And I've never enjoyed writing a paper more than this one. That could well do with the thing being my first year project, but even so that's mighty edifying. I actually love my subject matter. I'd scrambled in the dark for years, kicking around my eyeballs as they giggled, scuttling away as soon as I bent down to snag up. But here, now, over this past week and whatever the fuck all, I learned that I really do want to do this first year project.

It's mighty satisfying. It's also mighty satisfying that I used 11 pt Times New Roman, since 12 pt would put me at 18 pages. My references section is 5 bloody pages long on that same count.

Even I'm satisfied with how it turned out. I put a HELL of alot of work into this paper and it shows. I wanted it to be as good as I could get it--not just outta my usual sense of pride in work, but for the fact that I can use this paper for my research proposal to my committee.

Two birds with one stone never sounded so sweet.

And some I'm listening to Smashing Pumpkins' "Perfect" and enjoying a high from my efforts. I gotta cover 60 pages of reading for the emotions class, where the final paper is due. Yeah, ain't the prof. a sadistic bastard? But I can get through it easy. And I know from talking with several other students in the class that they just started their papers over part of this weekend. So it looks like the last class is gonna be quiet except for my ass and a few others.

On a different note, Mad Town is famous for halloween. 20 and 30 somethings from all over America and even Europe put their cells on hold and jet out here for two days of debauchery. You can smell and see it along downtown, the walking-only street curving and slithering with a hot river of flesh and masks, packed together, shuffling, inhibitions like spent cigarettes. Into and among this cornucopia of sin on friday was yours truly, the only silly fucker on the street with a backpack, dressed for intellectual warfare in a land of pink promises. I needed to get away from the paper, though, so drinking some apple cider and reading statistics and Starschmucks sounded good. I was perched up in the quiet corner on the 2nd floor, reading bits about mixed ANOVA designs and glancingly appreciating all the interesting costumes and the bounty of decolletage that came with some.

And then it rained like fuck. The gods were angry that more drunk bastards hadn't spilled beers onto the ground. They thirsted for a taste of the goslings, pouring down gale and wind into a torrid torrent of monsoon kisses, smacking and laughing against the huddled minorities in building alcoves and the prancing creatures that drank it up. I admired by window-side, not even going out onto the roof-covered terrace. A ready thread of people flew in and out with the wiles of the rain and their gonad dreams.

I read through a fair bit of my stats chapter and escaped when the rain was just occasionally sneezing.

But that next day...

That day was remarkable in the old-fashioned sense.

I'd been mixing it up with the paper again, on some section tense and paragraph I can't recall clearly; it was close to the end but far away yet. It occured to me that I had 3 full days to finish a paper that was manifesting around page 12. I flipped through my uni e-mail and looked at the e-vite I'd received a few weeks ago.

Blonde Jess had decided to host a party at her sizeable house apartment for the day before halloween, the apex of Mad Town holiday insanity. Weeks ago I'd written down I couldn't go. Several people like Tat, Xtian and Katie subtly and not so subtly told me that a paper shouldn't keep you from having fun when you needed it--and could spare it. And they were right: I had more than enough days to finish the paper...and I wanted to go...even if part of me said that working would probably be more prudent. But I quickly decided I could afford the time and threw myself into having a good time.

It was just 6:00 when I'd come to this realization. I had time enough to eat food, buy my Skyy and orange juice, then head out over to Jess'. Finding the place wasn't as much of a bitch as parking, but I did both well.

There was only a handful of people warming the place when I got there. Xtian was done up as Stay Puft and seemed happy to see me. That was kinda cool. Sasha (I think that's her name) was working away in the kitchen on some stuff with her not so sociable boyfriend. Jess' boy introduced himself, though, which was a nice touch to otherwise feeling kinda awkward at a stil-being-prepared party. There were assorted sugar-carb bits that screamed to be nibbled. I rarely have dessert except for fortune cookies nowadays, so I sampled. The witche's fingers looked positively gruesome. It wasn't half bad, even if I don't care much for shortbread.

And so it stayed relatively dead for awhile, with one or two new ones coming here and there. Katie eventually showed up with her man, a tastefully slutty school girl and her all-white human year book.

We all began to play a modified version of "kings" at that point, a drinking game that had me regularly sipping Tat's sangria and taking a shot of Bacardi 151 on one ill-picked up king. It was well and good and fun, though, and just when I was getting to my 'hmm, I've had too much to drink' phase, more people all of the sudden showed up.

Make that 25 more people in the span of 2 minutes. The fucking hallway outside was like a clown car.

