my attention, and held up his Jug O’Riot Punch, and simply said, “We have to finish this.” There was like a quarter of a gallon left, as we polished that shit off promptly.
This is the part where I blacked out and as I’m wont to do when completely shit-bombed, headed crookedly home and passed out. This is also the part where the Party Trotsky takes over in order to atone for giving me the beverage that set me over the edge.
Excellent summary of the events of the night so far by Castro, although he failed to mention one of the more terrible instances that seemed to keep happening to various members of our group, particularly Castro, Sluggie, and I, that instance being the fact that in every single apartment the temperature was comparable to that of the surface of the sun. Seriously, I was sweating like no one’s business at every available moment, most likely due to the fact that I WAS WEARING A BLANKET. Regardless of this minor problem I encountered, the night was going swimmingly as we approached our Grail-like quest of making it to Franklin Street, and the closer we got, the more people began to appear out of nowhere, and it appeared that we would soon be involved in what appeared to be slightly controlled chaos, on a town wide scale. I was correct.
We made it onto Franklin Street, with most of our group in tow, and so began the gawkfest that would define the rest of the night for me, with slutty (insert random job, person, or pretty much anything you want) being the costume of choice for the ladies, and a wide array of hastily made, slightly ironic outfits for the fellas. We picked our way slowly through the crowd, the majority of which was stumblingly drunk, but since this description also matched us, the speed and the demeanor of the crowd agreed with us considerably. Many picture taking opportunities were taken, my favorite being a picture with one of the many Green Men wandering the streets, and the brilliant display of dance moves from said Green Man, courtesy of Mr. Charlie Kelly. These pictures would be the downfall of our group, as each time someone stopped to take a picture, everyone else, obliviously drunk as to what was going on, continued on their merry way down the road, therefore losing the picture person in the crowd, which according to news reports later was as large as 50,000 people. So understandably, we lost more and more people as the night went on, and the “group” that I was walking with had a constantly changing roster. It was around this moment when I received a call from a dear friend of mine, who had decided to visit on this the most ridiculous of night in CH. She was farther down the street, and I told her to wait, I’d somehow make it there, and in about twenty minutes of cajoling the rest of my group to pick up the pace and hustle down to meet my friend, we finally found each other outside of New York Pizza. Greetings of love and happiness were exchanged, exacerbated by our mutual fucked upness. I discovered later that she was actually engaging in a myconically orientated journey that night, and I imagine the constantly changing and flowing stream of gaudily dressed people was built expressly for the purpose of the psilocybic meanderings. I plan on making a journey quite similar to this next week, but that will hopefully be the topic of another post.
As my friend and I continue to exclaim over finding each other in such a ridonkulous crowd, other members of my group wanted to continue down the street to regain various members of the original Townhouse liquor treat crew, who were apparently scattered every which way. My friend was going the other way, in an attempt to meet up with other mutual friends that had decided to make their way to our humble town. So we said our goodbyes, parted ways, and continued on, both on our individually mega fucked up planets. The mission of our group was to make it to Vespa and grab a friend of Caesar’s. We got there, went in, and proceeded to hang out in what I believe was the kitchen of Vespa. In our defense, I have no idea why the hell we were in there, but the kitchen was right next to the bathrooms, so fuck you it made perfect sense at that point to conversate in the kitchen, rather than a room we were actually allowed in. Just as we were about to start stealing random bits of food, someone who worked at Vespa began mean mugging us hardcore, so we exited and instead sat outside and bullshitted for several minutes.
