Hey out there all you KDA readers, glad to be here!  Danno already wrote up a better introduction than I could hope to craft for myself, but he left out an important fact that should go a long way towards explaining lots of the situation that I’ll hopefully be retelling here.  I have never in my life had a hangover.  Scout’s honor.  And it’s not for lack of trying, as many people who know me would attest.  With that being said, allow me to regale you with a tale, not of the start of my drinking career, but one of the shining moments at least…

Ah, the 21^st birthday…an opportunity for one to glaze over all the underage drinking they’ve done in order to celebrate the newfound legality of their actions in a grand gesture of blistering inebriation. People cherish the hazy memories of that birthday and almost to a fault speak of it in reverential tones. When such a topic arises in conversation, I’m glad to know that my 21^st birthday, in my estimation and no fewer than a dozen of my friends, was one of the most epic shit shows to have ever occurred. I have on multiple occasions heard from people that is the standard by which they judge parties now, or that it was the closest their college experience came to the movie Animal House. With the total realization that I’ve hyped this story up to an almost unattainable level of awesome, I will heedlessly charge forward into the telling.

My birthday falls on May 16^th, for all you stalkers out there dreaming of making a skin suit out of me. As such, the temperature is generally agreeable here in Wisconsin, and the school year is in the process of winding up, if it hasn’t already. These conditions usually result in a fairly agreeable day in which to celebrate my presence on this planet. In this particular year, 2004, I had already finished up with my finals and gone back home for the summer. But, like any good college student, I knew that my sleepy northwoods hometown couldn’t offer me up the appropriate 21^st birthday experience that I felt I deserved. As such, my good friend Adam and I packed up and headed down to Madison to celebrate with the good handful of my friends who were still in town. As luck would have it, my friend Lothar was graduating on the day before my birthday, and was having a party to celebrate said fact. The forces of fate seemed to be conspiring to make this party a large and festive affair.

When we arrived in town, the Lothar graduation party was in semi swing at the apartment of Lothar, Biff and Stinky. His parents had generously contributed a quarter barrel of Spotted Cow, a huge sandwich tray and a gigantic sheet cake. Additionally, as this was the apartment of 3 college guys, various bottles of booze were on hand. The stage was set, and the quiet transition from graduation party to birthday party worked smoothly and efficiently. Lothar’s parents and grandparents eventually said their goodbyes and left, which in retrospect was probably for the best. Other friends, acquaintances and random hangers-on started to arrive. Biff, under the auspices of my impending birthday, took the opportunity to pour Jack Daniels down my throat like it was his job. Beers were being pounded at reckless rates, and spirits were generally high. This is the moment I will henceforth refer to as when things started to slide rapidly downhill into extreme shit-show territory.

Obviously in GREAT shape

As a wildly drunk 20 year old on the verge of becoming a legal consumer of alcohol, my mind was whirling with half formed ideas and plans, the majority of which were wildly infeasible or just generally bad. Eventually, however, two neurons slammed into each other in just the correct fashion to give me the Single Greatest Idea in the History of Ever. Lothar, the graduate of note was already in a state of complete disregard for himself and his surroundings. Having been drinking all day, at this point of the evening he was good for anything. We had already taken down one of the party decorations, a thin cardboard ‘Congrats Grad!’ sign and duct-taped it to his head as a sort of pope-style hat. Obviously he was a ripe target for some shit to go down. I immediately stumbled over to my good friend Pecker to share my insight. The conversation went roughly like this:

Me: (In hushed but excited tones) Pecker! Pecker! I just had the greatest idea!

Pecker: What’s up, dude?

Me: I need to throw that sheet cake at Lothar!

Pecker (who was blessedly sober enough to have rational thinking abilities): Whoa, whoa, whoa! Seems like a bit much…why don’t you just cut a big piece of the cake, and then hit Lothar in the face with that?

Me: Great idea! I’m gonna do it!

I proceeded to sneakily sidle over to the cake, which was largely uneaten, and cut myself off a roughly plate-sized slice. I then drunkenly meandered over to where Lothar was standing and conversing and figuratively lit the fuse on the powderkeg of drinking and bad decisions that we had stored up. The cake hit Lothar square in the face, to great effect; frosting and particles of cake were smeared everywhere, and his reaction was one of complete surprise and mirth.

Action shot of actual cake smashing

Understandably, everyone at the party thought the whole event was awesome, and proceeded to laugh and tell me how hilarious it was. In my drunken knot of a brain, I knew this constituted a tacit understanding that if one piece of cake was funny, the entirety of the cake would be just as epic as I had previously assumed. Bolstered with that knowledge, I almost immediately grabbed the cake and hurled it across the room in Lothar’s general direction. As one would expect following an event of that magnitude, shit began to roll rapidly downhill.

