It is now time to talk about the bad day.

The best worst day of my life (so far, I think) happened in college. I remember it pretty clearly. In fact, most of the stories I remember pretty clearly happened in college. I don't remember a lot before that very clearly, for various reasons, but that's a story for another time, or perhaps not.

It was the second half of my junior year and I was rooming with both Dave and Steve (brothers) and one other guy that I won't get into just yet. He wasn't around much anyway. Dave was my year, Steve was 2 years behind us. Dave dated all kinds of cute girls, I wasn't dating anyone at the moment (though that would soon change for the worse), and Steve was dating this girl who I think was a sophomore at the time. Her name was Carrie.

Carrie was awesome, which was only enhanced by the fact that her family lived on a boat, which I think is cool and would totally consider doing myself someday. Why invest in real estate when you can make the world your oyster? So yeah, Carrie had that I-grew-up-around-the-ocean coolness that I think is hard for people to recognize for what it is unless they know it for themselves. Plus, she was just a really nice person (Steve later married her, smart boy that he was).

I only ever flunked one test in college, it was my second Accounting 201 test. I studied just like normal but my brain must have been turned off that day. I remember taking it, like any other test, and thinking I probably did fine, like any other test. I remember getting it back, too. The teacher looked at me kind of odd. I looked at it and the first thing I did was check the name because I didn't believe it was mine. I had literally flunked the test (I got A's on every other test in that class, and the rat fink of a man STILL wouldn't give me a re-take on that section).

So that set me up to just have a really nasty day. I was dead set on it. There I was, angrily riding my BMX bike way too fast to my job (background investigations for high security positions, pretty sweet job for a college kid, but landing that is another story for another time), and next thing I know I'm in mid air, the bike somewhere back behind and below me. My return to Terra firma netted me exactly one torn-up left hand, one ruined pear of jeans, and one knee bleeding through a fresh hole in said pair of jeans.

So I show up at work all angry and bloody and fuming. I wash myself off, tape up with what's left in the shabby first aid kit, and spend the afternoon scowling at my workstation. I didn't touch a case file that day, which was probably for the best as I'm fairly certain I would have made some stranger's life that much worse, in my foul mood.

Later that evening I'm back in Map cafeteria having dinner. I always ate in Map, I hated Hicks because it was out of the way, and all the Greeks ate there. Plus Map always had more girls, which made the food taste better, somehow. Anyway, I'm in Map and I'm pissed off at the world and sitting there by myself entertaining thoughts about setting things on fire. I had noted on my way in that they had Rice Krispies treats on the dessert table and had a distinct pause to appreciate the fact that at least something had gone right in my day of days.

So I finish my less-than-mediocre dinner, and I sulk over to the dessert table.

Somewhere, fate chuckled.

They're gone - cleaned out. The lunch lady is packing up the remains of cookies and whatnot.

"Where...are...the...Rice Krispies treats...?"

"All gone!"

"What...about...in...the...back...?"

"Nope! None!" she was happy to tell me.

I storm back to my tray and sit down and stare blankly across the cafeteria waiting for lightning to strike me right through the roof. Then Carrie walks up and just sits across from me with her tray and doesn't say anything (I think maybe she wisely perceived a problem). She just smiles at me in that "What's up?" kinda way, so I launch right into my tirade about the Worst Day Ever. I give her all the terrible details, complete with a show-and-tell of my bloody stump of a hand, and then wrap it up with the topper - no Rice Krispies treats. TOP. THAT.

Carrie sits there the whole time without saying a word, and then she just gets up and leaves. She left her tray there so I figured she must have forgot something. I wasn't really expecting her to say anything in return, I was just happy to have someone to unload on. I sat there feeling only slightly better. It dawned on me at that point that I didn't want to go anywhere or talk to anyone for the rest of the day for fear of things getting worse.

And then, the next thing I know, Carrie comes back holding a bowl, and she's stirring something in it.

She sits down, nonchalantly slides said bowl across the table, and I look at it.

Its freshly microwaved Rice Krispies, butter, and marshmallows, shining up into my face from that bowl in all its warm, gooey glory, and it was the best thing I had ever tasted. (I previously had no idea you could do that. In retrospect it seems pretty simple but on that day it was nothing short of a mystery of the universe, unravelled before my greedy eyes.)

We ate the rest of the meal in silence.

And that was pretty much my best worst day.

My alma mater runs an alumni update magazine type-thing that recently included a story on my work here in Africa, with a link to my blog, which may or may not have been a good idea. Let's call it a neutral one. I've just never felt very comfortable about promoting it in any fashion.

