Think About The Way I

Minneapolis — There are only a few shouts erupting from the otherwise quiet night. Homecoming 1998 has been a relatively calm affair, with no major riots or police busts. The drunkenness curve had flattened at around 10 in the morning, perfect time for the parade, and hadn’t budged since. People were as crazy as they were going to get, which was good news for the local cops.

Good news for me as well, in a roundabout way. I had already been forced into the Homecoming parade for the good of the Democratic party, and that was as much of the festivities that I wanted to see. The half-mile stretch held numerous altercations and annoyances, and as usual I was in the middle of them. A fine magnet for all that is weird at the U. Upon reaching the end, gubernatorial candidate Skip Humphrey still intact, I could finally let out a sigh of relief and head home. Homecoming for me was a done deal, for the most part. I didn’t give a fuck about football or any other nonsense.

My memories of previous Homecomings were dim. I was totally oblivious to the event last year, although I managed to work security on the lovely 8 PM to 4 AM shift that left me with more contempt for humanity than I felt was possible, much less desirable. I did happen to be around to be a dim spectator for SCSU’s Homecoming in ‘97; however, it was more a case of seeing which of my former classmates had run their lives onto the sandbar than anything else. At that time, the major controversy was whether bars could open in the morning to give the poor buggers a place to drink. Of course they could. It’s the American Way.

So this time I wasn’t too enthused about having to think about the damn thing. However, I had promised that I would wave a sign and harass spectators and play dopey politician for the morning. The two days before I had gone without sleep, working, going to class and then dropping a few C-notes short of a grand on a wager that I may yet live to regret. 10 to 1 says I will come back from Europe in the form of a refugee from a Dionysian festival; whether that is good or bad is still up in the air. It was a bet I was railroaded into, unfortunately, and I will be sitting on some Greek island asking the locals if the motorbike I will be renting is equipped with a Virgin Mary.

This tangent is only slightly relevant: I was so damn tired that I fell asleep shortly before 8 Friday evening. I knew that at precisely 8 o’clock I would receive a call on the tele, and when I awoke to the ringing of that damn phone the clock read 7:59. Jesus, how did I know that, I wondered after the fact. There wasn’t any planned rendez-vous, and when I answered it nobody was there to greet me. This led to a somewhat agitated state that was made worse by my extreme exhaustion; I *69ed the bastard and got a local number that was unknown to me. Fuck it, I thought (or instinctively reacted; I was too far gone for thought). I immediately fell asleep for another 10 hours, which was still not enough.

For some reason, we had to meet in front of Sanford Hall at 7 in the morning. It was still dark when my alarm went off at 6 and I decided that my colleagues would not enjoy the presence of a washed and sentient Doctor. So I rolled over and dozed until the last possible minute, knowing full well I would be one of the first ones there anyway.

Third, to be exact, and just in time to see one of my supervisors come out of the dorm after his night shift there. He had a red biohazard bag, and was trying to figure out what the hell to do with the thing. The police said just throw it in the trash; this struck my supervisor as somehow incorrect and he was just going to bring it back to the office where somebody with a clue would hopefully tell him what to do. I didn’t inquire as to what was in the bag. Some things are better off unknown.

So after a quick chat with him I was settled to sit down and rant and rave with those of my comrades who had already arrived. It was early and I had thoughts of social protocol and levels of acceptability on my mind, topics that weren’t going to be shared by everybody. I wasn’t into the whole gig, I was simply there to take orders and follow them as best I could. I always have ulterior motives for doing anything, anything at all, but in this case they were small and mostly irrelevant. This was just another hassle that came about from having a conscience and an inability to say no. Certainly not attributes that will get me far in this nut-cutting world.

By about 7:30 almost everybody who was going to show up had arrived, and we were talking about the ineptitude of those who were putting this thing on. The most anger, however, was directed at our own chair of the U-DFL, who had managed to forget about 2,000 brochures for Amy Klobuchar in the office. He hadn’t shown exceptional leadership or organizational skills so far in his tenure, with a grim prognosis for the future. But I didn’t expect anything else. The anger was lost on me, and I just sat around to brood.

