January 15, 2003

The end

"You know this is it for me" he said in between spitting out a little of the large chunk of tobacco that he had stuck between his inner bottom lip and front teeth onto the concrete floor of the auditorium.

We were trying to listen to the speech, trying to give the guy a break. After all it is pretty hard to speak in front of three thousand people who are older than you mostly about the significance of an event that they have already done and that you are doing: you don't know what the fuck you are talking about and everyone knows it.

He had placed the tobacco there while we were lined up behind the bleachers. Well, while we were lining up - there had been some confusion as to where everyone was supposed to be since most people just remembered who was in front of them and a few people either hadn't been at the rehearsal or hadn't shown up for the real thing. So we had a bunch of groups of people who were in order but the groups were all out of order. After a couple of minutes of a few people taking charge and figuring this out he had simply yelled down the row "Everybody just fucking ask the person in front and behind you what their damn name is and keep moving up or back until it is fucking right" and then turned to me and grabbed my little honors tassle gently between his thumb and index finger and said "See, we don't need none of this bullshit to do this". Bubble sort, parallel processing, complex adaptive systems. Looking back on it he was drunk but I didn't know it at the time not knowing what drunk people act like when they have managed to cover up all the obvious things like speech and smell and walk. After all this takes practice and you don't come across very many of this level when you are that young.

"Yeah" I said, not knowing what to say this is always what I said.

"Yeah" he replied with a little grin and then quickly turned away from me and looked out into the audience.

January 15, 2003 03:05 PM