Anyway, if that's how you came to be reading this, you may be interested in my fairly recent post on what I'm doing here for work, or perhaps the full post that Rebecca pulled from my blog for use in her article.

If you're looking for anything else in particular, you have the search function up in the top left there, plus the post navigation in the side-bar on the right there, nicely organized by month. And you can always click on my profile up there in the left corner of sorts, and find my contact info, if you need anything else.

I haven't had much time to write as much as I wish I could, lately, but I'm trying to get back on it. Oh, and for anyone else, if you're interested in the article, it can be found here (pdf warning), on page 14.

Story time! Back to college.

So its the same year that I was still in the suite with Dave and Steve, the pimp pad. This, however, is not a story about the pimp pad. This is a story about how the passion palace came to be, and how that almost derailed a train. Literally.

So room draw comes along that year (drawing for my room for senior year) and I draw the 19th pick out of the entire senior class.

This was the same year the Pans lost their charter. The Pans were the rich-frat boy fraternity on campus, and they had all the best rooms in the best dorm, Alumni - the same one I was in for the Year of the Snake. I had actually been friends with some of them, so I had hung out in their rooms and whatnot, which made me uniquely privvy to their best kept secret:

The Pans' president's room.

For years untold (well, since the last time they lost their charter, at any rate), the Pans' had always had this block of rooms, and the diamond of the bunch always went to the frat prez. It was basically 2 double rooms, with a hallway and a bathroom in between them, and a small study room off the back end of the bigger double room.

BUT, the smaller double room was like an inch too small to be called a double by state regulations or something, and due to some other kind of regulation it couldn't be considered a single while it was attached to the other room via the small hallway between the two.

So basically 2 guys got 4 rooms to themselves.

The idea was to shove the all the beds, desks, and dressers into the smaller room, and then you had the massive other room for a huge lounge. The Pan's president and his lucky roommate had been successfully implementing this strategy for as long as they had been in possession of their charter. Which, conveniently, they no longer were.

Forced to pick room numbers with the rest of us independent plebs, they were all desperate to get that room with their highest pick. I like to imagine their emergency meeting before the room-draw, with the president raving about the room, spewing the fate that they would suffer if he didn't have his palace returned to him. Etc. Anyway, they were desperate, the 30 or so of them, to come away with just one high pick, one saving grace to get that room back. And so they picked with us, and then gathered outside the auditorium in a circle to determine their highest possible pick. Which was 60-something.

God was clearly frowning on them, along with the administration.

Of course they had carefully surveyed who had grabbed the top picks to see if any one of them might be a threat to their obtaining this room. At some point in the next couple of days, they must have logically worked through the first 18 guys with the assurance that none of them knew the secret of that room. The secret, you see, was that it was drawn on the map like a normal double-room. Nobody knew this. It was their holy grail.

So they figure all of those guys who got picks #1-thru-18 are going to go for rooms like "the palace," (yes there was actually a room by that name, which inspired me to name my room "the passion palace," for while it was infinitely better and more passionate, it was also a secret known to the privileged few). Singles, too, usually went pretty high in the room picking.

But then they get down to me, #19 on the list, and they know that I know.

And so they began to come, bearing gifts. Groveling.

The first offer was so insulting it immediately made my ultimate decision for me - they could end up offering me the moon, they weren't getting that little slip of paper with the 19 on it out of my grubby paws. But then of course the offers got better and better.

At one point it got up to 600 some dollars and they'd do all my chapel cards for me, and they'd give me their highest collective pick for #19. There might have been something else, even, I don't remember.

I do, however, remember politely declining it to my closest Pan buddy, on a quiet evening in the rows of computers in the Technological Learning Center (TLC). The look on his face was one of sheer desperation. He was their last emissary, and he had been denied his plea. We looked at each other and we both knew, then and there, that I had lost any friendship I may have had with any among their brotherhood.

It was a sad moment, but two minutes later I was over it. The previous year I had made the mistake of dating a sorority girl. But I learned from my mistake - I learned how you can instantly make 30 friends, plus all their boyfriends, and then instantly lose them as well. So this came as no surprise.

So that same evening, I caught up with a one Bo Bucklen, the chillest kid to ever go to my college. Chill was pretty much my number one qualification for a roommate to share the passion palace with me.

"Bo," I said..."I have a proposition for you." (In my best Frank Fagan impersonation, although Bo never knew him.)

