A Saturday in Athens

When you live in Athens, OH, and you experience the second Saturday with temperatures significantly above freezing, you remember how good that first warm Saturday three weeks ago was when people would hang out all over town on their porches and play music and games. So you shlep yourself into Alden Library in the hope of working at least two hours on your Pop/High Culture midterm paper which is due on Tuesday, the day of the midterm exam in that very same class. And you somehow manage to bide your time in Alden for a bit more than two hours. Then you go home, have a great bagel for lunch and call your roommate to  find out where they are so you can go there, too. You go to a bar, wait in front of it and then you are led up a steep flight of stairs right next to that bar, enter a cool murky apartment and then ascend another even steeper flight of stairs to the rooftop of that building where people are sitting in the sun listening to some country pop mishmash. Someone hands you a  PBR and you sit, then lie down on the warm tar. Aggregate some solar energy because you know next week is gonna be cold again. 

   About an hour or two later, you move on. A friend knows that there's something going on on a friend's house's front porch. So in a group of four or five people, you walk along streets that are roamed by dozens and scores of dudes in shorts, gals in ultrashorts, jocks in tank tops, and jockettes in flip-flops. Then, to your left, a group celebrates a girl's birthday by playing beer pong. You pass the unbelievably oversized frat building, redbrick, with white window frames and huge doric columns, guarded by two giant concrete lions. And then there's the porch, filled with people and music from an iPhone. You join them, are introduced to two or three of them, then participate in a drinking game which, quite fortunately, doesn't involve any drinking for lucky you because you know how to handle that ping pong ball. Then you try the hammock which is hard to mount but very snug once you've mastered the high art of lying in it. You gather the last sun rays because it's almost 5, then go into the kitchen, have a coffee. Outside the window, down on the parking lot, you see your musician friend who tells you you should come over to his house later to jam a little in his basement. Sure, you say. After a while, you stop by at another one of your friend's friend's place, say hi to the guys watching hockey, have a beer and leave. Down to the basement, try to play some music with people you'd met before. You're mediocre at best, but they say it was good. Maybe it was okay. Then you're invited for a burrito and enjoy it before you head home to get some beers. You mount the mound and, inside the house, you find your roommate who you've lost track of earlier that day with another friend drinking margaritas in the kitchen. Of course, you have one, too. Make plans to meet up again later somewhere uptown. Grab the beers, get back to your friend's place where the music has stopped because everyone's sitting on the porch. Another friend had invited you to a party some hours ago, so you say, let's go there. So you and the guys, you go there. Your friend is not at that party, so you just enter a room where neither you nor the guys know anyone. You leave two hours later after having talked to two or three people you hadn't met before. Hit the bars. The group scatters. You meet some friends and roomies from earlier today. Reunion. A slice of pizza at Goodfellas, then the weak half of your group goes home, the other half goes to a last bar, and home eventually.