Day Six
Sometime between evening of Day Five and the afternoon of Day Six (which was Friday) the intensity rises, tightening like tire rubber expanding under pressure. We live in apartment-style dorms and gather nightly to boil down the day over beer and wine, music and chatter. Grand Central Station, so to speak is located in the courtyard of the apartments where one tier of small bleachers and a picnic table reside.
All week I have joked about how excellent it is for “us writers” to get out and practice socializing. And all week people chuckle when I say this because they know it to be true them selves. Hardly a craft talk goes by without a faculty member making obscure or direct reference to insanity. Several have gone as far as to talk about voices in their heads, poking their skulls from behind the podium then laughing as they say something like: “It gets a little weird in their sometimes!”
So when on Day Six we went straight from an afternoon of programming to the catered BBQ dinner at the University Center, it’s no surprise that drinking two glasses of wine before the food was served got us all rolling. At a certain point I became aware of the fragility of the situation. I joked to CF:
“I have to leave. I have homework to do tonight and I feel like kissing everyone in the room. This is a dangerous situation,” I must have smiled while I said it because she understood me immediately.
“Oh, let me tell you. We’re at the halfway. Everything is about to become very flirty. It just works that way. And don’t think it’s just between the students…”
And I did leave, and I was drunk like everyone else, and later I did go to the phenomenal reading by PS and CD, their words flying in little arcs from the stage to the theatre seats below, connecting the dots of life and learning like rainbows in crisp, clean light. And later at night, in the courtyard under a sky whose vastness was interrupted by campus lights, we did all start to go a little crazy, perhaps driven by the voices in our heads…Or was is the way JW played guitar with his long hair down tonight, letting is spill wildly across his back, reflecting the porch lights of our apartments as if it were the wild, blue light of a full moon beckoning us to howl.