Bo was a freshman at the time, and the prospect of living in the biggest double-room on campus with a senior in the year to come was obviously appealing. Under advisement that we would be under withering hatred from the Pans, and would have to watch our backs for the first month or two there til they got over it, Bo accepted.

One of the best things about that room was its location. Pop open the window, and you could hop out onto the roof, walk over across the building, jump out of the bushes and you were in the senior parking lot (the building was built into the side of a hill, essentially). This was convenient for getting to class in a hurry, but even more so for importing contraband into your room.

Which is when we decided that I needed to obtain a duffle bag that could conceal a case of beer.

Bo had a car, I had a license proving my legal age, it was a match made in heaven.
I quickly learned I studied best with a couple Icehouses and tuna fish sandwiches. I probably ate dinner in the cafeteria all of 10 times my senior year.

Bo came with a trio of friends - James, Brett, and sometimes Bob. Mostly James and Brett. It was a regular occurrence for me to show up on a Thursday or Friday afternoon (but sometimes a Monday or Tuesday...) and find the three of them standing around trying to look like they weren't waiting to ask me to take them to the beer distributor.

This is really the best part but its so horrible.

I was bitter, around that time, had just been dumped in a pretty odd fashion. So I was in a phase. A phase, with a phrase. It was a phrase from one of Dr. Dre's soliloquy - suffice to say it was a phrase that characterized my distrust of the fairer sex at that point in my life. The guys would ask me to get them beer, and I would force them to tell me what was the single most important lesson they would take away from our institution of learning.

After all, I was only repeating the wisdom of Dr. Dre.

So they would repeat the phrase, and then I'd pretend like I hadn't heard them clearly.

"Say it like you believe it. Say it like you want beer."

So they would and then off we'd go to the beer distributor. Sometimes they'd head off to a party, sometimes they'd stay in, and occasionally I'd celebrate the fact that we had beer along with them.

Well, one of those nights, we decided for a change of scenery from the room, but no one was in any state to drive anywhere. So we load the case up into the duffle bag and head down for the railroad tracks across the road from the school soccer fields. There was this old flatbed sitting there next to the main line, and it had a bunch of lumber on it. I remember it was my idea to go hang out down there and drink, but I don't remember why.

So there we are, sitting on the flatbed, sipping Yeungs, when all of a sudden the guys decide to start piling all of the lumber on the flatbed onto the main tracks, right next to the stationary car we were sitting on.

Its like 1 in the morning or something.

They're having a grand old time talking about how cool it will be to see the train plow through this, and I'm standing on the flatbed trying to determine just how bad of an idea this is (whilst opening another beer).

See, these were big thick boards of lumber. 2x4's and some even bigger. Like, posts. And there were a lot of them.

And that's about when my bionic right ear heard something in the distance.

EVERYBODY SHUT UP!

They drop to the ground thinking its the cops pulling up.

Quiet...do you guys hear that?

The train whistle sounds again in the distance, and just then, way off where the tracks curved into the woods, I could see the light starting to shine on the trees.
Oh sh....

I start screaming at them to get the wood off the tracks before they derail the train and we all go to jail. Bo and James snap into instant sobriety and start ripping the lumber off the tracks like wild men. I jump down and start helping them and am promptly knocked in the head by a flying board.

The train has rounded the corner now and we can see his light, but he hasn't seen us yet, cause he's too far off. Roughly half the lumber is still on the tracks by the time I shake off the knock on the head and start helping again, and then I realize Brett isn't with us. WHERE'S BRETT I scream but nobody's listening.

I jump back up on the flatbed, run to the other side, and sure enough, there's Brett, crouching next to the case of beer, drinking and giggling. So I drag him back over to the pile and he starts helping us.

And that's about when the train sees us, and he lays on his horns and his brakes simultaneously, but by now he's bearing down on us and there's no way he's going to stop before he reaches where we're standing.

More screaming, more frantic removal of wood.

In the end we finished with maybe 10 seconds to spare, and then we had a very brief fight about what side of the tracks we should be on. Brett, James and I were on the flatbed side of the tracks, where we would be cut off from school once the train passed. Bo was on the school side. I was trying to get everyone to the school side so we could run and hide, but there was still beer left in the case, so Bo jumps over to the beer side and that was pretty much that.

The train goes flying by, still on his breaks and horn, we scramble over the flatbed, grab our beer, and start running up-tracks, opposite direction that the train was heading.

At some point it reached a stop, and we crawled through between the cars, and off into the forest and fields back towards campus, staying off the main roads.
that took a long time, but we made it back to the back side of the school parking lots, where we finished the beers and then walked back to my room.