At this point, I had a tiny, inconsequential encounter with Chapel Hill’s finest. While sitting outside, we spotted our dear friend Ethel with a group of acquaintances across the street. Me being the friendly friend I am, I decided the natural thing to do was to go across and discuss where the hell everyone had gone too, and also just to join Ethel back up with our limited group. As I set foot onto the street, I realized this would be more challenging than I had assumed. The time was about 1:00, maybe, and the streets were in the processes of being cleared of all those god damn collegiate hooligans, this being accomplished both by driving large vehicles down the road and forcing all those who didn’t want to be crushed out of the road, and also by having copious amounts of policia in the street, physically making everyone get the fuck out of the street. I thought, of course they’ll understand I just want to cross the street, and have literally no interest in standing or walking down it, merely across it. I gingerly started my way across, hoping I’d go unnoticed, but about 1.5 seconds into this charade I was spotted by a typically pissed off, slightly balding specimen of police beauty, and was told in no uncertain terms to “get the hell back on your side of the street.” I’m gonna throw some praise on myself, and say that while I’m definitely one to pull stunts that some would call stupid and which I choose to call ballsy, I weighed the pros and cons of running across the street after that outburst from my copper friend, and the cons won out. We arranged, via shouting, to meet farther down the street, at another party.
We vamoosed our seating at Vespa, and made our way onto Roberson, the site of a friend’s party. I stood outside and chit chatted for a while, and then I believe Caesar and I, although this could be completely wrong, discussed the fact that we needed more alcohol, and decided to check out a party across the street, at which we knew a total of none people. Entering the house presented us with the images of a dying party, with the few people inside gathered on the dance floor, doing some various white people dance moves. We moved to the kitchen, and despite our ingenious plan to get more alcohol at this place, there wasn’t any to be found in clear sight. Disappointed, Caesar and I moved towards the door, when suddenly a bottle on the counter caught my eye. It was a nearly full fifth of Kahlua, the drink of choice for put upon stoner dudes, and for my mom when she wants to sneakily drink with her morning coffee. Anyhoo, the situation presented in front of me was too perfect to pass up, and I gathered my robes/blankets, and crammed the bottle down the front of my costume. We peaced, and successfully made our way across the street and back to our friends, me being extremely pleased with my thieving ingenuity. We decided to make our way back to TH to continue drinking and go over what had happened so far. We began the long walk back to TH, which was fairly mundane, and except for Ethel making a few passes at some randos on the street (gotta love that; classic Ethel), we made it back to TH in one piece.
At this point my memory becomes a little fuzzy, but apparently I called the Bear Jew and Ivana Trump, who had been at some other unknown locale, and got them to come over to Caesars. After this, we decided to leave Caesar at his humble abode and went to meet Sluggie and Ethel, who had broken off from our group and ventured to Mill Creek for more drinking and dastardly deeds, but not before the Bear Jew, Ivana, and I passed by Sluggie and Ethel’s apartment, where we discovered a poorly hidden case of beer on her doorstep. We found out later that this was actually beer for the inhabitants of the apartment, but who gives a shit, we had a free case of beer, and I introduced my friends to a game I used to play a lot at my former school, that game being beer can baseball (BCB). This is sort of self-explanatory, but it consists of someone pitching you a can of beer, diving out of the way, and then you slamming the can of beer with another object, preferably a baseball bat, although I’ve used golf clubs and random branches in the past and can vouch for their ability to hit a beer can at high speed. This game is always fun, and we took to it with a distinct visceral pleasure, since we didn’t really have any monetary investment in the beer we’d stolen, and we were all still drunk/exhausted. After partaking in such a world changing event as BCB, the small group of drunken friends we met at Mill Creek hardly impressed, no offense to them. It’s just hard to compete with the childlike joy of hitting a full can of beer and seeing it spin off in the air, spewing its contents like a grenade over the landscape. Ivana and the Bear Jew decided to head back to his place, and I joined them in their long walk. At this point, it was around 2:30, and anyone who was outside that night around that time knows what happened around then. Rain. Fucking rain. Fucking torrential rain. I escorted the other two back, and then started my long, wet, cold journey back to my dormitorio. Honestly, the rain wasn’t really that bad until I made it onto campus, it was then that the Biblical floodgates opened and God decided to piss all over the remainder of my walk. Anyways, sorry for the complaining about weather related events, but in truth it put a ridiculous cap on a completely preposterous night. Well done Bolsheviks and Bolshevik related peeps, it was a classic night, and one that lent itself to being written about, two weeks later. Sorry for the delay, hope your night, if it didn’t intercede with this account, went as swimmingly as ours did. Peace in the middle east, I’m out.
