Scumbags of Convenience

I think that one thing people think when they think of punk houses is that they kind of think it’s a loose collective of people with similar morals, but a lot of times, in my experience, they’re just, sort of, scumbags of convenience. 

I have, like, 3 really short stories that tie together into one stupid decision.

The first one is… somebody who I went to high school with, and who I was friends with. We were underage and drinking at the time, and we had just started college. We had discovered the joys of Everclear. So, we were out near campus, and he did not realize how much he drank, and he laid down on a park table bench to try and rest, and he was just enjoying the summer breeze, I guess. But he was lying still enough that a squirrel came by and walked right under him… right as he decided to puke, and this is how he ended up puking… on a squirrel. 

He didn’t live that one down for a long time. 

I had another friend who had heard that you could get a high similar to acid by eating Morning Glory seeds. He ate about a thousand of them, and then we went to the grocery store. He decided that this was the perfect time to shoplift a block of Cracker Barrel cheese — I don’t know why the Cracker Barrel part has stuck with me, but it has. He ate about half of it, then he left it in the glove compartment of my car, on a summer day, so it just melted in there and ruined the glove compartment of my car. 

That was also how I found out that alchemy is real. It’s a real science. A lot of people don’t believe that, but it’s true. Mountain Dew and vodka completely mask the vodka, and you can just get completely obliterated. I remember being blackout drunk, waking up, and being like, “this is how Jimi Hendrix died”, because I had been puking in my sleep, and then I went back to sleep. 

I ended up signing a lease with these two idiots, because I was just so desperate to get out of the house and do some self-exploring. That house was a shithole, though. It predated electricity. It had been used as a frat house for several years before we had it. The wall was warping out away from the stairs, so you could see all the way down from the second floor to the basement, which was full of beer cans from the frat.

You can imagine what a shithole this house was.