We were worried for about a week that they'd finger-print the wood and come find us. There was a lot of research into how well finger-prints could be lifted off of untreated wood. Then someone pointed out that there were beer bottles there. That was a long Thursday.

But nothing ever came of it. And a month or two later, we had a new favorite drinking spot. The end.

(A while back the story of the snake was finally put to type. You can find it here. This is the story of how I got that pimp-pad of a room for my junior year, as promised in the story of the snake - a story for another time that is now being told.)

It is now time to talk about the pimp-pad.

Near the end of my freshman year, I had the sudden realization that I needed to join a housing group. Our school had fraternities, and housing groups. I'm not really sure what the difference was, all I know is the housing groups had Greek names and did a lot of the same things as the fraternities, but technically weren't frats. Even the frats, however, were not the same national ones you find at big schools. They had Greek names, but ones made up at some point, unique to our small, private, Christian college. Lame.

Anyway, I had realized that I needed to join one because I found out that otherwise I was going to end up in Hicks, basically the worst dorm ever, where no girls would ever talk to you, much less visit. This, of course, presented a huge dilemma for the freshman male.

I pretty much had my choice of fraternities or housing groups to join. I was not yet cool, in my own right (that would come with time), but I was like one of 2 or maybe 3 kids from California in my class, so I had the whole surfer dude thing going for me. That helped me more with the ladies than with the guys, but doing well with the girls got noticed with the guys. Perhaps even more instrumental with securing my position as a solid rush was the time I stood up to Chip Kosher.

(brief side story)

Freshman year you are forced to take a "Fitness and Wellness" class (a.k.a. "Fitwell") which is basically a college version of PE. Which was ridiculous. They're going to try to tell an 18 year old who runs 7 miles a day, lifts regularly, practices martial arts, and is on 2-3 intramural sports teams at a given time, how to stay in shape. Like I needed that.

Anyway there were two parts - half the semester was spent in the classroom learning useless stuff about exercising and food, the other half was in the gym doing useless workouts (which I opted out of, more on that in a second). So on the first day of class, all of us nervous freshmen men (this was the one class on campus that was not co-ed) were sitting there in our assigned seats in the auditorium. The seats were assigned alphabetically, based on your last name, so sitting to my right was a one Chip Kosher - captain and star linebacker of the football team.

Class is just about to start when Chip did what I came to suspect he did in any academic course he ever took in his life. He leaned over and put his elbow on my desk, pulled his shirt sleeve up to expose his bicep - which was roughly thicker than my waist, at the time - and, nose to nose with me, told me in no uncertain terms that I was going to help him pass this class. He then sat back, please with himself that he was going to pass another class I suppose. So I leaned over, put my elbow on his desk, pulled my shirtsleeve up, exposing my bicep - probably about as thick as Chip's thumb, at the time - and said exactly 4 words, starting with "The..." and ending with "...I am."

I don't think anyone had ever done that to Chip, and, surprisingly enough, he respected my massive (MASSIVE) gamble. So he turned to the other scrawny white kid on his right and did his schpeel again. The kid actually turned whiter, which I wouldn't have believed was possible for a Pennsylvanian.

From that day on Chip was like my best friend - inviting me to frat parties almost constantly, trying to get me to come over to their hall to do shots, introducing me to upperclassmen girls, etc.. I politely declined most of the time, as it wasn't really my scene, which made him call me up even more. Chip thought I was cool and nobody knew how I had done it.

The second semester of that year, I finagled my way out of the gym half of the PE class by "testing out," informally. The coaches that taught the class worked off of that same alphabetical list of last names, so naturally Chip's came just after mine again. When we got to the pull-up test (they tested you at the start and end of the semester to measure improvement), Chip was getting mouthy with the other guys as the coach got nearer to his name on the list - making fun of them for not being able to do the 30+ pull ups required for the highest marks. Then Chip turned to the coach (one of his buddy-coaches from the football team) and told him that he bet he could do 31 pull-ups, and if he did, he would get excused from that part of class for the rest of the semester. No discussion was made of the penalty for failing, to my recollection, but the coach took Chip up on his offer. 2 guys later it was my turn, and I walked up to the bar, and told the coach I'd be taking the "Chip deal" as well. He didn't get what I meant at first, but when I explained it, he laughed and said "OK." So I did 31 pull-ups (I weighed about 135 at the time, so there wasn't much to lift). Chip did the same thing right after me. He took me back to his dorm for a celebratory drink, at 10:30 in the morning.