All of the sudden the joint was packed tight with the overcoming sounds of conversation. I spoke with this or that group and gravitated to the outside balcony, the night crisp, the wind cold and a sliver of God whispering from every fluorescent and jangled color bauble. Xtian and Becky came out sooner thereafter..or maybe I came out and saw them...in either case, we started to talk about the amusing shit that comes to mind when liquor is in it. We talked shop obviously, with me telling Becks what I thought about this or that subject (since she asked for tips on what to do for her first year project), or talking about various personal oddities. Xtian rattled off a bit about Milwaukee and how everyone within 600 square miles of the county says they're from it. Becks is also from "Milwaukee", apparently, but proudly indicated her tit insignia, a deep blue "S" on her color guard uniform/halloween costume. My monkey ass finally decided on being a "photographer" because I was carrying around a camera case, so all is fair in etcetera. Becks tends to get touchy-feely when she's drunk, so it was neat to actually be touched by another human-being. Hadn't happened since Drunk Thursday.

The night progressed, with me taking no drinks while others got ripped. I threaded through every conversation pile and enjoyed this or that bit. I tended to gravitate to Xtian, Katie and Becks because I know them best, but there was Dr. Canadian Matt--dressed to the robed 9's as Osama bin Laden, sporting a 6 pack of beer and pro-Bush signs. I have pictures. I will develop and post. You bet your ass.

And so after a few hours of snapping photographs in bad lighting, charging my battery, making nice social conversation, and lather rinse repeating, it was time for all of us to go Downtown and strut around with the tens of thousands of other nut-jobs. Of course getting there would be a challenge, since Katie, Xtian, Canadian Matt, myself and Katie's boyfriend had no idea where 'Crave' was. An image popped into my head, though, and I could swear it was right by where I lived. So rather than leave my car 2 miles from my apartment complex, I thought fuck it: I'll drive back home, lug some passengers with me, and get to the place with everyone ahead of, well, everyone.

And it worked beautifully. Of course, Xtian was hesistant about having Canadian Matt along. Y'see, Matt has something of a crushing crush on Katie...and Katie is taken...and he was doing some crushing/flirting/whatever at the party, the same party where Katie's boyfriend was at. At the time this failed to impress me at all on a moral level, but I thought that bad group cohesion would suck, so I talked with Xtian about it some and how Matt struck me as a dude that just sorta trolls for the sake of trolling. I could be wrong, but he seems happy-go-fuckie like that.

So I got slightly lost within three blocks of where I live, on account of going one street too far over. Apparently this struck everyone as fucking brilliant in the end, though, since we had to cut through a parking yard and by some dumpsters to get out onto the right street. The fucking brilliant part came in where Matt got waylaid by The Riddler and The Joker talking shit to thin air, while Harlequin just sorta chilled. Everyone but me seemed relieved that Matt was now moderately drunk and not with us. I was concerned about the Osama bin Bastard, though, because getting ditched when you're really drunk fucking sucks. The consensus was that Matt would be fine, though, so I dropped the matter.

We waited in front of 'Crave' until the whole troop of psych people came a-callin'. Then we toured downtown in all its glory. I stood on top of shit and took panorama shots. Becky held her color guard flag high to lead us onward, saving us from losing each other in the swirling flesh miasma that circled like drain water all around us. Apparently she was even more tipsy than at the party, actually taking either my arm or Xtian's as we strode about. Suddenly, after we'd made a good 20 minutes of progress over a block (which for 15 people amidst 65,000 ain't shabby), Guido decided we should head back toward the center of downtown to a bar she knew. We collectively thought "What the fuck, why not".

And so there we were at the forefront, Becks and Xtian and I, with Becks on flag waving duty while I occasionally blazed a trail through drunk assholes. We kept the rag-tag group together better this time, considering half of everyone had split off to use less travelled routes. It was a slog, but a damned fun slog...and when we finally got there, it was bar shangrila, some smoky semi high class place with a large rasta man behind the bar, complete with a gold "$" medallion. There was a decent knot of us psych people there already, and the rest of us milled around to enjoy the snaps of conversation.

And it stayed that way for awhile, me talking to this or that person, looking at my guiness he bought, looking at Xtian looking at his beer looking at my guiness, and so on. Becks ordered more drinks and got more tipsy, getting nose to nose with Xtian at one point. I suddenly wanted T to be there so I could enjoy some closeness along with inebriation, but no dice. Still, from the little I could hear, everyone was having a good time talking and bobbing to the music.

At one point, though, I was by the bar and some chick that looked just like a girl I was vaguely into in my freshman year started talking to me. Apparently a guy dressed as a book had just hit her in the arm and she was not fine. I looked over to the guy and he had that air of "I know you and I'm being a silly dick because that's my nature", but with just enough of asshole to him that I thought he might have done something. The chick oh so not subtly positioned herself behind me, clasped semi-close, as if the dude was going to do something. That piece of fuck cheese wasn't doing shit, though, so I sortof chuckled and smiled and that was that, with her getting a drink and moving to sit and smoke with her pack. Later on book dude and some guy dressed as a pimp were massaging her and some such, so I'd figured rightly: women that intensely remind you of weird girls with mental problems should be steered clear of.

