In a World Lit Only By Christmas Lights

What follows is a series of nostalgic anecdotes about a summer I spent living in semi-alcoholic squalor (in no particular order)...

Earlier today I was browsing through the Facebook photo albums of total strangers, and I saw something great: Christmas lights used as interior lighting. It reminded me of the ridiculous summer I sublet from Tower on Trinity with James and (sort of) Vito. We had a huge living room with no light fixtures, and obviously we were too cheap and lazy to buy a lamp. What we did have was a huge bucket of Tyler's Christmas lights, which we nailed to the walls all over the room. They ended up being the only lighting in that room for the whole summer.

Right at the beginning of the summer James turned 21. James was the first person in my crew of friends to turn 21, and as his birthday expanded our access to alcohol it was kind of an event for everyone. We bought (or had James buy) a really excessive amount of liquor and threw a big party. The people at the party didn't get close to drinking it all up, so we opened the summer with just bottles and bottles of liquor lying around. I guess at some point we all developed this subconscious desire to get rid of it all, and we started playing beirut with all kinds of mixed drinks to try and drink it up. We did rum and coke, vodka and sprite, and on one occasion I think I did gin and orange juice.

There are some humorous bedwetting stories behind the vodka and sprite, of which I will omit the details. For those of you that were there, wasn't that some funny shit?

At another point in the summer Andrew basically moved in with us for a week (I think Alice was out of town). He was sleeping on our couch, which was right by the door to James's room. James vanished for two days, off doing whatever the shit is that James likes to disappear for a couple days and do. He left this 45 second clip of the Battlestar Galactica theme playing on his computer (on a loop), and because he had his door locked nobody could go in and turn that shit off. It was clearly audible in the living room, and Andrew had to spend a whole night listening to it loop over and over. I would have gone fucking crazy.

There was also a night when Vito randomly decided to sleep on the pool table (instead of his bed). He wasn't even drunk or anything. I guess if you know Vito that's not too weird, but if you don't, it sure is.

Oh...I shouldn't forget when Tower's sister visited, got plastered, and totally wigged out. I can't remember what she was in town for, but as it was Tower's apartment anyway we were letting her crash on our couch. We were playing the board game Diplomacy upstairs, and at one point she went downstairs for a bit. Later on I went down to get a snack, and I see her just chilling out by herself with a bottle of Jack Daniels. She said something to the effect of "Oh, I am just cleaning up a bit down here..." and skittered off. Later, she came back upstairs and seemed totally fine. Then there was a moment when it seemed like she snapped and Pop! all of a sudden she was wasted. It was like night and day. Diplomacy involves a lot of passing notes, and she handed someone this note like she had written down the most diabolical plan imaginable on it...but she had actually just written the number "3" over and over again in different sizes. It was pretty funny.

Back then Battlestar Galactica was still good, and we were pretty into it. We made plaques with the characters names on them (with the corners cut off, naturally) and hung them above our doors. We also had a masturbation alarm; when someone rang it, everyone had to run back to room and masturbate as if it were an emergency. We only used it once, but thats probably pretty messed up as it is.