Chip would sometimes try to tackle or punch or otherwise abuse you for little or more often no reason at all, and this was how he found out I knew martial arts. One day in the mail hall, between classes, he saw me through the crowd and started shouting at me: "KNOWLES! I SEE YOU KNOWLES! DON'T YOU MOVE KNOWLES! DON'T RUN!" Well of course I tried to run but there were too many people, and he got to me about halfway through the crowded hall, and hoisted me up in the air, pinning me to the top of the wall with my head kind of crammed against the ceiling. He then just put one hand on my chest and leaned into me, securing me hung and helpless in midair, with everyone who walked by (most importantly, the girls) having a good laugh. Chip informed me that he'd only put me down when I agreed to party with them in the city that weekend. We argued for a minute and then I told him I was going to make him put me down. "If you kick me Knowles, I swear we are gonna fight, right here."

"I'm not going to kick you."

"You're not going to try and piss on me, are you?"

"No."

"Then how are you going to get down." (It was more of a statement than a question.)

I grabbed his hand on my chest, which happened to be perfectly positioned for one of the basic aikido moves, and next thing Chip was on the ground with his arm bent behind his back. He was a mix of "Uncle!" and "Holy cow KNOWLES KNOWS KUNG FU! Knowles you didn't tell me you were a ninja! Etc."

Letting Chip in on this turned out to be a mistake. Years later when he sat next to me in a finance class, his favorite thing to do was still get everyone's attention, announce that I knew kung fu, and then say "watch" and proceed to slam his arm in to my chest, sending me flying.

Chip had a really loud, obnoxious old pickup truck, a very cute blond girlfriend, and his family were rich - his dad owned the most successful hunting-dog-food company in the northeast. That's about all I remember about Chip.

(end brief side story)

So where was I? Oh, yeah, how I joined a housing group. I decided to go with the Nu Dels, because they were the only guys who had a double room left with no one to fill it, and since I was the only remaining rush they had, I would get to pick my own roommate, and he didn't have to join the housing group. I planned on remaining as independent as possible, so having the only indy roommate on the hall fit well with that plan, and I got to room with my buddy Kevin, who was awesome.

Because I wasn't down with most of the housing group activities (parties, drinking, running around in your underwear), I didn't end up "getting along" very well with some of the guys, although I did get on just fine with some of them. But there was some latent angst about my laissez-faire approach to the group, and about half-way through spring semester, things came to a head (one of them tried to attack me with the wooden ladder to his bunk bed, at one point), and I told the dean of men, Toncic, that I needed to move out of there before someone got seriously injured. He moved me the same day into a single that had just come open in the next dorm over - Lincoln.

I thought things were great, but there was a rub. That same day that I moved just happened to be the day that they had room-draw for the ensuing year, where all the rising independent men picked numbers to see which order they would pick in, in their class year.

So, since as of that morning I had been in a housing group, which didn't have to pick numbers for their rooms, I missed room draw, and after informing me of this Toncic told me to come to the room-picking session (where you selected whatever best room was left when your number came up). He said he would "See what he can do," which translated to "I was going to pick last out of the whole sophomore class," I was pretty sure.

That evening, I walk into the auditorium, and there's this sly Italian kid who was a year ahead of me, a rising junior - Frank Fagan. Frank was suave - smooth as a movie star suave - he had a way with the ladies that I deeply respected. I remembered Frank, even though we weren't really friends, because he won his freshman talent show with a song that he made up on the spot on the piano. I had met him when I tracked him down after *my* freshmen talent show (which I didn't win, sadly), where he performed at the end, as the previous year's winner always did before presenting the prizes. I asked him to teach me that song that he played and he told me he couldn't really remember what it was because he had just made it up. I asked him if it was the same thing he played at his show the year before, when he won, and he told me he just made that up too. This was Frank.

So there he was, just cool as the cat's pajamas, and he's sitting all sprawled out across a couple of the auditorium seats - and he sees me wandering in and beckons me over. He tells me he has a "proposition" for me, but I have to promise to keep it on the DL. I'm game for anything at this point so I shut up and listen. Frank tells me he has 9th pick out of all the seniors. He tells me he wants to give it to me, let me do with it as I will. Any room in Alumni (the best dorm at the time) that the Pans (rich boy frat) don't already have is mine...so what's the catch?

