Thing About Writing While Drinking is You Never Finish Either One

I didn’t vomit from the keg stand and I didn’t suffer any psychosomatic burn wounds from wearing the purple and gold t-shirt. On October 10, 2009, after nine years of this place, five of which were spend on LSU’s campus, I went tailgating for a LSU football game. Inadvertently, I had selected the Saturday heralded by ESPN as “anything but just another game”. Not knowing or even caring what that meant I set out, vodka concoction in hand, to face the legion of enemies who had so wronged me over the years. They kept me from getting to my beloved apartment off of Dalrymple Drive for weekends on end, they prevented me from hosting any cultural event that might coincide with the home game schedule, they had pervaded the national conception of what Baton Rouge looks like or cares about and they have fueled the criminal appropriation of university moneys. I was sure there was not enough alcohol or free BBQ in the world that could turn this sour relationship sweet.
My first goal (that’s a football pun, that’s what they call it when the ball goes through either giant pitchfork at the end of the field. Then every one watching strikes a pose as if they were going to do the Robot, but could only remember that first move), was to just break the ice. I found the most obnoxious Tiger fan I could without venturing too deep into the fray. He looked just like I imagined; beet-red face, protrusion under his lower lip from a stash of chew, slightly weathered baseball cap, khaki shorts sagging with reserve bottles of Abita Amber.
“And what is your name?” I braved to interrupt a game of beer pong.
“What?” he didn’t break his concentration.
“What’s your name?”
I attempted to guess before he answered Travis, Jackson, Trevor, Kurt, Cole.
“Lee,” he said.
I asked him how long he had been coming out to tailgate and it turns out Lee lives in a temporal dimension that most of us haven’t seen, because he said, “forever”. In fact, the 32 year-old was not even going to the game, his only reason to be there was to obviously perpetuate this never-ending, never-had-started act of tailgating.
“So why, what’s the big deal?”
“Just fun.”He was a man of few words, but precise action, as he sunk yet another ball into the awaiting cup of beer.