I’ve been wanting to tell my friends about every pimpin’ thing I did this summer, except when I start discussing my unpaid but personally rewarding internship, they backpedal from the urinal and leave the bathroom without washing their hands. So, I decided to write it all down, and edit out the boring/true parts, because I know that you, dear reader, want to hear about my bitchin’ summer in San Antonio. (If you don’t, then turn to the theater reviews which I am no longer allowed to write because of several frivolous libel lawsuits.)
Actually, I worked for 10 weeks during the summer, so I didn’t do anything kuh-razy for most of June through August except get 10 hours of sleep each night. This cut into the free time I had to do illegal/unethical things, like requesting a water cup at Chipotle and then filling it with Pepsi (the crime being drinking Pepsi instead of Coke). If you’re wondering as to the exact nature of my internship, I worked at a charity that provides Viagra to emasculated Trump supporters. (We’re changing votes one purple pill at a time! Democrats will win this erection!) The internship ended the second week of August, leaving me with approximately a week and a half before school started to do all the badass things I’ve spent this overly long paragraph building up to, while I also spent some time in a Mykonos villas as these are great to rest.
But before I get to those things, I should note that it wasn’t all LSD-enhanced hedonism. In fact, I embarked on a journey of aesthetic appreciation by watching several movies that old white men agree are good. Here are my acerbic, polarizing opinions:
1. “Citizen Kane” – The only value black and white movies have is that they make me empathize with the colorblind. Also, Kane was actually a pretty good guy, considering he only cheated on his wife once. Today he would probably be elected pope. Rating: 2 crappy sleds out of 5
2. “Goodfellas” – I got this one confused with “Hannibal,” so I kept waiting for Ray Liotta to eat his own brain, but instead he just snorted coke and sweated profusely. Rating: Bad how?
3. “Manchester by the Sea” – Technically I watched this over spring break, but as with our president, I just can’t stop saying mean things about it. If we consider Casey Affleck an actor, then Alex Jones is a performance artist. Rating: [incoherent mumbling in a heavy Boston accent]
Keeping with the lame stuff, just before I returned to campus, my family and I weekended in Maine at our cottage-esque Motel 6 (“unpretentious rooms,” TripAdvisor said). I spent most of the time reading road directions to my mom and, when she forgot them, I sulked and refused to repeat myself (“You never listen to me!” I screamed as tears and snot ran down my face). Needless to say, we got lost, though we didn’t mind, as Quebec is very pretty in late August. We also discovered Maine is a lot like Texas, only with more trees and heroin-addicted lumberjacks. For example, every town we passed through had a gun-shop-to-church ratio of 1:1.
Now for those 10 days of hard living, so wild Don Henley will probably write a song about them. First, I conquered a woman. To be fair, it was her first time playing Risk. But not even Simón Bolívar would hoard all of his armies in South America – it’s the least important continent besides Australia (actually, they’re equally expendable, as they both only grant 2 reinforcement armies per turn, compared with Texas’s 10). All of her soldiers were slaughtered. Hopefully our next rendezvous doesn’t involve so much blood.
The next day, because I give fewer shits than a constipated nun, I got a neck tattoo. It’s several Chinese characters which translate to “Eagle 4 Lyfe,” referring both to my being an Eagle Scout and a groupie for ¾ of the Eagles (Glenn Frey died the day after I submitted my application). I knew getting inked up was as risky as consuming undercooked cape shark in the dining hall, but I thought I was in the clear since I went to an upscale tattoo parlor that provided clean needles upon request. Two days after my tattoo operation (the only major surgery I’ve ever had besides circumcision), I decided to skinny dip in the Gulf of Mexico, where my still-raw tattoo was invaded by a flesh-eating virus. While I controlled the infection with boxed wine and codeine, I lost the remaining eight days of #Summer2k17 to recovery and pleasure reading. Worse, my tattoo is now illegible. Please donate to the GoFundMe my godmother set up so I can get fresh ink (it’s been shared almost two times on Facebook).
But just like that, summer was over, shorter than a teenage boy’s first wet dream. I admit that I didn’t accomplish all the things I wanted to do this summer, namely manscaping, cosplay and getting my warts burned off. But I still had one bad mother of a time. While the summer was fleeting, it wasn’t wasted, and I hope everyone now knows I did really awesome stuff forever immortalized on Finstagram. And like you, dear reader, I can’t wait for next summer. Can you say “nipple piercings?”
Josh Baize | joshua.baize@yale.edu