Frank's dad was paying for his senior year, so if Frank could get a job and support himself, he could afford to live off campus in a booze-filled apartment. Problem was, the admin wouldn't give him the OK for it, because they had the sneaking suspicion that Frank would fill his apartment with booze (and probably women, too). So he needed someone to keep up the facade that he was actually living on campus. I got to have a roommate-free double in Alumni, my pick of the room, and all I had to do was make sure everyone got the impression he actually lived there. He said he'd stop by a few afternoons and take his shirt off and study, etc., to help towards this end, which happened all of like once, which is part of why we ended up getting outed, eventually.

There was another catch, however. In addition, I had to find a way to turn in 48 or so chapel cards that year for Frank, but - there was a bottle of my choice from the liquor store waiting for me upon completion of that (how's that for irony - going to chapel for booze?). The college had a policy that you wouldn't receive your diploma unless you had turned in your chapel cards (one per service), or alternatively wrote a book report on a theological book for each chapel card outstanding. I won't divulge my methods, but I never wrote any book reports for Frank.

The pimp pad was a nearly perfectly positioned room in Alumni, the 2 story building that housed most of the athletic department offices, plus the gyms, racquetball courts, mail room, and student union on the first floor. It was centrally located, one easy flight of stairs up, and had lots of great views, especially if you picked a room like mine, which was right above the main entrance to the building that most of the female population at the school used every day, coming to and fro between their dorms and the classroom buildings. (It should be mentioned that despite being a pimp pad, it in no way to be compared, whatsoever, to the passion palace, the room I would wind up in on the other side of Alumni, my senior year. *That* is another story for another time).

And that's the room I lived in when the whole snake thing went down. (Its also the room that my buddy Dave from down the hall started crashing in half the time, because his roommate snored like a diesel engine. Dave and I would become good friends, and I would later learn most of he and his brother's smooth ways with women, when we all roomed together later that year, once the snake thing happened and it became evident that Frank was not living with me on campus. Dave and Steve - his brother - were a big help to me in that department, but that, too, is a story for another time.)

It is now time to talk about the snake.

Apparently the closest thing I attained to lasting lore at my alma mater was the snake. I like to claim that I did much else of significant merit while there (golfing off the roof at security guards, sprinting around Map in the snow, sans clothes, the spoon fiasco, etc.), however this seems to be the one that stuck - I recently had yet another current student there call me out on it.

So, without further adieu...

I was living on my own for a bit from somewhere around the time I was 16 til - a few months before I turned 18, shortly after which I left for college. During that period that I lived on my own, I acquired a ball python from a co-worker of mine. He was named Cope (pronounced ko-pee) - the snake, not the coworker - after the chewing tobacco, Copenhagen (said co-worker was a hick, the kind that many northern California natives frown on because they make Phil Jackson's sweeping generalizations somewhat accurate).

When I moved back home before leaving for college, mom did NOT like the idea of having a snake around, but I was able to keep it in the garage when I moved back in on the promise that he would not come in the house.

Well, one day I'm working on my car and I had him draped around my neck, and I literally lean inside the door to grab a tool from the laundry room. Providence would have it that mom pulls up right then and that was close enough to the snake being in the house. So he had to go to the barn until I left for school, and that's when I gave him to my buddy Ed, down the street, for safe keeping.

Ed keeps him through my fresh and soph years at the grove, and everything's going fine. But then the summer between my soph and junior years, Ed informs me he's moving to the bay area for school and can't keep him. I didn't want to get rid of him, but I had no means / funds to transport him back to Pennsylvania (I had the faint thought that it might not be a good idea / within the school rules to own a snake there, but it faded pretty quickly).

And then the Grinch had a wonderful terrible idea.

The night before I was due to go back to GCC, I picked up Cope from Ed, and took him home - kept him in a pillowcase with the top tied in a knot - he would just sleep coiled up in there. Mom would have killed me if she knew he spent the night in my room. The next morning the pillowcase goes delicately in the top of my backpack, and I deliberately dress in nothing containing any metal whatsoever - shorts, sweatpants, t-shirt, big hoodie, and flip flops.

This was the year that Robbie was coming to join me at the grove as a freshmen. Being Robbie, she packed way, WAY too much stuff, and when we get to the airport they inform her that one of her bags is too heavy. So we have to start unpacking all her vital stuff and mom starts trying to put some in my bags. Well mine get pretty full in a hurry, and then mom starts angling for the backpack, which has not left my back, as it has a sleeping snake in the top of it.

At this point we got into a bit of an...arguement... about...the situation at large. I really wasn't upset like I was feigning, but there was no way I could let mom kill my snake cramming robbie's crap on top of him, much less risk her finding him in my backpack and freaking out in the middle of a busy SMF airport.