Thursday, November 12, 2009
MAJORNOMICS
You guys are lazy. Also, there’s a really good pun in this post; just wait.
I foresee what we in the biz call a “big weekend” coming up, so I think I’ll indulge myself in the contemporary hyper-intellectual’s favorite pastime: a bullshit, pseudo-Marxist critique of a social institution, mixed—of course—with the pernicious flavor of self-awareness you’ve already grown tired of from Old Major. Also, the only social institution in which I’m interested is parties.
Because I’ve just today taken an exam in Microeconomics, the parallels between the role of the firm and the role of the party organizers is lodged in my mind. (An aside: my Microeconomics teacher is dick-chafingly hot. As in, if I wear jeans in that class I’ll regret it for a week. She only wears like size -6 Levi’s and t-shirts that are adorably FOB (assuming, that is, that Turks arrive in the US via boat).) From a supply-side perspective, the production function of a firm is dictated by the factors of production, generally simplified to K=capital and L=labor, so that Q(K,L).
Similarly for parties, but let’s define the variables differently: Q is quality rather than quantity, K is party capital rather than monetary capital, and L is still labor, though more in a “do work” sense than a do work sense. In micro, the general approach to this problem is to combine the production function and the budget constraint (I=(wage)L+(rent)K) to determine the optimal allocation of resources between the factor of production.
This model breaks down in our case, though, because the microeconomic assumption that money can be freely divided between L and K does not hold in our case; discounting the potentially-worth-exploring category of strippers, money can only be used to increase K. In order to develop a new model, I propose a reexamination of the factors of production of a party.
Rather than the vague variable L, let’s introduce three more specific variables: people the party organizers can comfortably invite via facebook, call it GP for gross popularity; people who come to the party, call it P; and the per capita “will to party,” call it WP. Additionally, we can say that K=c$, where $ is the total expendable income of the organizers and c is the marginal propensity to party.
So, in the short run, we can say that GP is exogenous to the model because popularity cannot grow by any appreciable fraction in a few days, and also because talking about popularity is just embarrassing. Now we need to determine how our variables are related.
P, the people who come to the party, is surely a function of GP and K; in fact, let’s let P=GP/(1+9e^K). My choice of 9 is arbitrary but I think it plays out pretty well in reality. For example, if K=0, P=.1(GP), so only 10% of people you invite show up. As K approaches infinity, however, (1+9e^K) approaches 1, and P approaches GP; in that case, everyone you invite shows up.
WP is also related to K, but here I’ll introduce one final piece of notation, A, which is the Awesomeness of the occasion for the party such that A={1,2…10}, where 1 is “Oh dope I still have 4 stones in the fridge from Hipster Night and The Price Is Right is on” and 10 is “HOLY MOTHER OF GOD ETHEL IS TURNING 21.” I’ve derived the equation so that WP=A*(K^1.5). So, keeping in mind that it is obviously better to party on better occasions, A is pretty much constant; there are only a finite number of 10s IN YOUR LIFE SO USE THEM WISELY. Note also that the relationship between WP and K is not linear. Each unit of K increases the value of all previous units of K in the case of WP because it helps to escalate the party and loosen inhibitions, which in turn encourages more drinking, looser inhibitions, and so on.
So that leaves us with a General Equation of Partying such that Q=WP*P. Let me note here that it MAY BE POSSIBLE for a party to get too good—I’ve theorized something I call the Asymptote of Police Involvement, but that, my friends, is the subject of another paper. Substitution into our General Equation yields:
Q= GP * A * (K^1.5) / (1 + (e^K))
Since GP and A are both very difficult to change, it becomes abundantly clear that the only real way to improve Party Quality is to increase K.
FUNNY.
THAT’S WHAT I’VE BEEN SAYING ALL ALONG.
REAPPROPRIATE THE CAPITAL FROM THE BOURGEOISIE.
