Cheese Combos

My friend wrote this piece for my previous and now retired blog a few months ago. I just stumbled upon it today and realized how utterly amazing it is and decided I should share it with the world and by world, I mean whoever actually reads this or stalks my a$$ on twitter twatter. He was also HAMMERED when he composed this piece, but that is the usge for him...I think it makes him more charming...

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At 12:50 a.m., the sky over Pickens County, South Carolina, glows the same way that the island of Manhattan does when looking west from Long Island– a glooming and hideous afterglow, evident of low pressure systems and pollution kicked up into midnight air. Clemson University is a mighty bastion slapped smack-dab next to Bumfuck and Nowhere and this night feels just like the rest of them, drunk and stupid, drunk and stupid. Most of the few-odd-thousand students are gone for the summer, and the 98% humidity is reserved for only me and my empty residence hall.

Late at night I’ll often wander down to the lobby to chit-chat with the student at the front desk, as I am unable to locate any other human beings within a few miles, especially at such ungodly and unspeakable hours. She can tell I’m drunk usually, my breath reeking of the Pabst Blue and Red Stripe that she saw me smuggle in earlier. I won’t hit on her, there’s something about southern women that demands our best behavior, regardless of my BAC and raging hormones. Night after night, they tell me their names… Toni, Sara, Johanna… wash, rinse, and repeat. After 15 minutes of shooting the shit, that long pause comes; I lie and say I’m tired so I can return to my room and drink the last awkward moments of our conversation away.

It’s funny, how when you have everything, all you do is drink. Sleeping limits my alcohol consumption and I adjust accordingly.

Most of the time if I have my phone on me I’ll do the verboten and text every single person that I miss terribly, detailing exactly how bad I miss them, as if I were a freshman feeling the ethanol pump steady for the first time through these veins. The truth is, most of them appreciate it (thank god for auto-correct). The Brazilians have an expression in Portuguese, que saudade (kee sah-ooh-DAH-jee), which has no literal English translation, save “I miss the piss out of what we’re talking about.” This phrase bounces in my mind most drunken nights and I’ll text it to those familiar with it. If you love someone dearly on a shitfaced Saturday evening, send them those two short words and ponder neatly on the most fantastic fifteen seconds of raw personal emotion that reminds you of them.

I call it the “Cloverfield video,” that short clip you might have accidentally taken on your phone at an Applebee’s in 2010, of your best friend from high school, remarking about nothing in particular. Whenever you watch that video though, it’s as if you stare deep and insightfully into the soul of that person, and you get this feeling of deep longing and grief, the grief that you may never feel their love again. I wonder, in an optimistic sort of way, if I’ll ever kiss her again. I think deep down I know I shouldn’t.

This time it’s the golden glow of amber pilsner that calls me back to the keyboard, my words fueled chemically and methodically, sometimes pausing ridiculously to format with stumbling keystrokes and mouse-clicks. My dorm belongs to hundreds of freshman girls and I frequently admire this irony. Occasionally I’ll pass a girl that looks especially young, it reminds me in a daunting way of my looming future as a parent one day, maybe as a loving father to a beautiful young daughter. Can I admit that nothing scares the shit out of me more? Knowing full and well what I’ve done over the past few years, how can I father a child? I guess that’s the point, the whole challenge of the process.

I think I might wait a few years, honestly.

I can remember back to the days when I counted drinks, or tried to pace myself. It makes me wonder what the fuck happened… when did I start drinking twenty a day? When did this become acceptable? Is it?

Before I graduated college, literally the last few hours before I spun and hauled-ass across the stage and state, I promised my very few best friends that we would talk every week. It’s been two since graduation.

The joke is that graduation is like parole; should that be the truth, I feel like I’ve just stepped away from Shawshank, with an astounding helplessness… without aim and terrified, as I head out into this laughing stock of a “real” world that human beings have facilitated and fucked-over throughout the years. Resumes, cover letters, interviews, and rejection.

Alas, there is a light at the end of this tunnel. Hops, barley, rice and yeast, cared for and chemically stabilized, filtered, bottled, shipped, loved, sold and consumed by the sixes and twelves, twenty-fours and thirty-sixes. If you read this and feel pitiful, you obviously can’t tell your porters from stouts, your ales from lagers. I like to think that beer is the least of the evils in this world. I’d like to think that what I’m doing is acceptable, or at least forgivable.

I’m not sure if I was born this way or if I’m the product of my environment. Who cares? Give me a beer.

-     14 MAY 2012

P.S. This was completed at 1:32 a.m. At 3:36 a.m., I have decided that Nacho Cheese Combos are without a doubt the food most consumed by the force that you call god. If not evident by the previous statement, I am roughly 8 beers more deep into mayhem.

P.P.S. I will stand by the last statement until death.