Sketching:

This semester I am taking ENAM 0170 -- Writing: Poetry, Fiction, Nonfiction, the introductory creative writing workshop, which affords me the opportunity to write creatively, something I haven't officially done (although perhaps some of the entries on this blog could qualify) since 9th grade. After two weeks, it is both a pleasure and a challenge, and I look forward to cranking out some good material in the coming months. Our first assignment was to write a brief character sketch. Being swamped with work only a week into the semester, I wrote mine in the hour and a half before class on the day it was due. While I wish that I had taken the chance to further develop things before handing it in, I was actually quite pleased with the final product:

A kid spotted him on the way to school. He was leaned up against the side of a tree, everything all around him, and he held up traffic all morning. I was late getting there because of an issue with my transportation – the chain had come off again, and I discovered one tire was flat once I got out on the road – so he was gone by the time I arrived. They’d left everything else for me to sort through, to identify, catalog, and interpret, and as I caught by breath, swearing at the traffic that still clogged the main road and that had almost killed me as I tried to cross the street, that is exactly what I did.

There was still tape around the scene, and after nodding to one of the other officers, I ducked under. It marked off a blast radius. Things were strewn everywhere. His pack, leaned up against the tree where he had been. His bike, off to one side, dropped in the grass like he had jumped off in motion. The remnants of a fire, and in the ashes, the remnants of a book.

I set to work tagging, bagging, and cataloging each item, which would take a while given the circumstances. I hoped that I could be finished before the afternoon, as recent tree work had obliterated what little shade there had been, and as soon as the sun got high enough, I’d be cooked. Why do they make us wear these stupid jackets?

First item: the bag, tattered, sun-bleached, and empty, like a poolside retiree, at the end of its line. The bike, better than mine, chain in good condition, bright blue, with some spots of rust, and two full tires but the back brake out of commission. I couldn’t bag the bike, but I had to report on it anyway. The contents of the bag had been emptied and strewn about the ground, arranged nearly, given the circumstances, like they had been on sale. Two t-shirts, one red, faded, and smelling of sweat, the other, a pale gray, reading, Charlie’s Chicken ‘n’ Things. I wondered where he got that, and then saw that the address was printed on the other side. Georgia. The shirt was worn, but you could tell that it was still pretty new. He had just worn it a lot. Three pairs of socks, one with holes, two without, one of which was surprisingly clean. A camp stove, plus matches – one book, one box, eight matches in all – and little bits of charred paper, on which one could make out a few words, in jagged handwriting. It was worse than mine. I always wondered how the lab even dealt with my reports.

Three books, one I’d read, one I hadn’t, and one I couldn’t remember. I’d have checked the plot on the last one, but he had been slowly cannibalizing the pages for the fire, and my search for a logical conclusion revealed nothing more than scraps of words and incomplete sentences. If I had gotten there sooner, I could have at least known how it ended.

Another shirt, thrown in the bushes, that I had missed before. Striped, with holes, like old wallpaper. An apple, half eaten, a sack of rice, three pieces of white bread, crumbs, a few crackers, and an empty jar of peanut butter. I was pretty hungry. In my rush to fix the chain, pump up the tire, and avoid getting hit by traffic, I’d completely forgotten to eat. Two plastic containers of pudding, a few carrots, and unpopped microwave popcorn. I bagged all the food individually, just to see what they said. Three slices of bread, three bags. The rice, split among at least seven, the crumbs in another, and the pudding, poured out into one bag that I knew would explode everywhere if I jumped on it. Evidence. I thought about making lunch, and passing the bags off as my own, but I knew that would never hold up. I hate peanut butter.

An Allen wrench, an extra tube, duct tape, and a Swiss army knife. I opened each of its parts. I counted them, thought about writing the number down in my book, and realized it wasn’t important. Who cared how many things it could do? It’s a Swiss army knife, after all – the rest of the things are insignificant. I wondered about how many people had actually found occasion to use the fish scaler or the compass, and then I dropped it in the bag. The knife, as well as two of the three screwdrivers, hit the side of the bag, tearing a hole, and the whole thing fell out on the ground in front of me.

I looked around, embarrassed, but the mid-morning traffic was clearing up, and no one had noticed. Even if they did, what would they care? One guy, two bikes, a couple bits of food, some dog eared books, and a Swiss army knife, scaler, screwdriver, compass, toothpick, wine opener, scissors, tweezers, and at least three other things I couldn’t begin to know what to do with. I put it in my pocket.

I puttered around a bit more, kicking a few more odd items off to the side. I climbed the tree, just high enough to reach the bare spot where they had cut out all the branches, and sat in the sun for a while. It was 11:00. From this spot, all of his possessions looked just as random, and my meticulous bagging of everything had only enhanced the perception of a yard sale. As the cars passed by on the main road, I thought about the people in all of them, and what things they might have, and if they’d be willing to let me bag, tag, and catalogue them. They probably wouldn’t.

