This morning i had the revelation that i was just a kid in college, though a lifetime (for them) of experiences separated us, it didn't seem to matter. The Dorms were massive fun, with goings on in every nook and cranny. Everywhere i turned people were trying to engage me in this or that. At some point in your life you don't get that kind of thing as much, so you learn to enjoy it when it's not around, and you learn to appreciate it when it was.
The lack of privacy was an even exchange for the abundance of free spirit and mayhem. We were all characters in a freshly epic story, as if nobody had ever cracked that book before us.
The intensity and the vibrance was unmatched by anything else i have done. We didn't just rule the nights, we ruled the days between them as well.
One particular late night or early morning outing, a bunch of us took a trip to a local zoo where some of us may have occasionally worked as part timers. The zoo was full of animals, but some of them were overly animated. Some of them were cartoonish, miniatures of their breed. And some were a grotesque cross breed with humanity, an unfortunate experiment that should have never happened. Their retardation came across on both the human side and the animal side of whatever they were.
Several of these poor animals would speak to us, through actual words, albeit slow and somewhat challenged. The one common theme we noticed was these creatures were trying desperately to tell us something. We must find the reset button, and we must activate it, before whatever was coming made it here.
We went back to our dorms and had deep discussions about what we had been told by these freaks. Was it all a hoax? A drug induced dream? We came to the collective conclusion that there was only one real way to find out. We must go off in search of this reset button. If we found it, we must activate it. Either nothing would happen, or something would happen, or we would all come down from our clouds.
To create a diversion, i was nominated to lead a team of streakers around campus and town to divert local law enforcement on the chase, while others would look around for the reset button. The cops chased us around for a while, and we ended up in a car wash. Each of us talking up position in a bay, pumping quarters into the machines and spraying the pursuers with powerful soapy hot water.
Meanwhile, the others in our group were going door to door out in the community, once they got inside someones house they went to their christmas trees and unwrapped every gift under the tree, looking for the reset button.
Several wet and angry cops later, and a bunch of ransacked homes in the community, we finally all posted bail and were banished to our dorms while the university would decide what to do with us.
As our fate loomed, it became apparent that some kind of uprising was taking place in the quad outside of our dormitory. The grass was growing at a rapid pace, right before our eyes. So were the weeds, and the trees, all of the vegetation had grown rapidly and was becoming populated with an army of insects moving about. First they were somewhat out of control, but as we observed them, they began to ORGANIZE. An army of snails began to form against an army of grasshoppers, while lady bugs watched from the safety of their trees. The battle was about to begin.
As if we needed any more proof that something strange was going on here, an angry mob from town was stalking our building and preparing for some sort of an attack. The leader of their group, an angry man with a dark coat and several automatic weapons, told us to surrender or die.
We gathered together in the hallways and decided this could be a test, perhaps the reset button was part of it all, right here in front of us. Of course it could also just be part of some bigger journey we were all on. Nevertheless we decided to hold our ground.
The windows in our building started to crash and we held onto everything we could grab onto as our belongings were being sucked outside. The deafening sound of gunfire was soon replaced by explosions and then a much more sinister roar. The grasshopper army took a pre-emptive strike against the legion of snails, drawing first blood. The frogs left their ponds and began to chase the squirrels up what was left of the trees. Clouds morphed into eruptions and the entire atmosphere began to rotate everywhere. I couldn't hear myself scream over the giant vacuum and the roar.
My cats purring was all i could feel. His warm body on top of me. I looked into his eyes as i came to focus and he told me he was hungry. Meow. Wake up and feed me bitch, he said, i think.
