Track Mangoes

It's going down. This Wednesday. High noon. Ethan Rutherford's Fiction class will engage in a kickball game against Peter Bognanni's screenwriting class. Who will come out on top? Who's penis is bigger? TUNE IN NEXT TIME TO FIND OUT!?!

Is it wrong to participate in this gross display of masculinity? Probably. Does that make me want to do it more? YOUBETCHA. Who will I fight for? Hollywood, obviously.

When we talk about masculinity at Macalester we tend to speak in terms of "construction." This is ridiculous. Masculinity is not constructed, it is real, it has an essence, something undeniable, something linked directly to the balls. Nor is it a disease, as the second wave feminist movement and its residue would have you believe.

The last civilization to worship female powers was Minoan Crete, a civilzation that, ironically, fell to natural causes and, most likely, the invasion of a more technologically sound empire. Beyond this, there is not a shred of evidence supporting the feminist fabrication of "Matriarchy." There has never been one, anywhere, at any time.

I still marvel at the intensity of a woman driven by obsession. Ann Radcliffe. Emily Dickinson. Cleopatra. And I always find myself seeing it more readily in men, perhaps due to my sexual taste and the lens it affords me. While the canon seems to paint a picture of a male propensity towards that sadistic drive for art, one cannot help but remark that when such a drive manifests in women--that self-mutilating derangement which, in its alternate forms of crime and ideation, is the disgrace and glory of the human species--it always bubbles up in a more interesting way than man could ever muster.

Someone once said that there was no female Mozart because there was no female Jack the Ripper. They had obviously never heard of Aileen Wuornos.

Photos to be posted from the kickball game at a later time.

Days shy of 45 years after he patented the idea of wine in a box, Australian winemaker Thomas Angove has died at the age of 92.

Angove was also the first winemaker in Australia to use stainless steel for the storage of wine in bulk, in addition to introducing new varieties of wine grapes to his home continent.

It was only a few days before I would get out of school and head on a month long endeavor of couch surfing that I found myself in an empty dorm room holding a bag full of wine, removed from its box, above the head of the editor of my school's newspaper. The night had been a long one in which I discovered that a slushie from Super America could most efficiently mask the taste of gin and that, yes, sometimes there really was a worm at the bottom of the tequila bottle.

Blacking out is a peculiar phenomenon.

David sat on the edge of the bench staring at the sidewalk with his chin pressed tightly against his chest. The wind whipped pieces of his hair into his eyes and onto his cheeks like pieces of leather being slapped against the flesh. A crumpled piece of sandwich paper sat next to him on the bench, moving slightly, a half eaten pastrami on rye within. David's cell phone, a chique thing so thin it looked as though one might be able to break it with two fingers, was open in his hand, a message across the screen from one of his friends who had been arrested the night before.

There had been a protest outside of a factory up North. Students from David's school had gathered there. They were killing people, not directly, David told those who asked, but indirectly, yet it was murder nonetheless. Murder or something like it.

Not an hour before David sat on the bench he had been standing in a line to get a sandwich from a cart that passed by the school every day at noon. While he stood there a girl had come up to him, flipping her hair and licking her teeth, asking him how the protest had gone. "Yes, fine," David told her, and she laughed slightly and asked him if he wasn't aware that they had all been arrested. "Yes," David said again, "I was there." She told him that she was glad that he wasn't arrested, though she couldn't imagine how on earth he got away. "It just wasn't worth it," he told her, "I've been arrested before." "For protest," she would ask with a smile and he would nod and she would tell him that she thought the police treated actual criminals with more respect and he would agree and say that activism was a tough business and she would laugh and he would forget what he had just said and purchase a sandwich from the man with the cart.

"What'll it be?" the sandwich man would ask him. The girl, standing behind and adjusting the straps of her purse, would laugh and say that she always went for the pastrami. David would order the pastrami even though he had promised a week ago that he would take a break from meat eating. And the sandwich man would mumble to himself in a breathless way something while he spread the mustard across a slice of white bread with a broad silver knife. David would lean in closer, opening the folds of his wallet, pulling out money, but really trying to hear what the man was mumbling.

It was when David handed the man a 10 dollar bill that he realized the man was saying the Shema, mindlessly reciting it under his breath, smiling the whole time.

The man opened the cash register and the sound of the bell drove David into a hot spell. No longer able to shove the change into the pockets of his snugly fitting jeans, David would throw the remaining change into the man's tip jar as the girl behind him stepped up and started to recite her order.

"Did you hear," she would tell the man. "They were all arrested last night."

Squirrels came up to the bench, eating pieces of lettuce and pastrami that had fallen at David's feet. The girl was sitting somewhere off in the distance devouring her sandwich. From his bench David could see the white strings of her headphones hanging out of her ears like a doubled headed tapeworm, moving, writhing, going deeper and deeper as she sat. The phone was still in his hand, frozen there, as if he were about to drop it on the sidewalk. His lips were moving as if kissed by a hot coal.

David was trying to recite the Shema but couldn't remember the words.

"The amount of money and of legal energy being given to prosecute hundreds of thousands of Americans who are caught with a few ounces of marijuana [1 ounce = 28g] in their jeans simply makes no sense - the kindest way to put it. A sterner way to put it is that it is an outrage, an imposition on basic civil liberties and on the reasonable expenditure of social energy."
-William F. Buckley

It is traditional for Buddhist monks the shave their head on the quarter moon, a day of cleansing and renewal, devoted to the deity Vajra Satva. However, in a bout of laziness, I asked my Tibetan tutor at the monastery at Mirik if this was necessary. He responded by saying that if you have trouble remembering to shave your head on the quarter moon then you should try to do just that, but if you always feel compelled to shave your head on the quarter moon then you should try your best to shave your head when you feel like it.

So today I implore you to take a moment of self reflection, of reconsideration. If you are an avid marijuana user, step back and try to remember why you started in the first place. If you feel your children are at risk of becoming stupid, why not step back and try to remember that they could out-Facebook you in any state of mind. If you worry about "gateway" drugs, try to remember the things you did you feared at first. If you feel you have friends with whom you might never smoke, reconsider. If you feel you have friends with whom you are high more often than not, why, isn't today the best of days to take that sober walk? down the street and through the air, catching whiffs of the smoke plumes as they pass under your nose?

The sober moo about purity. The hazy moo about that state which one might define as "chill." But what are we to do with the man in between: a cow who barks, not knowing what is expected of him.