At the intersection, one car ran a red light, and another had to swerve not to hit it. At least three people honked. I climbed out onto one of the branches, balancing precariously as it shifted under my weight, and jumped down, two feet onto the bag of pudding. It splattered everywhere.

Investigators later in the day would discover a pudding blast radius of nearly twenty feet. It stuck to the tree, bits of it landed in the grass, and the rest completely coated everything I had put in bags. It was a good marker of my presence. He had tried, well enough, leaving his things strewn about the ground and a headfull of blood on the lower branches of the tree, but they took care of that when they took him and the gun away. They took the gun, bagged, tagged, and catalogued it, and then did the same to him. Evidence.

The sun was high enough in the sky that the entire scene was bathed in light, and squinting in the bright sunshine, I checked my bearings on the Swiss army compass, we traded bikes, and peddled into traffic.

I'll keep updating as my work progresses. Perhaps I'll parlay this into a longer story at some point -- stay tuned.

Number Two:

My sources have informed me that this week's edition of Waters to Wine was not properly posted on the Middlebury Campus website, so I apologize for keeping all of my dedicated readers in limbo with my belated posting on The Restless Life. This week's installment is below.

Over the course of our collegiate years, we all (hopefully) grow more mature, more sophisticated, and more discerning in our tastes. We shun Top 40 radio for indie-music blogs, we trade department store garments for vintage store discoveries, and we deny our previous populist tastes as awkward reminders of a shameful past. For many, drinking tastes undergo similar changes – we move from thirty racks to home brews, from box wine to good years – and we treat our embarrassing alcoholic pasts with the same scorn we heap on boy bands or Beanie Babies. Some people delight in broadcasting their alcoholic maturity and look with self-aggrandizing pity on those whose liquor store purchase still includes canned beer or boxed wine. With this I take issue.

Some people question our maturity in light of our drinking habits or juxtapose the expense of our education with the price of our liquor – “I can’t believe you drink that stuff,” or “anything out of a can isn’t worth drinking,” are popular refrains – but these people are missing the point. No one buys Busch Light because they love the taste. No one drinks it with relish, pouring it dramatically into a red Solo cup to release its full bouquet. It isn’t spilled onto dirty basement floors in order to let it breathe. We don’t leave it in hot cars during the summer to let it age, and we don’t pair it with food for true gastronomical ecstasy (besides, everyone knows that a cold Busch Light is best paired with pizza, 2AM Grille food, and one to several more Busch Lights). Busch Light, and all other light beers like it, is bought with such enthusiasm and in such large quantities because it is cheap, it is available, and it gets you drunk.

Some will probably say that this is the problem, that we drink it exclusively to get drunk, which is fine. But arguments over taste or sophistication seem mostly irrelevant. One can appreciate good beers or fine wine and still enjoy being force-fed light beer by a room full of yelling twenty-somethings. I think that given the choice, the vast majority of us would sooner reach for a Vermont microbrew than a Bud Light, as we should. But come late Friday night, nothing beats beer that can be bought in boxes of thirty. There is a time and place for light beer, and we should stop disparaging those who drink it.

As we all get older and more mature, of course we’re going to look for new and better ways of enjoying alcohol, but that doesn’t mean that we need to cast off our storied history of collegiate drinking, and we certainly don’t need to belittle it. A great beer tastes better after a couple nights of lesser fare, so by continuing both facets of our college drinking careers – the sophisticated on the one hand, the less so on the other – we can actually heighten our enjoyment of both. It’s nice to grow up and progress, but we shouldn’t so willingly cast off our pasts, as they are still relevant and even gain importance as time goes on. Although in the case of boy bands, it’s another issue entirely.

Besides these first two introductory weeks, my column will be bi-weekly from here on out, so look for the next one (hopefully correctly posted to the Campus website) on Thursday, March 5th.

Waters to Wine:

As chronicled in the older entries of this blog, I've been in pursuit of a column in the school newspaper, The Middlebury Campus, for some time now. After being turned down (once), kept in the lurch (both times), and generally perplexed (more or less continuously), my persistence has paid off: I am now officially the newest columnist for Middlebury's best (read: only) weekly campus newspaper.

My column is about all things booze, which probably comes as no surprise. The idea came to me during my semester abroad, and while I would like to be able to tell people that I write some erudite column on literary theory or physics as applied to sporting events, this will be more fun. The first installment came out in today's paper, and after appearing again next week, it will run bi-weekly through the rest of the semester. I'll post each one on my blog after the paper is released, but you can also read them online on the Middlebury Campus website. See my first attempt below:

At a beer tasting class during my semester abroad in Denmark, the host introduced himself as “a part-time alcoholic,” which makes sense. In Denmark, with its government-funded education and universal healthcare, one can afford a part-time schedule. Me, I’m an American. I work full-time.

