Smokes: Multiple packs of Camel Lights, thanks to a truck stop in Lodi, Ohio … mmmm, cheap tobacco…

Tunes: On my way home from work, it will be the CD of the Phish show in Pittsburgh from last summer … just got my copy in the mail today.

Hm. I just read a couple accounts of what was apparently a pretty exciting weekend in Athens … it was Dad’s Weekend, when fathers converge on campus to buy groceries, clothing and cocktails for their children. There’s usually great potential for mayhem — The Wife and her friends used to stroll through the bars uptown grabbing Dad asses, pausing at the door to watch the reaction spread through the room and then leaving in fits of giggles — but this year the mayhem involved stabbings, gunshots and a Halloween-style police crackdown along Court Street Saturday night. I know things get out of hand on Halloween — I was there for like nine of them. But since I left, the kids at OU seem to have had a little more difficulty playing nice. This starts with the Daylight Savings Time Riots, which were funny the first year or two and just a sad self-fulfilling prophecy after that. There have been full-blown riots in conjunction with Highfest and Palmerfest (block parties created to fill the void left after the university killed Springfest) and then this. We had fights on Court Street when I was in Athens, but the scariest one I ever saw was a thing between two fraternities and pool cues outside Baker Center. Knives? Pistols, for christssake? What’s the matter with just being drunk and happy, folks?

I promised an explanation of the groundhog thing, but that’s a little involved, and I still have two weeks before we (and by that, I mean the Fraternal Order of the Groundhog) meet in Mansfield. It’s hard enough to explain to the two people The Wife and I are dragging into this thing … I’m not feeling up to explaining it to you, at least not yet.

And then there’s the sex essay/story/thing. Just as I completed the three projects I’ve been working on for the newspaper, I have this other thing on my plate … it promises to be as stressful, if not more so. A very good friend of mine from college publishes a zine called Bee (it’s widely available in the DC area I’m told), and she’s been asking me for a contribution. So I volunteered, unknowingly, to write something for the sex issue. Do I write something about my sex life? Do I make something up? This is teetering on the very boundary of my typical comfort zone, so I’m feeling a little stuck. Possibles:

— writing about how hard it is to write about sex

— sex and power. another friend of mine is enduring psychological abuse/stalking from an ex.

— write the raunchiest piece of fiction I can come up with.

— bag it and write a CD review.

Hm. I wonder when my deadline is….