I worked tonight from 5 o’clock to around 11. It was my last day delivering pizzas before Christmas, and the holiday spirit was inescapable. Light 101FM filled the shop with festive tunes, Christmas cookies were popping up out of nowhere, and “have a good night” was replaced with “Happy Holidays!” when addressing customers. I guess you’re not allowed to wish people Merry Christmas unless you are completely sure of their denomination. The last thing you want to do is offend a Jewish person before they decide how much to tip you.

Despite all of the holiday cheer, it was turning out to be a shitty night. It was raining, nobody was tipping, and I wasn’t in a mansion having sex with a model on top of a pile of cash. Things were looking glum.

I made a run to one house that was covered with decorations. I’ve found that if I’m not sure which house I’m looking for on the street, it’s probably the one with the most lights. Holiday nuts love pizza. It was certainly the case for this house. A bubbly middle aged woman answered the door in a holiday sweater and, after completing the transaction, offered me a Christmas treat to take with me. She handed me a festively wrapped apple covered in chocolate and caramel and sent me on my way with a Merry Christmas.

The night suddenly wasn’t so bad.

The last delivery of the night was somewhat of a landmark for me. I had heard talk about a mysterious regular customer… a customer who would order every week…. a customer who would order enough food to last him several days at a time. Not just pizza, but desserts and drinks and everything but the kitchen sink. They called him “Charlie Manson.”

A huge order popped up on the screen; three pizzas, two subs, a couple of two liters, some brownies, a cannoli. The total came out to be around $55.00. My boss asked me if I had ever been to Charlie Manson’s house before, and I told him that I hadn’t.

“So, is his name Charlie Manson or does he just look like him?” I asked.

“He looks just like him. A younger Charles Manson,” he replied.

Charles Manson has always kind of fascinated me. The way people talk about his hypnotic presence, the fact that he is one of the most famous serial killers in the history of the world, and his frightening appearance… he sounds like a scary guy.

As I drove to his house with his humongous order sliding around in my trunk, I was anxious to see this guy. I flicked on my overhead light and took a glance down at his address; he lived at the very end of his street.

The street was dark as I turned onto it and it only got darker as I neared the last block. I finally spotted his house in the shadows on my right. The ticket said to use the side door. There were no lights on in his house. I grabbed his food and made my way towards the entrance. The yard between his house and the next was, again, dark. The wind funneled through the make-shift alley and kicked around what was left of the rain.

His door had leaves around the entrance, a few cobwebs, and a black trash bag covering a torn screen. I’m not gonna lie, I was pretty creeped out. I knocked on the door and took a step back as my heart pounded.

I heard some faint footsteps and a cough before I saw the knob start to turn. It flew open and right in front of me, lurking beneath a pale hallway light, was Charles fucking Manson. I almost jumped when I saw. He looked EXACTLY like him; disheveled beard, raggedy flanel shirt, psychotic eyes, and all. There were mysterious bags full of God knows what strewn about his entrance way and the place gave off a funky smell.

He was actually a really nice, mild mannered guy though. But the entire time I dealt with him I couldn’t shake the idea that I was talking to the real Charles Manson.

After I got off of work, it was pretty late and I decided to hit up a drive through for dinner. Taco Bell had a thousand people waiting so I went to McDonalds.

As I waited in line the kid in the passenger seat of the car in front of me stretched his arm across the back of the drivers seat. I followed the line of his arm with my eyes and ended up at his hand… which was giving me the finger.

What?

“There’s no way that was meant for me,” I thought. Maybe I had misinterpreted what I saw. That’s when I saw him look back at me. That motherfucker looked me right in the eyes, flicked his head as if to say “what are you gonna do about it?”, and then he gave me the finger again!

I didn’t know what to do. He kept sneaking me the finger and then looking back to see my reaction. I just stared at him in disbelief, shaking my head occasionally in disappointment. It crossed my mind that he might be with a big brother or someone who would kick my ass if I retaliated in any way.

Their car pulled forward a bit, and I saw that he was with his mom. At the time I thought this eliminated any chance of me being able to say or do anything, so I didn’t. Now that I think about it, I should have just walked up to the car, knocked on the window, and said politely “I would appreciate it if you would please stop giving me the middle finger. Thank you” without even looking at the mom, and then walked away.

That kid would have gotten his ass beat so badly when he got home.

