Monumental excursion

For Halloween I was the Pillsbury dough boy. Well, not on Halloween, on the Saturday before. And I was only in costume for about 45 minutes. But either way, so far as I know, there are no pictures, so as awesome as my costume was, there is no evidence of its amazingness.

The night began at Pipes' house. Funny though, most of the team wasn't there -- a lot of people had gone to Georgetown or other places, so it really wasn't that big of a party, at least in the beginning.

Let's describe my costume. I basically just wore a plain white long sleeve shirt and plain white thermal pants, and stuffed them full with every other piece of white clothing I own. Then, I put on white face paint, and put flour all over my shirt and sleeves so that I could make little puffs of flour come out just by hitting my costume with my hand. Of course, once I entered, Woody made it a point to come up to me and start banging on my chest like a bongo drum, sending a surprisingly noxious cloud of flour up into my face and eyes.

After milling about in the house for a while, I started to overheat. I went out back to their little enclosed backyard and sat on the crummy couch that's out there. I was really tired at this point, so I just closed my eyes and relaxed a bit - definitely not a pass-out, just taking a few moments to myself. After all, at this point, I still had most of my 750 still untouched. While I was sitting outside, though, some people inside poked their heads out and noticed I was "sleeping." Then the whole party started to think that I was "passed out on the couch outside" and I heard a bunch of different people laughing about it.

Granted I wasn't passed out, but I was decently drunk by this point, so my reaction to this was somewhat different than it would have been had I been sober. The logic went like this. If I ever saw someone sleeping outside in the cold for more than just a few minutes, I would at least check on them and make sure everything was cool. Given that this did not happen, and that people were instead laughing at me, I got pissed and decided to leave. Prior to doing that though, I spiked a bag of flour on the ground in defiance of circumstances.

I went back to City Hall to get rid of my bulky costume. In retrospect, it was great that at this point I had gotten drunker than before (consuming more of the 750 I was carrying around). Why? Because face paint is frigging hard to get off without basically scrubbing your eyes with soap, especially when you've stupidly face-painted your eyelids and eye sockets. So feeling no pain was a plus. While I was home/walking home, people started to wonder where I went, and so they all started calling. I figured if they didn't care how I was doing before, fuck them for giving a shit now (again, drunk). So I just hung up on most people.

Either way at this point I called Pete and Julia B and some other people to see if maybe it was worth walking up to Georgetown or Adams Morgan or whatever. Instead, though, in my infinite drunken wisdom, I thought it would be a better idea to go for a little monument visit, a la Ethan. I poured out the rest of my 750 into a ginger ale bottle, added some things (possibly ginger ale and lime juice, who knows), and left. On the way, I had to pee again, so I stopped by the Marvin Center for some reason. There, I took a dump and drank more while I was on the can (don't ask me why I thought this was a good idea, it just seemed like it was).

From there it was down to the monuments area. The next thing I knew, I was being dragged back up to campus by Moomi and Russ, who had come down to find me after I had apparently passed out underneath a tree near the Lincoln Memorial. The missed calls log in my phone was pretty funny, as it had Moomi calling me like six different times -- on all of which I probably hung up. But they managed to get through at least once, because somehow I told them I was in the monuments somewhere. They apparently headed down to at least look for me, and luckily for them I passed out underneath a tree along a lighted path.

I have vowed that the next time I will not be so easily found. Obviously I appreciate the fact that they came down to get me, as I was definitely visible to any passing park police. There are areas though, where you can pass out and no one will notice. I just didn't pick one of those areas. As we were walking back, they kept telling me there were cops around every time I wanted to stop and take a rest. Maybe the first couple of times there was a cop, but I was not too drunk to remember that I'm pretty sure they were just making it up to get me to move along. Probably a good career move, but such things will only work once...

Anyways, that's my Halloween story and I'm stickin' to it. The next morning I woke up to find flour everywhere, and my eyes horribly, horribly red from getting so much flour in them. Of course I dutifully went to practice, and acted like everything was fine.