Lothar, now covered in cake, immediately stumbled backward from the impact. As luck would have it, he managed to drunkenly crash into a wire shelving unit that the guys used as a semi-pantry. The end result was Lothar laying in a pile of various dry goods and cake and every other attendee standing and staring in wonderment and disbelief. The tense silence was broken as Biff charged up the stairs as quickly as possible. Before enough time had passed for us to even wonder at what he was doing, he came running down with a hockey stick and proceeded to attack the shit out of the giant mess on the floor. Between Lothar’s fall and Biff’s rage, a bottle of apple cider vinegar had broken open, a can of spray Pam had been de-nozzled and was now spraying everywhere, flour was quickly spreading around the room and cake was becoming the fashion accessory of choice.

Seeing the general disregard for the apartment demonstrated by the people who actually lived there, everyone took this as an invitation to get as wildly out of control as possible. As I was already pretty hammered, things are generally fairly hazy, but I do remember specific instances of crazy. People were writing on the window with soap and on a collection of movie posters with sharpies. Handfuls of cake were being thrown around the room. Someone started hurling food out into the street. For my part, I took the roughly 5 or 6 jars of peanut butter that the roommates had, lined them up on the floor on their sides and proceeded to go down the line, jumping on them. Their tops would pop off and peanut butter would spray out in a satisfying combination of loud noises and widespread destruction, like some sort of miniature peanut butter cannon. In short, shit was getting very crazy-go-nuts. This near-riot would have probably continued unabated, were it not for the fact that it was very near midnight, so I would soon be a legal consuming adult, and therefore ready for the bars. The final tipping point certainly arose when my friend Mongo, under the mistaken impression of some imaginary wrong, threw a bottle at Pecker’s head. That was all we needed to see to take this show on the road.

Largely, the bar portion of this tale is exactly what you would expect out of a 21^st birthday; lots of drinks and shots consumed, general conversation and what have you. We only managed to make it through 2 bars due to our late arrival time, the Church Key and the Red Shed. The only noteworthy occasion involved the now blisteringly shit-canned Lothar being basically passed at a booth in the Shed. Apparently despite his state, namely face-down slumped over a table, he had managed to convey his desire to have his festive hat removed. It was now kinda pulled off his head, but as we had taped it directly to him, a large portion of duct tape was still stuck in his hair and defying any attempts to dislodge it. Ever the problem solver, I quickly agreed to help him out of the situation. Placing one hand firmly on the back of his neck, I grabbed the loop of tape and gave it a vicious and quick yank. To the credit of both the strength of Lothar’s hair and the tape, neither gave way, so the end result was Lothar’s head briefly coming off the table before being forcibly slammed back into it by the pressure from my hand. Luckily he had consumed roughly enough alcohol over the day to kill a hippopotamus, so despite the initial and probably substantial pain, apparently he was good the next day.

As bar time loomed, Biff and myself decided that we needed additional nourishment, as drunk people are wont to do. We headed off to satiate our hunger at the ever faithful Qdoba. As a delicious restaurant in general and specifically one that is open after bar close, there was a sizable line to wait to order. Whilst in the midst of waiting, Biff took the opportunity to chat with some ladies directly in front of us. Ostensibly a good idea, granted, but apparently it was viewed none to kindly by the guys they were with. Tempers started to flare, and I held Biff back and generally tried to defuse the situation. As I calmed down one very drunken and angry Biff, the line started to move away from us, which led to the people behind us getting rather rowdy. The situations now quickly reversed, as apparently I had put up with enough, in my mind, and thus Biff had to restrain me from getting in a poorly thought out drunken throw down at the burrito joint. As we walked home, eating our burritos and both still running like a race-car in the red, temper wise, someone (a bone of contention yet over who was the initiator, Biff or myself) tackled the other person and we proceeded to wrestle/fight down a hill for a long enough time to tire ourselves out. At that point, we went our separate ways; back to the Tuba Haus to pass out for me, and Biff back to his now trashed apartment, where due to lost keys he had to break in through a window and subsequently suffer an attack by his equally drunk roommate, who thought he was a robber.

So that’s it in the whole….I know the post got a little long, but I couldn’t find a good spot to break it up, and I figured, what the hell, let’s give people a taste of what I’ve got to offer.  Hopefully you stuck it out till the bitter end, and maybe even enjoyed it.  Stay tuned to this same KDA channel, where hopefully in the near future I will offer up such thrilling tales as, ‘The Semester when God told me I shouldn’t ride a bike’ and ‘St. Patties Day in OK City: The Search for Green Beer’.