Mardi Gras Recap: Part 2

Our games on Saturday were relatively uneventful. All of the handlers, myself included, had a terrible game against Arkansas. That poor play resulted in a loss, but the other three games that day were all wins. Personally, I finally got into a groove with my new backhand break. I tried to make some changes to my throwing motion and release point over the course of the fall. I guess it's not the greatest thing in the world that I'm still changing my throwing form even after playing for so long, but I'm really happy with this new-found effectiveness with the backhand break. My confidence in that throw has never been higher, and that definitely turned into over-confidence on day two. I'm going to stop short of saying how this works into our strategy, for fear of giving away too much in advance of the HOTI and Roll Call tournaments.

The fields for Saturday's games were terrible. The ground was complete slop, and some local asshat decided it was a good idea to drive donuts on parts of the fields. That resulted in huge mud-filled gullies that covered one entire end-zone. I must admit, I still find things that surprise me in this game, and this next bit is a perfect example. What seemed to work the best in the muck was -- get this -- the handler weave. I don't even know why it worked so well, and it wasn't even my idea originally to call it. But damn, we pwnt the shit out of teams with that handler weave while we played on that messy field.

Also, before I get to far-afield chronologically, my team still persists in going to fucking McDonalds for breakfast. Every time I bring up the idiocy of this habit, I'm always told the same thing: it's the only place to get breakfast quickly. That explanation is complete garbage, since you can just as easily find a local grocery store and buy some fruit or something. There's no way I'm changing IU's McShit habit, at least not on a team-wide level. I mean I could be a dick about it and start giving orders and whatnot, but a) people probably wouldn't listen and b) I need to save my kicking and screaming for other more important things. That said, I went off on my own excursion to the grocery store only to come back to the McTransFats and find no one but the three guys in my car, who were just standing around waiting for me. Because it's clearly not important to call me when the whole caravan is going to the fields and I have no directions. Idiots.

I mention my excursion to the grocery store because there I bought a half-gallon of orange juice. I subsequently drank the entire thing over the course of the games. It was a bad idea, admittedly, to chug OJ on the sidelines between points. My teammates all cringed when they saw me do this, but somehow I didn't get sick. I am proud of myself. Also, there were crazy fire ants all over the place. I still have some almost-healed welts around my ankles from where those little fuckers got a piece of me. Never experienced that before.

Anyways, the real story I want to get to here is the story of Bourbon Street. There was some pretty massive confusion about how we were going to get to New Orleans (about an hour away). We needed to figure out who was going to drive and whatnot. It was already fairly late when these decisions were finally made and we haphazardly set off from the hotel. I hadn't been drinking yet, but I fully intended to do so once I got there. Little did I realize what I was getting myself into.

You do not fully comprehend the meaning of the word "clusterfuck" until you have been to Bourbon Street. The street itself is extremely narrow (those of you in D.C., think about the width of 22nd street in the F/G/H Street area). The whole street is just packed with people. The word I keep using to describe the surrounds was a "crush." It was a huge crush of people. Not like the Durham Fair or FallFest or Spring Fling on the quad or whatever. The entire street was storefront-to-storefront people -- very little room to maneuver and whole clumps of gawkers standing in the middle of the street at every balcony. A complete nightmare to try and navigate. No sooner had we turned onto Bourbon Street then two dudes got into a fight. A punch went whizzing by my shoulder and landed on some dude walking next to me. This was going to be awesome...

Wrongwrongwrongwrongwrong wrong WRONG! Within a half-hour of arriving, I felt something warm and liquid land on my leg and give me a very unpleasant feeling. I turned around to see some clown, college age, bent over still holding his cup of hooch, and a hefty splotch of orange-colored vomit seeping into the back of my pant-leg. After a long stare-down with the teetering culprit, the booter's accomplice managed to squeeze out a "These things happen, it's Mardi Gras man!!" I'm glad I didn't throw a punch or anything because there were so many cops. Vertical would later discover this fact when he showed his bare ass for some beads and got roughly pulled aside by The Fuzz.