Again, from Yahoo! News:

BERLIN - A man nearly died from alcohol poisoning after quaffing (chugging) two pints of vodka at an airport security check instead of handing it over to comply with new rules about carrying liquids aboard a plane, police said Wednesday.

For those of you who are American… which is probably all of you… that’s like chugging a 32 oz Big Gulp full of vodka. Insane.

How old do you think this guy was?

Not even close.

He’s 64. I hope I’m like that when I’m his age.

From Yahoo! News:

A Starbucks customer buys coffee for the car behind her, starting a two-hour chain reaction of goodwill.

A lady in Greensburgh, Pennsylvania went through the drive-through at Starbucks and, in an effort to spread holiday cheer, paid for the order of the car behind her. The car behind her, in turn, did the same. This went on for roughly two hours.

Immediately, my first thought was “Why didn’t they interview the guy who broke the chain?” That would have been priceless.

They were able, however, to obtain this photo via security footage before he drove away.

What a douche.

Finals week is here, seemingly coming out of nowhere to catch everyone off guard. This is probably my last post of the semester, which is an important landmark, I know. I know none of you have the internet at home and it will be virtually impossible for you to access the site until late January. In all seriousness though, I won’t be running the site the same way next semester. I’ll be going on with the Towerlight and getting an official weekly column (or at least thats the plan at the moment), so I’ll probably cut back my writing to just that. I’ll still post the articles here, and of course they’ll run in the Towerlight. With the extra time, I want to “pursue other projects.” I’m brainstorming on ideas for a site similar to this, but with a more global appeal. Let’s face it, no one outside of Towson students or people that know me personally has any reason to read this. I want to write about something bigger, but I don’t know what yet.

In honor of this manufactured occasion, I want to clean out the site and start fresh. What I mean by that is that I am going to post some of the drafts and dead end articles that I’ve started over the last couple of months. These are all things that, for whatever reason, I wasn’t able to do anything with. I started with what I thought was a good idea, wrote a funny sentence or two, and then completely submarined. Without further ado, here are some of my favorite dead ends, raw, unedited, and unfinished:

—————-

“If I’m old enough to go to war, I should be old enough to drink!”

You’ve heard it/said it/agreed with it before. It’s a pretty heated debate, with people under 21 arguing their side passionately while people over 21 read the paper and drink coffee or whatever it is that they do.

I had a similar argument in a class of mine. My group was discussing whether you should have to be 18 or 21 to be a police officer. Then there’s strip clubs, where you have to be 18 to strip, 18 to spectate, 21 to drink, and over 40 to get any attention.

All of this made me wonder, what are the differences between an 18 year old and a 21 year old? Are there any? Who would win in a fight?

——————–

Almost everyone I know is a self-identified procrastinator. No one will ever tell you that they are very prompt and deliberate.

Most people who claim to be procrastinators are, in fact, lying. The most diligent people I know will be the ones freaking out about an exam they have in two weeks, that they’ve “put off studying for.” Please, I’ve never even heard of studying for an exam more than two days in advance, and I count the day of the exam as a day.

Procrastination is both a vice and a virtue. It can screw you badly if you’re not careful, but it has some perks that no one seems to ever talk about.

The pressure of an approaching deadline will light a fire under your ass like nothing else. Screw outlines and proofreading, toss aside the flashcards, and just wing it. You sort of become possessed, and by the time you’re done with the assignment you can’t remember anything. You have no idea what your paper says because you only read it once, and you can’t remember any of the questions from the test… let alone how you answered them. When you get the graded copy back it’s like Christmas. You get to see your grade, yeah, but you will also be amazed at how much you knew at 4am the day you turned it in.

—————

If you keep up with my site, you’ll probably find that the one aspect of being a college student I don’t touch on very often is going to class. That’s because going to class is boring. I mean, sure, I could write up some sarcastic bulleted list of ways to make class more fun. Off the top of my head, though, I can’t think of anything that won’t get you thrown out of the classroom or cause you to fail out of college. While I have, in previous entries, advocated underage drinking, binge drinking, assault and battery, Vicodin, insurance fraud, and evading the law, I can’t in good conscience promote poor study habits. I can’t even bring myself to joke about it.

—————-

In one of my classes this week we are doing individual presentations. It doesn’t matter what class it is, but the rubric for the presentation specifically says “3-5 minutes.” I went the first day and kept my presentation within the time limit, and you know what? I got an A. Everyone after me happened to choose a topic that apparently moves them to tears, and proceeded to ramble on for 15 minutes extra about irrelevant nonsense. So today I went to that class for the sole purpose of listening to these presentations. We should have gotten through everyone and been let out of class early, but because people are inconsiderate, we stayed the whole time and will end up running over a day or two. I know this isn’t an isolated incident or a problem of mine alone.