So I proceed to STORM off to the bathroom, and that was pretty much that.

Of course, the bathroom was all part of the plan anyway. I head into a bathroom stall, take Cope out, wrap him around my waist (he'd often just chill there like a big thick belt, if he wasn't feeling super active), and tuck my shirt around him and into my pants. I put the hoodie on over the shirt, close up the backpack, come back out, settle things with the folks, and then Robbie and I head off to security.

I've got Cope wrapped around my waist the whole time. Put the backpack on the x-ray belt, breeze through the metal detector, pick up my bag, head back to the next bathroom I can find, pack Cope back up in the pillowcase / backpack, and head for the gate (this is all pre-9/11 mind you, probably wouldn't have tried this after).

Robbie and I proceed to fly cross-country with Cope sleeping at my feet. He spends the night with me at our uncle's place in Cleveland, then we arrive safe and sound at GCC where my first order of business was buying an acquarium.

That was how my junior year at the grove started, up there in that room in Alumni where I didn't really have a real roommate (another story, for another time), I had Cope instead. All the guys would come over once a month to watch me feed him, it was good times.

However, there were a few guys in particular who were NOT privvy to said feedings, namely the two Order of St. George (read: dorky goth) tools who lived in the room next to me, and generally ruined my otherwise serendipitous experience in Alumni. These guys were freaks, and they had their freak buddies up to do freaky stuff with them CONSTANTLY and it was usually in the middle of the night, when normal people (namely, me) were trying to sleep.

One evening I walked by their door and it was open, but all the lights were off in the room. I heard talking / giggling. I stood there for a minute trying to figure out what was going on, before I realized they were watching the Harker windows with binoculars, from the dark of their room. Harker was the girls dorm across the street.

Suffice to say they were just terrible to live next to. I couldn't stand these guys. I did not get on well with them.

Back to Cope.

A python's main goal in life is to find a way out of his acquarium and go explore for warm dark places to curl up and sleep, where no one will bother him. So of course one day about halfway through the semester he manages to break out and disappear. Now, these things can go almost anywhere, squeeze into almost any hole, find the most random places, etc. - so you have to be careful when searching, and you have to look EVERYWHERE.

So the first thing to do is make sure he's not in the room, which meant moving the entire room, piece by piece, into the hall. Check every drawer, between the clothes, inside the desk, check the mattresses for potential holes, look inside the couch lining, every box, the entertainment center - anything he could have burrowed into. It all goes into the hall once its deemed to be snake free.

Well, he's not in the room. The room is EMPTY and he's not there.

So its time to review alternatives. The ceiling tiles are too heavy for him and besides, I don't think he could have gotten up there, so the only options are a) he crawled through the heating vents to any of the other rooms on that side of alumni (one long vent ran the length of the building, 20 rooms or so, or b) he crawled through a hole in the floor into the ceiling of the first floor - the men's bathroom was just below me and the security office was next to that.

I move everything back into the room (I think this was around the time that the RD started to suspect weirdness was up in my room, but that's more related to the fact that I didn't have a real roommate, which as I already mentioned is another story for another time). I decide to check option b first, and that night I go down to the mens room on the first floor and climb up into the ceiling with a flashlight and make sure he's not there.

So that mean's its option a. He's in the vents or, more likely, in someone else's room on the hall.

I then let all the guys in the other rooms, everyone but the OSG tools, know that Cope's on the loose. They all know that he's harmless and they're more likely to hurt him than he is to hurt them, so they all are cool with it and look through their rooms (not to the same level that I did, but I encouraged as much thoroghness as possible).

Well, no one finds him, so that leaves one of two possibilities: he's either in the vents or the OSG room. There's simply no way I can tell these guys about him - we've gone to security over each other before (I would sometimes accidentally leave my stereo blasting in the early AM when they were just going to bed after they had kept me up all night, etc.). So i know they'll rat me out if I tell them, so I cross my fingers and hope for the best.

I figure cope will get thirsty in a week or so and come out looking for a drink. But snakes can go for a while without food / water (I only fed him monthly, for instance). About 3 weeks passed.

I kind of stopped thinking about it so regularly after a while. I had left a bowl of water in the middle of the acquarium in the middle of the room in hopes he would come back, but never saw him in the course of the three weeks, and the water didn't disappear.

Well, one night I'm doing laundry over by the new racquetball courts. The easiest way back to my room was through a long hallway above the old racquetball courts, which deposits one at the very far end of the long hall I lived on, from my room.

