The Damned Lies Project

Wherein there are rumors most amusing and secrets most dangerous.

There are a few pervasive rumors about the UT Campus.  Three in particular come to mind.

First, there is a small population of albino squirrels around the campus.  This part is not rumor, that’s fact.  The rumor or folklore is that if you see one of these rare but twitchily cute beasties right before an exam, you will get an A.  This rumor is more wishful thinking than anything else, but when stressed and freaked about an upcoming exam, you too might find yourself crouching by some bushes with some bread crusts from your sandwich making cooing noises for the rarest of all squirrels.

The second rumor is that there is a catacomb of steam tunnels running under and connecting the entire campus.  At first hearing, this doesn’t sound unreasonable.  Most large facilities have steam tunnels running under them which may connect two adjacent buildings so they can share boilers, waste channels, etc.  However, upon the realization that the UT Austin campus is 423 acres large, this moves from “obviously likely” to the “maybe plausible” category.

The third rumor was always an odd one for me.  According to this piece of folklore shopped around parties and side conversations as truth, there is a secret nuclear reactor under the RLM building.  The Robert Lee Memorial building was always one of the strangest buildings on campus.  Home to all the hardcore full frontal science courses, it was a tall behemoth, rising above any other building at that time.  A veritable tower of science, it was the place of indentured servitude for science students and a confusing maze of boredom for other students.  The first few floors of the building had escalators which you had to take to get up them.  The higher floors required an elevator that did not stop on the earlier floors.  The building went up to the sky and deep into the ground.  With the foreboding sciency way the building looked and the wily, laconic nature of most professors who had offices within, the idea that there was a secret nuclear reactor below wasn’t that much of a stress.  Why they kept it in the heart of a populous city made no sense, though.

These are all the rumors that many UT students learn.  Whether we accept them or not is up to us.  None of them are really verifiable nor do they really affect your UT career (unless you have a phobia of nuclear meltdown, in which case, sorry, they already have your tuition check). But they were always around and always made you wonder.  What was happening on this particular night was that I was learning some rumors that not every UT student hears. Read the rest of this entry »

Wherein we explore Toy Joy, paranoia rears its ugly head, and things fall apart.

Before us was Toy Joy, bathed in a holy light, the destination of our pilgrimage.  We three wise men had traveled across streets and realities far and wide, traversing a multitude of trying situations that our drug addled brains made far worse.  Before us lay our goal, our destination, our holy land, the song, the sign, the alpha and omega of our desires.  With only an endless moment spent gawking at its exterior, we rushed inside, like air sucked in through an open door.  The door dinged as we made our entry.

Inside the toys very nearly jumped off the walls at us.  Stuffed animals lined some of the shelves, so packed that taking just one down would start an avalanche of fake fur and plush that would bury lesser men.  Even a dexterous step to the side would be a failure; the pile of stuffed animals next to you would provoke embarrassment as you mumbled something to the other patrons and staff as you fumbled to somehow try to get the animals back onto the shelf, effectively resetting the trap for some other unfortunate victim. Read the rest of this entry »

Wherein there are chicken fingers.

The Drag, covered in lights and sound, hipsters and Drag rats, students and slackers, was a cornucopia for enhanced and garbled senses.  However, it was not unknown or unfamiliar to us.  As students, we spent a fair amount of our time on the Drag.  It was dangerously off-campus, but at the same time close enough for a short walk.  Things happened there, and even if they were the same old things for the Drag, they were new to us.  Consequentially, a walk down the drag on drugs was a revisiting of familiar places. Read the rest of this entry »

Wherein we go west like young men.

When we last left our intrepid heroes, there were three of us just beginning to trip balls.  We had inadvertently discovered the destination for our quest:  Toy Joy, the kitchy toy store not far from campus.  Our next step became getting there.

Toy Joy was theoretically within walking distance, but it was not an idle walk.  Twenty to thirty minutes for a normal person, depending on the speed you walked and how urgent you were to get there.  For drug users, such a time estimate was impossible; it would be a feat worth talking about if we even arrived at our destination.  There was a route we could have taken through the heart of campus which perhaps would have been more direct.  This would have taken us across campus, through looping paths, steps up and down, either plunging through or circumventing campus buildings.  That could have been quicker, but it was a less interesting walk.  We particularly did not want to walk through any buildings we had classes in while on acid, just for the poor associations in our drug-addled minds.

The route we took was more L shaped.  Five blocks to the west, then about ten north.  The north trip would take us along the Drag, a long stretch of lights and sound.  This would be far more interesting than plowing through campus, especially when said light and sound would be augmented by our current mental states.

We set out the west exit of Jester dorm, walking down the steps with a sense of purpose.  It was still dinner time, so there were a fair amount of people on the street and the sun was setting.  This again was different from previous trips, all taken at night time where pedestrian density was less and far more used to nighttime revelers.  We each did our best to not look suspicious, to look like stupid college students rather than stupid college students on drugs.  In retrospect, I’m not sure anyone would have been able to tell the difference. Read the rest of this entry »

Wherein three friends take drugs and start a trip that will change the world… or not.

Basquiat typically received his drugs by mail.  This sounds stupid, but it was true.  He’d receive Fedex deliveries of a sheet or two of paper with some art on it.  Each sheet was already dipped in acid, so he’d simply cut up the sheets and sell each small square as a single hit of acid.  I don’t know who sent them or how that relationship was set up; sometimes it was better not to ask.