One of my favorite Facebook groups is “Keep Your Fucking Hand Down in Lecture and Shut Up, No One Cares.” This really doesn’t require any elaboration because I’m sure just reading that sentence has enraged most of you. I know I am already starting to get angry. People who ask questions, repeat shit just to clarify, request elaboration, or tell stupid anecdotes in class are just part of one subset of annoying ass people in class. There are other people who deserve groups dedicated to hating them, too.

People Who Nod in Agreement: The occasional “oh, I get it,” nod is acceptable but some people take the reasonable nod and just shit all over it. Your professor doesn’t need you to advertise your agreement while he’s telling the class about how he got stuck in traffic. He’s probably not even looking at you because he knows eye contact will lead to you asking a question. Here’s a hint for people who do this: Every time you feel the urge to nod in class, shove a thumbtack in your eye instead. If you still want to nod after that then go ahead.

People Who Bring Laptops to Class and DON’T Use Them to Play Games: God damnit. I hate it when I look over at someone on a laptop and the only application open is a plain old Word document. I’ll often scan the task bar to see if Minesweeper is hiding out in the background somewhere. If it isn’t, then that person sucks. Look, asshole, if you’re going to distract me with your technology, at least make it interesting. Play solitaire, read the news, hell throw some porn up there. You wouldn’t like it if I brought an old-style typewriter to class to take notes with. That would be annoying as shit. And not the least bit entertaining.

People Who “Make an Entrance”: Dramatically removing your sunglasses, rapping along with your iPod, and talking loudly on your cell phone should all qualify you for immediate removal from class and possibly the human race.

People Who Are “The Unofficial Tech Guy”: There’s always that one kid in class who thinks he is MacGyver, and when the VCR won’t work properly he steps up to the plate to fix it. I mean, hey, if you know what you’re doing then by all means fix it. But 9 times out of 10 this person doesn’t fix a damn thing.

—————-

Good luck on your finals. I’ll still be writing over winter break, but for formalities sake, see you next semester.

We’ve all done them. We’ve all hated them.

My three least favorite words to hear in the classroom are “write a paper,” provided they aren’t followed by a clear explanation. My second least favorite words to hear in the classroom are “get into groups.” It doesn’t matter what follows that; there is nothing good at the end of that sentence. But that’s really neither here not there.

I can write a paper if you give me… I don’t know… a topic. I’ll even take some rough guidelines, or a sample subject. Opening up an entire semester’s worth of discussion and readings and telling me to “form a thesis” is the least helpful thing a teacher can do.

The question and answer sessions following these assignments are always hysterical. It’s obvious to everyone but the teacher that no one has any idea what to do. To the professor, though, it couldn’t be more clear. I think these discussions might be more helpful if that one kid didn’t always finish half of his paper the day it was assigned. He’ll put his hand up in the middle of a “what the fuck” question and ask the teacher to critique his thesis and if he should focus more on the 17th century Irish literature as a separate entity or if he should examine its impact on modern authors, particularly in regards to the early women’s movement and first wave feminism.

Great, now everyone else looks retarded. Thanks. I’m still trying to figure out if the pages have to be numbered and you’re already looking for proofreaders. Don’t look at me. I hate you.

The best is when you turn the paper in, get a sub-par grade, and are offered the chance to rewrite it. This is especially awesome when you STILL don’t know what you’re supposed to be writing about. The comments never help. Circling random sentences in red ink and adding a question mark, putting tiny check marks next to words that seem to please you, and scribbling illegible notes in your microscopic handwriting doesn’t help me make revisions. I shouldn’t need The Rosetta Stone to understand where I went wrong.

I’m tempted to sit and crank out papers on random topics all day long; eventually one of them is going to be satisfactory. Or I could get an infinite number of monkeys to bang indiscriminately on typewriters, and in 7 billion years I’ll have a masterpiece. It’s minus 10 points per day it’s late, so that’s…. the end of my college career as I know it.

Here is another piece of writing that is in no way Towson related or even college related in general. If you’d like to read it, you can click the link below. Oh and if you have any sort of comments, whether you liked it or didn’t (as long as you say why), I’d love to hear it.

Full Story »