I get through the door with my arms full of clean laundry, and just about start down the long hallway towards my room when I realize there's about 20 people around it - everyone who's ever worked security for the school, Van Til's son (the head of security), a couple cops, and a few guys from the hall. Nobody's looking my way but then one of the guys from the hall sees me and gives me a very discreet wave-off, so I spin around and go into hiding for an hour or so.

When I finally sneak back into the hall, everything's settled down, so I head for the room of the guy who waved me off, before (he was with the Nu Lambs, I think). He and his roommate give me the scoop (this was at like 3 in the morning, mind you):

Apparently the OSG tool who stayed on the bottom bunk had been crawling into bed at an early hour (for him) and when he crawls in, he feels something at his feet. Throws back his covers, sees Cope. Jumps so hard he hits his head on the top bunk and either faints or knocks himself out. Falls on the floor.

Tool #2 sees this, and flees the room, screaming bloody murder, leaving his buddy behind to be eaten by the snake of doom.

He runs down to security, they come running up, help tool 1 out of the room, but no one will go near deathsnake.

The guys on the hall know he's harmless but nobody wants to admit knowing anything about the snake so they all just stand around saying nothing while security debates how best to kill Cope.

They end up calling all cars (cops, etc.) to weigh in on the decision, and fortunately one of the cops knows something about snakes and says it's a harmless one. That's about when someone indicated to security that there might be an acquarium in my room. So they go in there, find it, put him in it, take him down to the security office, and leave me a note, TYPED OUT (no joke) on a piece of scratch paper taped to my door.

Man I wish I still had that note. It said something about the owner of the acquarium needing to report to security immediately.

I check out security from the long end of the hall downstairs and there's still a bunch of people there waiting to see me show up, so I give them about another hour til things settle down (I did have laundry to fold, after all). Finally, I decide its time to face the music, head downstairs, and there's still 3 security guards and the smart cop.

They all inform me that yeah, I'm in HUGE trouble but its going to be up to the administration how to best deal with me, as stuff this big is out of their hands.

Then they start asking me all these questions like "why's he drinking so much water?" and "could he kill a small child?" etc..

I answer all the questions, fix the top of the acquarium for them, and then they keep him in the office that night and I have an 8am appointment with Toncic, the Dean of Men.

I head down to Crawford (where the administration offices were) in the morning thinking "That's it, I'm toast, they are sending me home. And then Mom and Dad will kill me."

I'm waiting out in the hall for my sentencing and T. Scott Gordon, this one guy who worked for the administration but I was never sure what exactly he did, who always had a mustache and a bowtie, walks by and looks at me grimly and just shakes his head in dismay over the low, low state I had sunk to.

Then I get called into Toncic's office. I'm waiting to hear the world "expelled" at any second. Toncic informs me its a very serious violation, and that this isn't going to be treated lightly. He then informs me I'm going to have to get rid of the snake immediately.

Then he starts in asking me questions about the snake, just like the security guys - how long i've had him, how big he can get, is he dangerous, etc...really curious about it.

Then he dismisses me to go work on getting rid of the snake.

I'm thinking, for about 3 seconds, that I actually might get out of this thing, as we head towards the door of his office.

And he opens it, and Nancy Paxton is standing there. I think her official title was Boss of the College. The college president was basically a front man for the whole thing, while she methodically pulled the strings that made the puppets of that school dance. She maintained (and boasted in) her 80% rate - fully that many students would someday marry a fellow student of the institution.

She asks me if I was the young man with the snake.

I reply that I am.

She tells me what a big deal this is, and I apologize and grovel, basically the same thing that just happened with AT in his office.

Then SHE starts asking me the same set of questions. AT is so excited at this point that he starts answering her questions FOR me. I'm standing there in dumb disbelief.

I'm not really clear on how the conversations ended but I do remember walking out of there with both of them kind of shaking their heads in a comical awe at me like I was some mildly-famous visitor to the college, or something.

So I walk back, find a friend of a friend over at Slippery Rock (the next college-town over) who was happy to have a free pet snake (he was worth a good deal of cash by that point), and drive it over there that afternoon.

And that was the last I heard about it from anyone in the administration. No fine, no suspension, no call to my parents, nothing. In fact, it got me on a first name basis with a bunch of them that I wasn't very close to before.

And that's pretty much the story of the snake.

(Oh and the OSG guys never gave me any crap again, EVER. That was the best part, in my book.)