So that started my night off just fine. Our guys and girls were moving along in a big group down Bourbon Street so slowly that Paul Prudhomme almost certainly could have motored circles around our group. I was already sick of being there, my pants having been soiled and my desire to drink nearly gone. The final nail in the coffin of my desire to have fun was when I got caught up in a crush of people moving down the street. All of a sudden, I found myself surrounded on all sides by hordes of drunken idiots, all believing that the harder they pushed, the faster this would all go. It got to the point where I was no longer in control of where I was headed, since everyone around me was pushing and shoving in the same direction.

I was NOT okay with that. I'm no doctor, but I'm pretty sure that what I subsequently experienced was an anxiety attack. All of a sudden I was hypersensitive to the various loud noises and getting pushed by other people. All I wanted to do was leave. I had at this point left the group so that I could go to the periphery of the street and try to calm down, to find some open space in which to stand and collect myself. Then, to keep myself occupied, I wanted to try and remain in sight of our group the whole time without actually being within the group. Some of my teammates expressed concern after the fact, saying that I looked as if I would fight the next person who looked at me funny. I don't think I would have done that, but I certainly was flipping the fuck out. I never want to have an experience like that again.

The one bright spot of the evening was that all of a sudden everyone was looking up and cheering. On the balcony overhead was none other than Hulk Hogan. He was throwing some pretty good beads and TardBang actually got his hands on some of them. So that was the good thing that happened.

Oh, there was another good thing too. At some point, TardBang really wanted this one set of beads that someone was waving around on some balcony. They wouldn't give it to him for showing any male equipment, so enter McNoob, one of the Janes (our women's team), willing to do show some nurp or something and get the good beads. Previously, I had noticed some supercreep a little ways away from our group. This guy was like 40ish, balding, standing around by himself with a video camera. Every time it looked like a girl was about to show her jubblies, this guy would swoop into the crowd to get a good view. Well, as soon as McNoob stepped up to the curb, some other similar supercreep came in and started focusing in his digital camera.

This was not okay with me, nor was it okay with one of the other women. So we confronted the guy. I covered up the lens with my hand, and together we gave him a pretty vicious tongue-lashing. We told him we didn't want him taking pictures of our friend so he could go home and jerk off to it later. He said something about "what, and girls showing their breasts for $0.05 plastic beads isn't stupid?" Seeing as that had nothing to do with what we had just said, the two of us just fired off a salvo of verbal barbs and prevented him from getting close to our group or to McNoob. I kept pawing at his camera too every time he tried to take a photo. He said that it was "kids like [us]" who were "[ruining] Mardi Gras for the rest of [them, i.e. supercreeps]," and walked away. I was proud of having done my good deed for the day, and McNoob succeeded in getting the good beads. Wins all around.

Finally everyone decided to leave. We didn't get back until some absurdly late time, like 3am or something. As we were all getting ready for bed, we hear a knock on our door, and in comes Vertical, buttass naked, blitzed, and wanting to wrestle TardBang. After prying the two ex-wrestlers apart, we all dragged Vertical back to his room, still sans clothes but at least subdued for the moment. That ended day one of games and Bourbon Street.

Other than getting puked on and getting caught in a human meatflow, the worst thing was seeing my teammates reduced to such a primal level walking around in search of boobies. Much like Vegas last year, it was just depressing to see people I know so well -- people who are more or less intelligent individuals -- craning their necks all night and waiting for random girls on balconies to show some side-boob. Maybe this wouldn't be a big deal if they had spent a half-hour or an hour trying to get a glimpse of some funbags (they're only human after all), but this is what the whole group did for, like, three hours. It makes you think, being like, "These are my friends? How embarrassing..." because they voluntarily put themselves on the same level as every other community college dropout who's walking around Bourbon Street spewing chunks onto unsuspecting people's pant-legs.

That's all for part two. Needless to say, I never want to go back to Bourbon Street ever again, at least not on such an absurd weekend. Pandemonium is not my cup of tea. Anyhow, that's all I got, and part three won't be too long in coming, and probably won't be as lengthy as this one. It will encompass Sunday's play and the ride home. TTFN.