One Night in Evanston Makes the Tough Guys Tumble

Today's quote from the Professor: "I love the fact that I can be me, that I can wallow in me, that I can buy stuff for me, and when I don't get it I can blame you because I'm not happy." -on the benefits of American individuality over Communist collectivity.

I just got back from Evanston, IL, after having spent a night and morning down in my old college haunts. I have 18 papers to grade by Monday morning. So naturally I'm blogging and then going to take a nap. Always looking out for you, gentle readers.

Hubris was in town to see his girl Humility's show. Brownsox was in town just for the heck of it. As they had planned this together, they convinced Irish McJew to come down from Ann Arbor and me to briefly depart my Ivory Tower realm of Madison, in order that we may see each other and drink to celebrate our old times (or in an attempt to end our lives. The two usually go hand in hand).

After seeing the show at 8:00 on Friday, we all stocked up on alcohol and returned with our friend Kodez to his and Hodgkins' apartment to obliterate our minds and play Halo. At around 10:00, Hubris text messaged Quantum back in New York, whose plans involved similar consumption of alcohol (imagine that!). The message Hubris sent was, in essence, a challenge to see which group, Coasties or Wildcats, could get drunker by midnight (central time, a two-hour window). Quantum, in perhaps the most inspired bit of brevity since MacArthur's "I shall return," sent back immediately "It's on." And with that, the madness began.

We had all started with our own original drinks before the contest developed. I'm unsure what my cohorts consumed, but I personally had a Jack & Ginger with about 4-5 shots worth of Jack Daniels in it, planning to savor this for a while. However, when the challenge came, we immediately updated our Halo to Drinking Halo, and I quickly improvised the following rules:

1. Anytime you are killed, you drink.
2. Anytime you kill someone, you drink.
3. Kodez had created a character named Khan, a la Star Trek 2, and so anytime he killed someone, the deceased must yell "KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!!!!" in the best Shatner-voice he can muster. Upon hearing this, everyone must stop and drink.
4. On the level with the train, anytime anyone is killed by the train itself, we all drink.

Moved by the simple beauty of the plan, we quickly leapt into the spirit of the game, finishing our drinks quickly and busting out the case of MGD Hubris had picked up. The players in the game were myself, McJew, Kodez, and Brownsox, while Hubris looked on with great amusement, determining to drink everytime anyone had to drink. In the span of those two hours of play, we killed almost the entire case of MGD, plus half a bottle of Wild Turkey, and various and sundry other alcoholically inclined beverages (for those of you who aren't alcoholics like us, yes, that's a lot). Now, such intense drunkery can only lead to good things, such as multiple obscene and sexually suggestive phone calls and texts to Uber260 and various others (what Brownsox and Hubris continually referred to as DrunkCataz, after some prank war between the Mooninites and Plutonians on Aqua Teen Hunger Force), as well as some truly profound infighting amongst ourselves. I can be quite offensive when I choose, as evidenced by my repeated claims that McJew's lack of Halo skills came not from the fact that he doesn't own the game or ever play it, but from his Hebraic ancestry. And Hubris ended up tackling me and nearly throwing me through the stairwell bannister because of my claims of superiority that both my parents are still alive (perhaps the most insensitive thing I've ever said, apologies to Hubris). At the time, it all seemed quite amusing, as do most things I say when I'm under the influence. I'm sure much more hilarity ensued, but my memory is all somewhat hazy, so for addendums see the links to Brownsox and McJew's own blogs, which will hopefully contain updates later. Needless to say, we won the contest (or were so drunk we couldn't be convinced we had lost), and all called Quantum to yell "KHAAAAAAAAAAAAN!!!!!!!!!!!" one last time. We also called various other people who were not there drinking with us (the fools) and Brownsox and I both left extremely troubling messages for Hodgkins, who would not listen to them in our presence but instead promised to save them for later, like an unexpected treat. Apparently we watched some Sin City after that, and all passed out.

Upon awakening, I discovered that Brownsox had slept on the floor rather than the empty magic couch right next to his head (thus rivalling Uber260's earlier feat) and McJew had taken the pillow I brought with me, despite the plethora of pillows already on his magic couch. We eventually all woke up in various degrees of hungoverness, showered, dressed, etc. As a nice coup de grace to our epic evening, we played some games of Halo in black and white, as the color was off and we couldn't figure out how to fix it in under a minute, and therefore gave up. In our defense, turning it off and back on didn't work, nor did unplugging replugging it. After that, we were stumped. And lazy.

Had brunch with some old friends (including Sergio, he of the awesomeness that has given me his barbershop music) , and then drove home through a nice snowstorm. Props to my boys still back in E-town, who will surely repeat the whole affair tonight.