My name’s Mike, and while I’m kidding about being an alcoholic, I do have a problem: lately this publication has played host to not one, but two sex columns, which seems a gross misrepresentation of the lives of your average Middlebury College student. If you, like me, have ever, say, walked around this campus after dark on a weekend, you might have noticed that it seems far more Middlebury students are drunk on a regular basis than copulating actively. In fact, this ratio is probably considerable. I’d be willing to wager that on an average weekend night, perhaps 75% of Middlebury students will consume an alcoholic beverage (perhaps Jyoti Daniere will prove me completely out of touch on this statistic), while a significantly smaller number will practice what they’ve learned from the most recent installment of a Campus sex column. Furthermore, while our administration would be loath to admit it, probably a sizeable majority of those engaging in sex consumed alcohol beforehand. It seems to me that the alcohol-drinking masses are criminally underserved, which is where I come in.

I’m no expert on alcohol, but I’ve had my share. I enjoy a good drink, as well as the occasional bad one, and I think there can be a place for both. In this column, I hope to explore this world of alcohol as it relates to the college experience, and specifically, the Middlebury experience. I’m not here to over-glorify it or rehash embarrassing Friday nights, but I’m also not here to turn up my nose to light beer or the most foolish of foolish drinking games. I just believe that alcohol – in all its forms – plays a sizeable enough role in our college lives that it is worth looking at. I don’t believe that you have to drink to have fun, but I do know that some of the best times I’ve had with my friends have involved drinking alcohol, both to excess and in moderation. And I believe that with a more open conversation about both situations, we can avoid some of the troubles that alcohol can most certainly cause.

Over the course of the next few weeks and months, the subject of this column may vary widely. I’ve got in mind reviews of different alcohols (with a nod to my own limited qualifications), profiles of different microbreweries, investigations into the broader alcohol industry, and where our specific place is in all of this. I don’t have a detailed plan, but if alcohol figures as widely into our lives as I think that it does, I doubt that I’ll be starved for material. I suppose that this column, like any good night out with friends, begins without a certain idea of where it will end up. But I think that with equal parts seriousness and silliness, we can make it till morning. Although that might just be the alcohol talking.

The Campus comes out every Thursday, so stay tuned for more columns.

And we're back:

I had intended to write something soon after my return from Denmark -- nearly a month and a half ago -- but home, J-Term, and my burgeoning alcoholism got the better of me. So here I am, a few solid weeks into my return to the mother country, and back home in Massachusetts on break from school. I've been off since 9:35 AM Thursday when my last class ended, and I'm a free man until Monday the 9th, when it's back to business as usual. In the intervening days, I'm hoping to pay a visit to some voices from the past, catch up on my reading and writing, and begin working off the accumulated weight from the past month.

The past month -- January for the unenlightened, but J-Term for Middlebury students -- was Middlebury's one month Winter Term, where students take one class, affording them the opportunity to "really get involved in one subject," which reads more accurately as, "do as little work as possible and spend most of their time skiing and drinking." Yes, J-Term is the time of the year when Middlebury students are finally afforded the opportunity to take advantage of all that their school and their region has to offer. And while the fact that the temperature did not rise above 28 degrees the entire month might have deterred some from enjoying the month to its fullest capacity, my friends and I took advantage of every free moment (and there were a lot of free moments) to destroy our bodies and college property as best we could.

What follows are some sweet pictures my friend Foster took of one of our more destructive J-Term endeavors, where we amassed an arsenal of Molotov cocktails and deployed them with gusto onto an icy-field-cum-bombing-range in the middle of bucolic Vermont.

Incidentally, we discovered that we'd make awful insurgents, as the vast majority of our explosives failed to shatter and create the fireball we hoped for. The pictures above represent our only truly successful attempt, which was still certifiably awesome. While we surely would have been crushed by the Israeli army in the event of a real insurgency, we can take solace in the fact that we got some good pictures, available both on Foster's blog -- www.arestlesstransplant.com -- and on his Picasa page, here.

Thankfully, not everything we did during J-Term was destructive to property, body, and mind, as a couple of my friends and I also decided on a whim to make the trip down to D.C. to watch Obama's inauguration. Our schedule was a little absurd: leave 5:00 PM Monday, arrive at my friend Mike's house in Maryland at 1:30 AM, sleep from 2:00 to 3:30, hit the Mall by 5:00 AM, watch the inauguration, and leave by 2:00 PM for the nine hour drive back to Middlebury. Regardless of the lack of sleep, it was a fun time, and I'm glad that I can say that I was there, albeit sleep deprived. Plus, the trip was not devoid of real highlights, like discovering that the friendly people behind Harold and Kumar pulled a fast one on us, and that White Castle is actually the worst food known to man. While we had to learn our lesson the hard way, the sidetrip to a White Castle in one of Newark's seediest neighborhoods was still totally worth it, just for the experience. Here are a couple of photos my friend Dan took of the inauguration, also available here.

Not that anyone needed any more proof that there were a lot of people there, but there were. Seeing that many people, the Washington Monument lit up at 5:00 in the morning, and the sun rise over the Capitol were just some of the moments that made all the driving worth it. Also, Aretha Franklin's hat.