Man Night!

Okay, so I did do something for Valentine's Day. It was called Man Night, and it was a celebration of all things that are not available to guys who have girlfriends. Or at least what I think isn't available. The same principle applies to my semi-annual Earthling Night.

To get in, you had to wear flannel and have a cigar. I bought mine from an old man who looked like Mr. Filch from Harry Potter. While my friends bought items with Spanish names and warning labels, I paid two dollars for an unmarked tree branch six inches long and as thick as a quarter. I couldn't really taste it, although I hear you can't taste radioactive fallout from a nuclear blast, either.

(I heard this from a chemistry professor this morning; I went to his office hours, though I only had him for one class a year ago, and after reintroducing myself asked him about the effects of a nuclear blast seven hours later at two miles away from a bomb detonated one mile above the surface of Pittsburgh. To ease into the conversation, I told him it was for my thesis.)

Smitty, one of my fraternity brothers, bought four twelve packs of Best Choice Fruit Punch, which came in aluminum cans. It tasted like Mexican orange soda. I didn't drink any, but I know the taste because my clothes are soaked in it. The main activity of Man Night was softball pitching these cans to another Man wielding an aluminum bat.

These things explode like doves. It's kind of beautiful. As the bat hits the can, the opposite side splits open and fruit punch flows out like vomit. What remains of the can floats to the ground on two little wings.

There were girls at Man Night. They had to follow the rules; they couldn't talk about girls either. One of them, Alex, was a golfer in high school. We gave her an old nine iron. She split a can in half.

I went inside after maybe thirty six cans, so what follows I have pieced together from separate and disparate accounts, but apparently near the end of his reign as fruit punch king, Smitty began to climb one of the trees in his backyard. This is an old tree; they had to build the porch around it because it wouldn't move for them. Too bad they didn't have faith the size of a mustard seed - Jesus told me that helps.

He was on a branch, maybe ten feet off the ground, when he asked another brother, Taggart, to pitch the cans to him so he could hit them and watch the doves glide to their nests on the grass. Before the first pitch, the branch snapped and Smitty fell all the way to the ground, among the split cans and sticky grass.

Taggart was laughing when he told us this; he couldn't get out the last part, which was that Smitty had almost landed straddling a tree branch, like in Home Alone. After he finished laughing he asked for some band-aids. I followed Taggart down to assess the situation. Smitty had a three inch gash below his knee that looked deep. The girls asked him if he needed to go to the hospital, but before he could reply, Taggart, staring at the wound, said, "This makes me want to watch Saving Private Ryan." And we did.