Utmost on all of our minds was the tendency for politicians to do stupid things like canceling at the last minute. Skip was supposed to march with us, and he had even sent out a pick-up truck to use as a pseudo-float. But the candidate himself had yet to show, and as it got close to 9:00, the start time for the parade, we became more and more nervous. A camera crew from Fox News had by this time harassed us once or twice as to his whereabouts, and the walking pencil from the Minnesota Daily was also there to soak up his wisdom. However, every single one of us knew the business, and when he arrived only minute after nine, we were amazed at his punctuality. One of his opponents, Norman Coleman, the swarthy little Republican from St. Paul, was so late that his entourage had to pull to the side of the campaign route and wait for him.

We had a grand old laugh as we passed by them. The candidate was persuaded to walk the route, with great success. While we held up signs and gave many a five-year old child Humphrey/Moe stickers, Skip was doing a good job working the crowd. He was helped by a few of us preceding him, finding a group of students and coercing them into shouting "We want Humphrey" when he passed by. This was no great accomplishment, however; we could have gotten the drunk sorority sweethearts to shout just about anything we could come up with. However, I never did try to get anybody to scream "John Chancellor to the wall!"

As we got further along the avenue towards Frat Row, things got a bit hairier. The men we sloshing around with open bottles of Heineken and Red Dog and trying to jump into the truck. One briefly succeeded, but was beaten back when Kevin threatened to kick his pretty-boy ass. A brief dialogue ensued:

"So you think you’re a tough guy?" the idiot drawled.

"Yes I am," said Kevin.

"You know what I hate about tough guys?"

"No, what?"

"MMMMmmmm," he said and tumbled out of the truck without further ado. A little violence would have lightened the scene considerably. Although we had planned on rumbling with the Coleman supporters or Jesse "The Body" himself, fighting frat boys would be just as pleasurable. Nothing doing, however, and we kept our goddamn hands to ourself. Skip did need to have us rescue him from some of the more obnoxious Ventura supporters, but he never lost his cool.

There were many a sorority person out as well, and I ran into a couple that I knew. The first was Brook, who I had planned on running into anyway. She was there, as usual, with plenty of bad things to say about Kevin. Earlier in the morning, Kevin had made his own slanted remarks about Brook. The extremely fucked-up dynamics of that whole scene still amuse me when they don’t make me question the very notion of vengeance. It’s a bit pathetic to see two people with no real reason to hate each other do so, but what can I say? As far as I can tell, I am the only person who talks to and sees the both of them on a regular basis; nobody else is quite in the same position. Then again, that’s how it always had been. Tuesday for a movie, righty-o, and I was off to catch up with the Humphrey mobile.

The second real instance of seeing somebody I knew came a bit later as I caught an old classmate in the crowd. What sorority she belongs to I still do not know, although I see that information as irrelevant anyway. I had sure ins for unloading a sticker, I thought.

"Hey, Sonya, you want a Humphrey sticker, don’t you?"

"Nathan, what are you doing? Jesse’s the man," she replied.

Along the route, you could instantly tell who the Ventura supporters were, and there was no way around saying it. They were archetypical angry white males. There is a female component to the vote, however, the companion to those men who take off their shirts and bitch about feminazis and taxes. If I had to think of a person who would be that counterpart, I would have come up with my former classmate. And with those people part of the democratic process, God have mercy on us all.

The rest of the parade was uneventful, and when we pulled to the side of the road next to Mariucci all that was left was to take pictures for the U-DFL scrapbook and get the hell out of there. I had accomplished my goals for the day, and I still had a sense of humour. That was to go later in the evening.