Eventually at around 3am everyone left, with Katie thanking me again and again about driving. I shrugged, we kibitzed about shit, and Xtian and Becks walked off into the night to who knows where while we all said our goodbyes, me gathering my coat about me.

But that wasn't the end. I strolled back along the length of downtown where pre-halloween was still in full force. I decided I wanted to go to Taco Bell. Just three stores before then, though, I noticed a police line had formed, the kind where you obviously weren't meant to cross. Some people were trying to argue with the cops, some chanting "assholes" or "USA" or some silly shit to comfort themselves that this was America: land of the rigidly fucking unfair when things got out of hand. And apparently they had. In the distance there were stories-high stadium lights, beaming down like death machines from the beginning sequence of Terminator 2. I could see swarms of creatures packed together tight, a column of mounted police pushing them back steadily. The column before me grew, tightened, vice-like, cops pushing people back forcefully if they tried to get through.

And then the pepper spray came, just off in the distance. I don't know if you've ever been in a riot, but pepper spray stings like a bitch. I'd just caught a whiff of it and it sucked...but for some reason, there, with all of us collectively wondering why we couldn't go any farther down the street we'd so enjoyed just several hours ago, I began to feel a genuine sense of comraderie with everyone. We weren't some anonymous collection of party-going jack-offs. We were Americans or whatever the fuck, young people out for a good time and wanting to express that, and the police had pulled out the big guns because it seemed like shit had gotten out of hand.

It was a softcore warzone that way, the lot of us shrinking bag and gagging, moving slowly, filtering through the dark side streets like rats. People complained about the cops like they were invading soldiers into a once peaceful land.

But I'd just had a taste, and for some reason I thought that I could get to Taco Bell another way. So I headed over down Greek Row toward Dunn Bros., to see if I could enter that way. Sure enough, there was a line of cops there.

But these ones were different. They had on full riot gear. I'm talking the gas mask, face shield, future police state full body armor riot gear. People were still on the outskirts near the lip of the main street, cops up on rooftops gripping cameras or rifles, I didn't know. They came in one by one, cops with big orange canisters in hand. Anyone who pushed forward or got to close was hosed with a quarter gallon of mace. It drove the red and tears to peoples eyes and beat them back.

I was fascinated. Absolutely fascinated and drawn up in the drama of the moment. I got out my camera and tried to get several shots of the oncoming swarm of armored police, closing rank, moving closer, barking at people who held their camera phones aloft and dared them to try anything. But they beat us back from the main street and unleashed a big waft of pepper gas. This time it was a hell of alot more potent. I breathed through my coat sleeve as I walked away, bile and wind sucking through my throat, trying to get out. I kept it down and only teared some, but others were hacking like hell.

But we were even more united by it. Over here was a person I nodded to who nodded back the same way..and there were a group of three drunk college guys who thought I my costume was 'fucking awesome' and had me take pictures of them looking sick as fuck for the tabloids. It was like we had a cause, even if I just wanted to get food. It'd become something else.

So I decided to head over to the spot I'd been at first. The foot police had been replaced by a line of mounted ones sans the riot gear. They weren't budging. I decided then to just head back to the overly crowded pizza place, that madhouse of out-of-town drunk young things waiting and talking shit for a chance to eat pizza. I waited in line and looked at my reflection. My eyes had never been so shot with blood. My face was red, but I was alright. Others recognized it and didn't give me shit--not that they would have, enjoying their own little microcosms that backed up into one another.

I ordered two slices of cheese and quickly ate them, some jackass talking shit to a group of hooch prep girls while Cut-Face pushed the fucker out to the street.

I'd had enough of riots and pepper spray. Around then I was worried for some bizarre reason that I'd get arrested for being at the scene of a riot, y'know, by way of those cameras they use up on rooftops. I knew I hadn't done shit except snapped shots, and the fact that there were tree branches and lots of darkness between me and those cameras--but for some reason I still worried.

But falling asleep, even so, I thought it was a damn full day...just like this had been a damn long entry...but the kind that I miss doing. I like laundry lists as much as you do, but we have to get through them sometimes to get to the good shit.

I have to get up in seven hours, no for any particular reason but just to keep my body in synch. I'll likely go out to the mediterranean cafe and have that bland chicken shwarma in yogurt cucumber sauce, where the hummus and the most wonderful tea I've ever had in my life come as side effects that actually make the meal. If the shwarma were like the stuff I had in Detroit, I'd never go anywhere else.

So, to sum: Paper done, flesh fountain on halloween with myself as just one drunk bastard among many, riots and mob bonding, pizza, and plans.

Rock.

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