LET ME START
BY REAPPROPRIATING
THE
CAPITALS.
No but seriously I’m super psyched for this weekend.
Old Major
I foresee what we in the biz call a “big weekend” coming up, so I think I’ll indulge myself in the contemporary hyper-intellectual’s favorite pastime: a bullshit, pseudo-Marxist critique of a social institution, mixed—of course—with the pernicious flavor of self-awareness you’ve already grown tired of from Old Major. Also, the only social institution in which I’m interested is parties.
Because I’ve just today taken an exam in Microeconomics, the parallels between the role of the firm and the role of the party organizers is lodged in my mind. (An aside: my Microeconomics teacher is dick-chafingly hot. As in, if I wear jeans in that class I’ll regret it for a week. She only wears like size -6 Levi’s and t-shirts that are adorably FOB (assuming, that is, that Turks arrive in the US via boat).) From a supply-side perspective, the production function of a firm is dictated by the factors of production, generally simplified to K=capital and L=labor, so that Q(K,L).
Similarly for parties, but let’s define the variables differently: Q is quality rather than quantity, K is party capital rather than monetary capital, and L is still labor, though more in a “do work” sense than a do work sense. In micro, the general approach to this problem is to combine the production function and the budget constraint (I=(wage)L+(rent)K) to determine the optimal allocation of resources between the factor of production.
This model breaks down in our case, though, because the microeconomic assumption that money can be freely divided between L and K does not hold in our case; discounting the potentially-worth-exploring category of strippers, money can only be used to increase K. In order to develop a new model, I propose a reexamination of the factors of production of a party.
Rather than the vague variable L, let’s introduce three more specific variables: people the party organizers can comfortably invite via facebook, call it GP for gross popularity; people who come to the party, call it P; and the per capita “will to party,” call it WP. Additionally, we can say that K=c$, where $ is the total expendable income of the organizers and c is the marginal propensity to party.
So, in the short run, we can say that GP is exogenous to the model because popularity cannot grow by any appreciable fraction in a few days, and also because talking about popularity is just embarrassing. Now we need to determine how our variables are related.
P, the people who come to the party, is surely a function of GP and K; in fact, let’s let P=GP/(1+9e^K). My choice of 9 is arbitrary but I think it plays out pretty well in reality. For example, if K=0, P=.1(GP), so only 10% of people you invite show up. As K approaches infinity, however, (1+9e^K) approaches 1, and P approaches GP; in that case, everyone you invite shows up.
WP is also related to K, but here I’ll introduce one final piece of notation, A, which is the Awesomeness of the occasion for the party such that A={1,2…10}, where 1 is “Oh dope I still have 4 stones in the fridge from Hipster Night and The Price Is Right is on” and 10 is “HOLY MOTHER OF GOD ETHEL IS TURNING 21.” I’ve derived the equation so that WP=A*(K^1.5). So, keeping in mind that it is obviously better to party on better occasions, A is pretty much constant; there are only a finite number of 10s IN YOUR LIFE SO USE THEM WISELY. Note also that the relationship between WP and K is not linear. Each unit of K increases the value of all previous units of K in the case of WP because it helps to escalate the party and loosen inhibitions, which in turn encourages more drinking, looser inhibitions, and so on.
So that leaves us with a General Equation of Partying such that Q=WP*P. Let me note here that it MAY BE POSSIBLE for a party to get too good—I’ve theorized something I call the Asymptote of Police Involvement, but that, my friends, is the subject of another paper. Substitution into our General Equation yields:
Q= GP * A * (K^1.5) / (1 + (e^K))
Since GP and A are both very difficult to change, it becomes abundantly clear that the only real way to improve Party Quality is to increase K.
FUNNY.
THAT’S WHAT I’VE BEEN SAYING ALL ALONG.
REAPPROPRIATE THE CAPITAL FROM THE BOURGEOISIE.
LET ME START
BY REAPPROPRIATING
THE
CAPITALS.
No but seriously I’m super psyched for this weekend.
Old Major
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)