Homecoming is a grand social event. Only the gimps of society are walking about by themselves on this Saturday night, perusing the used compact discs at Cheapo while nursing some deep bleeding wounds that society had inflicted upon them. Some were sitting outside of McDonald’s nursing a beer or a cigarette, or just plain nursing their bent egos. It wasn’t the cream of the crop, to be sure.

I can be counted in with that group. I had decided to get some damn air after watching the news; the cheap perfume from room 21, right below me, was getting a bit much. I was hungry to boot, and so I went to the Meat-Spud place that was close to campus for a momentary respite from starvation. Nothing serious, just a change of scenery to get the juices flowing.

I picked up a paper from the stand and sat down to read it as I was eating. It wasn’t long, however, before I was in a serious state of shock.

The paper was dated October 24th, all right, but I had already read it about a week ago.

No mistake. No confusion. Just glancing over pages that are already in the past, no matter what the bloody date says. I was sure it was a mistake on the part of the paper, and so I checked the Pioneer Press to confirm. It too held the same stories that were already old news to me. And these aren’t time-sensitive issues here. I had simply read everything previously, at least a week previously.

Now, one can make the argument that reality is a bunch of bullshit created by some malevolent demon to torture us, but that line of reasoning is a bit hard to back up. But this was too much. It was George Winston holding the photograph of three dead men in 1984. It was holding some totally illogical and impossible act right in your very hands. And what could I do? I was totally sure that I was right. My explanations for that even were no good, and could not be framed in terms of this reality whatsoever.

About this time I noticed a very strong scent of cheap perfume again, and sure enough my housemate had ended up in the same place I was at. Fuck that. I was trying to escape, and what did I find? Impossible time fabrication and people who were following me. I beat a hasty exit to pace around campus for a while, looking for trouble. I just found more people who I knew. I need to get out less often.

By this time I was not in a good mood. I was pressed to explain the events of the day, and there was a backlog of events that still needed explaining. As I wound my mind faster and faster up to speed, searching for any threads of reason that would explain this, I merely exposed the shortcomings of my own mind. Unsane, intrasane, call it what you will; the fact is that the world does make perfectly wrong sense. My problem lies not in the fact that my thinking is internally inconsistent, it lies in the fact that my rules are fine for other dimensions but aren’t applicable to the here and now. I’m using Euclidean geometry to fool around with Einstein’s theory of relativity. The wrong tool for the job. That, and plastic angels holding fake diamonds aren’t a solution to anything.

I couldn’t do anything, and I definitely was up for some soma out of Brave New World. However, our technology and pharmaceutics hadn’t yet progressed to that level. But a substitute was found rather quickly: the television. Even with the five or so channels I get it is enough to kill the mind. And as I watched the SCSU hockey team pull out a win over the U of M in the final 20 seconds or so, I suddenly found that I didn’t have the ability to do any more heavy-duty thinking. Fuck the future: we are in a consciousness-draining society now, and we are all playing our parts.

Which was just as well for the evening. The shouting, soft as it was, wouldn’t allow for introspection anyway. Just a nice backdrop for a bit of light/heavy reading about true Freaks who almost had it in 1966 but lost it soon after, and though many a comeback was tried none succeeded. I dimly remember that Homecoming has something to do with the past and alumni and all that nonsense; I was celebrating it in my own way. The only difference is that I never graduated from my alma mater, never even saw it. Hell, it probably never even existed. But from time to time as I see with glistening, short-lived clarity the nonsense we all put forward in the name of not rocking the boat, I just feel that things were right somewhere, sometime.

There will be no Homecoming for this school. It may be a school of thought, a philosophy, a church (I am still angry at having to defend the Pope yesterday; why did I do that?), anything. The teachers have no tenure, most students take far longer than four years to graduate, and only a few can afford to go continuously. But it probably exists somewhere. I’ve got the papers to prove it, along with all of those battle scars. At the very least, there will be no drunken shouts as this parade goes marching down the avenues of history, the only venue that is proper. And that is enough for me.