"Undermining my electoral viability since 2001."

The End of Youth

We billed our housewarming party as an opportunity to join us in "staging the end of our youth." The crowd was smallish but high quality, and packed dense enough to make the occupied rooms seem full. Mix in a little SparksPlus, and it felt just about right.

Most importantly, a representative social network sample was achieved: academics from Berkeley, drupal developers from the Mission, lawyers from all over, Sixto, friends from Humboldt county and Oregon, and perhaps best of all Nick's cousin in a positively outlandish basketball outfit rolling in and supervising the cooking of much bacon. Serious meatboxing. The mix works, and there will be dinner parties to come in the same vein.

The Roller at BatLater in the evening, when things got whittled down to the inner circle, the truly regressive behavior began to emerge. There was some unsupervised mixed-martial arts in the living room, and in the back yard the great ritual of "cutting beers in half with a machete." What started as a feat of immaturity is one cycle away from tradition.

I don't know what our neighbors thought about this, especially as it was 3am and things eventually moved on from cans to bottles, which is a lot less safe and a lot more messy; but we cleaned things up good in the morning, and it probably won't happen again soon. Hopefully there are no hard feelings.

I did a riff on Ken Kesey for my outfit, and my friend Molly Keogh came through with an amazing hat for me: the classic pinstripe train engineer number (which Kesey rocked, and has been appropriated and evolved by hipsters everywhere) with a "Software Engineer" emblem on it. Amazing! I'm still wearing it now. LGD dressed as one of the Kingsmen and the Girth simply hicked it up with an Oregon license plate around his neck, Flavor-flav' style. A surprising number of others heeded our "Oregonian costume" suggestion, and it seemed to be fun.

The final hours were a long drunken singalong -- me popping in between brushing and flossing for the chorus of Easy Money -- culminating with The Wild Rover:

And it's no, nay, never! No, nay, never, no more,
will I play the wild rover. No never no more!

It's been ten years of shenanigans with these guys. I wouldn't take any of it back, and I hardly think it's true that we're through. Not even close. People dip into various pools of nostalgia from time to time, and growing up happens whether you like it or not -- tomorrow's adventures will be different than those of yesterday, for sure -- but I'm a big believer in Fun of the Now, inconsistent practitioner though I may be. The best has yet to come.

Responses

I think my grandfather would be proud to know what use we put his machete to. Cornell Club forever.

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