On Thursday, just ahead of the Labor Day weekend when the college students stream up 21st Ave. in their lemming like return to academe the new crowd of young fellows across the avenue were beginning to set up a pirate ship. That was not apparent to me yet in the morning before I headed out to interview a subject for a book I’m in the process of writing.
Because these fellows had stayed up late and talked on their front porch several nights running keeping my wife and I up it was time for me to introduce myself. I have done this regularly for twenty-seven years to stay on the good side of the ever growing nearby neighborhood residences crammed with college kids. Most of these college kids have appreciated my appeals to their better nature and my need to let my children and now grand children get a good night’s sleep. I have never called the cops and God willing never will.
Fortunately, that has proven unnecessary in recent years as the corridor along 21st and Woodland have been visited at crucial intervals by our local police in ever increasing numbers.
The young gentlemen were grateful for my good-natured request to keep their voices lower in the evening because of us doddering old folks across the street who needed to go to bed early. Thinking my mission had been accomplished I left. When I returned some hours later I found the prow of a ship built onto the front porch. The nice young fellows in their tri-cornered hats; “Cap’n Morgan” I called one after of them as I’d waved them goodbye were ad-midst an obstreperous crew pulling a mutiny on the front lawn. Horns honked, beer containers littered, Youngster’s cheered. One student mooned the world and then threaded his way drunkenly across the avenue under a hail of water balloons traffic be damned.
Perhaps my request for late night calm was to blame for not encompassing the midday as well. Perhaps my daughter with a toddler on her hips who had succeeded me in asking for a little restraint had been too abrupt. Perhaps my neighbor, another doddering oldster had failed by merely staring daggers at the group rather than invade their territory with a request for a little more order. She might have been a little more assertive when they pointedly refused to return her gaze for returning it would have broken the illusion that no one minded their theatrics.
Hearing all this I went to my office and printed out a column I’d written and had published in our local tabloid the Reader Weekly five years ago. I printed out two copies because a second smaller party was under way next door to the animal house. I crossed the avenue and ducked under the 2 by 4 prow and tucked the column under the mail box with a short and not so sweet note jotted in the margin. I then walked to the second house and genially introduced myself to the next group of students quaffing beer and whiskey. I then handed the column to the second group as well for them to ponder before their party descended into unthinking abandon. Back at my house I peeked out the window and was pleased to see them reading my work. Their more restrained party broke up shortly thereafter but perhaps not because of my actions or written word.
A short time later four police cars moved in and surrounded the more obstreperous party. The police were in no hurry. Over the course of half an hour tickets were handed out to the students many of whom lifted them high and waved them to their fellow revelers like winning lottery tickets. Ah, the bravado of youth. (My son suggested such tickets cost each recipient $180.)
I’d heard a thoughtful young man recently describe today’s college drinking binges as a kind of extreme sport. I pictured soul-patched young men exhorting each other to “Do the brew!”
I have done my level best to help the alcoholics industry since my own college days. One of the ways I’ve done this is by not being an ass when drinking. Oh there were a couple times when I was in college that I may have pushed the envelope but one instance is a pretty good indicator of me under the influence…
To celebrate the engagement of a friend I went out with a small crowd and we set to drinking shots of tequillas at a local bar a mile away from home. We’d already had a couple beers when we each had five or six shots lined up before us with slices of lime and a generous portion of salt. not surprisingly we seemed pretty sober after the drinking but then we downed the liquor pretty quickly and were sitting at a bar. There was no blood pumping action to drive the alcohol into our heads instantly. Getting up from the bar and driving six blocks to another bar was all it took for the drug to do its work. I stopped drinking at the next bar and watched as some of my compatriots drank till they puked or passed out. I told the driver of the car that we were in no condition to get behind the wheel of his car and drive home and encouraged him to follow me home on foot. The next day when he told me he’d gotten a ticket for leaving the car behind he thanked me for having him walk home. I’m rather sorry to admit it did not occur to me to help him pay his parking fine.
I added this last story only as a little “mea culpa” so as not to sound too high minded about youthful excess. Back then, as today, I have no use for alcohol as an excuse for drunken driving, bad behavior, cruelty or foolish risk taking any more than I’ve fallen for not my fault line: “the devil made me do it!”
All this is prelude to yet another interesting piece sent to me by my Buddy. It’s not about alcohol. It’s about finding purpose in going to college. I recommend it. It contains this agreeable paragraph:
My father detonated. (That was not uncommon. My father detonated a lot.) He told me that I was going to go to college only once, and that while I was there I had better study what I wanted. He said that when rich kids went to school, they majored in the subjects that interested them, and that my younger brother Philip and I were as good as any rich kids. (We were rich kids minus the money.) Wasn’t I interested in literature? I confessed that I was. Then I had better study literature, unless I had inside information to the effect that reincarnation wasn’t just hype, and I’d be able to attend college thirty or forty times. If I had such info, pre-law would be fine, and maybe even a tour through invertebrate biology could also be tossed in. But until I had the reincarnation stuff from a solid source, I better get to work and pick out some English classes from the course catalog. “How about the science requirements?”
and apropos my prologue there is this:
In college, life is elsewhere. Life is at parties, at clubs, in music, with friends, in sports. Life is what celebrities have. The idea that the courses you take should be the primary objective of going to college is tacitly considered absurd. In terms of their work, students live in the future and not the present; they live with their prospects for success. If universities stopped issuing credentials, half of the clients would be gone by tomorrow morning, with the remainder following fast behind.
and this:
So, if you want an education, the odds aren’t with you: The professors are off doing what they call their own work; the other students, who’ve doped out the way the place runs, are busy leaving the professors alone and getting themselves in position for bright and shining futures; the student-services people are trying to keep everyone content, offering plenty of entertainment and building another state-of-the-art workout facility every few months. The development office is already scanning you for future donations. The primary function of Yale University, it’s recently been said, is to create prosperous alumni so as to enrich Yale University.
So why make trouble? Why not just go along? Let the profs roam free in the realms of pure thought, let yourselves party in the realms of impure pleasure, and let the student-services gang assert fewer prohibitions and newer delights for you. You’ll get a good job, you’ll have plenty of friends, you’ll have a driveway of your own.
and this:
…Schopenhauer, who despised belief in transcendent things, nonetheless thought Christianity to be of inexpressible worth. He couldn’t believe in the divinity of Jesus, or in the afterlife, but to Schopenhauer, a deep pessimist, a religion that had as its central emblem the figure of a man being tortured on a cross couldn’t be entirely misleading. To the Christian, Schopenhauer said, pain was at the center of the understanding of life, and that was just as it should be.
And if you do wade through it all (and it is longish) don’t forget to read a few of the comments both pro and pooh pooh that follows the essay.
