6.7.02 INT. MCGLINN HALL CLERK DESK 12:34am NIGHT
the proper word to describe my desk shift last night is idiosyncratic. the class of 1962 is staying in McGlinn this weekend. in 1962 Notre Dame was still an all male school. throughout my four hour shift i heard a steady stream of ‘back in my day’ stories and advice for living. it was to be expected and accepted, reunions are times for nostalgia, but the life lessons i garnered were not from their advice but from their behavior. they were drunks. the lot of them. decaying jaundiced men with red puffed and watery eyes, doublefisting beer in their shaking liverspotted hands. laughing, yelling because they are too sloshed to talk quietly, wondering where the liquor store is, where is the beer tent, is the bar at the hotel still open, where do college kids go drink nowadays, have i heard what bar other people are going to. the entire evening i think every question had something to do with alcohol. if you want your child to remain a virgin, send them to notre dame the only catch is they’ll leave an alcoholic. what made it even more surreal was that the radio was playing one of the greatest classic rock albums of all time, David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. the whole album. straight through. no breaks. i tried to enjoy it but the 60 year old drunkards insisted on telling me the things that were required of them back in the day. (showing their jockies in order to go to mass to make sure they did not have pajamas on underneath and that was just the beginning) and telling me how nice i have it now. yeah it is better than what they had but in my opinion times change and ND is always about 15 years behind the times.
i finished Cat’s Cradle today. all i can say is ouch. you don’t realize the subtlety of vonnegut’s satire until the very last paragraph and then you realize just how stupid humanity is. go hoosiers.