pointless ths story #1

here is a story that i sent a friend:

so, this one time (when i was still living in columbus) i was hanging out at our hang-out, bernie's distillery, where homeless people and punk-rockers hung out (because the drinks were dirt cheap) and it was hot and sticky because it was the summer time.

so there we were - sitting outside on the porch ... which was really not a porch but more of a fenced in (cheap, wrought iron fencing) that had a bunch of picnic benches shoved into it, not that we ever wanted to sit on them because people were always getting too drunk and peeing on them, but nonetheless there were benches in this enclosed, fenced area on street-level property of the bar, which actually was in a basement. there i was, hot, steaming. it was so hot that week that i decided to not wear deodorant that week since I, being a Pollack-Kraut and therefore perfect in every way, never smell, but always will sweat if it is too hot. I remember asking becky fauver, charlie foreman's girlfriend, to smell me to see if i stunk - i passed the test, a girl told me that i didn't stink and i was therefore happy that i saved deodorant that would otherwise have been wasted.

so there we were - sitting outside on the porch. some kid, kid - probably in his mid-teens, pimply and sprouting sporadic patches of red hair on his face, some kid walked up to us, holding a sign. he explained to us, standing there with his freckled charm and farmboyish bare feet, that he wasn't looking for money, but was bored and looking for intelligent conversation and held a small corrugated-cardboard sign explaining the same. the writing on his sign was child-like, written haphazardly in sharpie marker, on a piece of cardboard torn from a larger piece of cardboard and measured approximately 2x4 feet and had this haphazard writing written only on the white-side of the cardboard, torn from a larger piece of cardboard.

so, being the nice-folks that we were, we struck up a kindly mid-westerner to another mid-westerner (although i am not a midwesterner i acted as midwesternlylike as possible) conversation, which led to our red-headed iowanian friend (he later explained that he was from iowa ... or some other God-forsaken-mid-west-ern-

state) explaining that across the street, in the back of the Wexner Center (OSU's art building) there was a dumpster that had clothes in it, which turned out to clearly be cast-offs from a recently cleaned out lost-and-found box/area/trunk.

me, and john hoffmeister, and i think deepak bal, and maybe mike friedman, and i think somebody else (no, it was only three of us - me, the iowa kid, and john hoffmeister) went over to the dumpster. and looked in. and saw clothes. and jumped in. and found a bunch of matching suit jackets that we all wore for the rest of the night to multiple bars. and i found a short, crimson scarf, which was clearly a lady's scarf because it was short, but i wore it anyway that night even though it was probably gross and it was really hot, too hot to wear deodorant. but i wore it anyway - i was young and beautiful and nothing could hurt me.

i just found that scarf again and it made me think of that story. i don't have too many interesting stories like that from the past few years since i've been back in pa. that makes me sad.