During the height of my brief drug career, he got something a little different.  Instead of sending a sheet, he had gotten them to send the liquid itself.  Why they changed it up, I was never sure – I think he just was curious and wanted to try the liquid himself.  We weren’t bold enough to actually drink the liquid – the amount of liquid needed for a typical hit was miniscule.  Besides a mere overdose, there were other dangers: acid can be absorbed through any mucous membrane.  So spill it on your hand and touch your nose, mouth, etc and you could get more than you bargained for.  No, he took the liquid and dipped his own sheets.  But I was part of the experiment he was conducting – what was freshly dipped acid like?  Acid sheets lost their potency over time, so the question was, how powerful was a sheet that was freshly dipped? Read the rest of this entry »

Wherein I write a post that will probably get me on some watch list somewhere

It was in college that I experimented with drugs.  College is the typical time for this stuff.  I have a certain distrust of someone who doesn’t admit to experimenting with something during college.  Surely they tried something, they just won’t admit it, which is provokes the distrust.  Come on, just be forthright and admit you experimented with girl drinks until your banana daiquiri habit got out of control and you had the Great Girl Drink Detox of ’97.

This is not to say that I was using hard drugs.  I was no Burroughsian junky staring at their shoes for hours on end before riding around for a fix.  I put as many hats on the bed as I wanted, I wasn’t so poor I had to do anything for a fix, my classes did not suffer, and I had a life outside drug use.  It was just something to make the weekends interesting.

Primarily, I tried acid, aka LSD.  Oh yeah, I tried marijuana like every other college student who didn’t have a stick up their ass the size of Gibraltar, but I didn’t like it.  It gave me a headache and made me tired.  Phish fans who got excited at the title of this post – suck it, we’re not serving your kind here.  King Crimson fans – thanks for stopping by, please stay awhile. Read the rest of this entry »

Wherein we try the dance club thing again, a cute girl falls through my grasp, and a night ends poorly.

Ohms was a bigger club than Proteus.  Of course, club size was relative in the Sixth Street area; space was a premium, so no club was really huge.  But Ohms had a big dance floor, a few times the size of Proteus’s.  The club on a whole was darker, leaving more illusion to the actual size of the club and the actual attractiveness of the other club goers.  Add into that the requisite dance club dynamic lighting and copious amounts of alcohol, I was surprised people actually knew if they were going home with someone of the same species.

Our stomachs full of greasy but still unappetizing pizza (“Dude, chill.  Let the pizza go,” said Trent), we resumed our drinking in debauch in this new club.  There were three bars in Ohms.  A long one that stretched the length of the dance floor, an outdoor bar for their tables out back, and a shorter one near the random arrangements of old couches where we found ourselves.  I remember looking at the couches, trying to peer through the darkness, colored dance lighting, and smoke, wondering if I’d ever sit in these couches if I saw them in the light of day.  Trent suggested the same might be said of some of the girls at these clubs. Read the rest of this entry »

Someone has stolen Croggon’s airship.  He has an idea of who, but he doesn’t know why.  As he pursues the ship east across the United States, he finds that his beloved Free Crow has been renamed the Clementine.  He has no clue what cargo they stole his ship to transport, but he knows that they keep moving east towards the Civil War still waging between North and South.  He would be unwelcome with either side, but the South has a death warrant since he escaped his slavery in a bloody way all those years ago.

As if the pursuit of his ship were not enough, he is also being pursued by the newest member of the Pinkerton Detective Agency.  Maria Isabella Boyd is an actress and former spy that has been marginalized and pushed out of employment by her beloved Confederacy.  She is given orders to make sure that the Clementine’s cargo arrive at its destination no matter the cost. Read the rest of this entry »

Wherein a pontificate about pizza with unrepentant snobbery.

I admit that I’m a pizza snob.

No defenses, no conditions or suppositions, no backpeddling to make you think I’m even handed.  Nope.  I grew up in New York eating pizza nearly once a week for eighteen years.  There’s just a way pizza needs to be done.  It needs to be handed to you on a paper plate that has ruffled fringes on the ends for no more than a buck or two, often paired with a soft drink special.  You carry a single slice (because that’s enough for lunch) back to booth-style seating where they have a salt shaker full of powdered garlic, another shaker filled with red pepper flakes, and a metal napkin dispenser at the table.

Don’t get me started about Chicago style deep dish pizza.  I acknowledge that it is also called pizza, but I think of it as some other type of pizzeria culinary cuisine, like it’s some sort of tomato-covered calzone.  I sleep better at night that way.

Moving down to Austin was a rude awakening for my inner pizza critic.  My first observation was that the pizza shrunk in the wash.  It wasn’t just thinner or smaller on a single dimension, the entire pie was shrunken and pieces carved off of that.  Where in New York the expectation is that a slice or two would satisfy you (unless you were binging), in Austin a single person was expected to consume three to four of these mini slices for something resembling satisfaction.  I guess you could consider Texas pizza the sliders of the pizza genre.  I just considered it bad. Read the rest of this entry »

Wherein I go downtown with friends and witness a chilling event.

Those with some passing familiarity with Austin have heard of Sixth Street.  Not the street itself, but all it encompasses.  Even if you had not heard of it, when you move to Austin as a college student, you hear about it pretty quickly.

“So there’s an area downtown where there are like a hundred bars and clubs in a few block area.  Literally bars next door to other bars.  And most of them are playing live music or have dance music.  So you can just walk from one bar to the next as you like.  And there are girls all over, hopping from bar to bar, typically dressed for clubbing.”

“Where is this mystical paradise that you speak of?  How soon can I go there and how much of my soul will it cost me?” Read the rest of this entry »