YOU ARE NOT YOUR OWN

A lot of people know I went to Texas A&M. However, what a lot of people don't know is that for my Freshman year of college I attended Texas A&M University of Galveston. Yes, before I transferred to the capital of burritos, Redwing boots, oily baseball caps, and Robert Earl Keen... I spent two semesters on the beautiful beach side resort of Pelican Island (hint: read some serious sarcasm into this last statement). Anyway here are two MORE absolutely true stories from that wonderful period of my life I like to call... "What on earth was I thinking?"

STORY #5
Living on an island you can imagine the number of Gecko lizards available. Mind you this was long before the days of the Geico Gecko. Anyway my roommate and I had the bright idea to catch one and keep it as a pet. We caught a small one and named it Heather (after the lovely Heather Locklear... my roommate had a serious crush on her). We put it/her in a glass cup and set the cup on top of the television. We put a little water in the cup for drinking water. Well apparently the heat of the television far exceeded the drinking capacity of a small lizard and Heather was subsequently fried to the bottom of the glass. We were saddened at our loss but we pressed on through the pain. So long Heather. 

STORY #6
We returned to school in the Spring after Christmas break and my roommate and I purchased two cases of Ramen Noodles (34 packets in each case).  We had 34 packs of Chicken and 34 packs of Beef flavored noodles. The guys who lived next door (ok, they were called 'suite mates') dared us to eat all 68 packs in one month. A feat easily done right? Wrong. We had Ramen noodles for breakfast, lunch, and dinner... We ate those stinking noodles every day. We managed to finish both cases inside of one month and were victorious after all. However, I have not once since that time (it has been 13 years) eaten a package of Ramen Noodles and even typing this thing is making my mouth water. 

A lot of people know I went to Texas A&M. However, what a lot of people don't know is that for my Freshman year of college I attended Texas A&M University of Galveston. Yes, before I transferred to the capital of burritos, Redwing boots, oily baseball caps, and Robert Earl Keen... I spent two semesters on the beautiful beach side resort of Pelican Island (hint: read some serious sarcasm into this last statement). Anyway here are two MORE absolutely true stories from that wonderful period of my life I like to call... "What on earth was I thinking?"

STORY #3
I had a roommate (suite-mate actually but we're guys so we never used those words around each other) named Chris. Chris liked to (how do I say it?) get sloshing drunk on the weekends. By weekends I mean Thursday night because everyone knows you can skip Friday classes and still pass right? Anyway, one night after one of the craziest parties I've ever witnessed, what seemed to be a gallon of Everclear, and maybe a few "green cigarettes", Chris was done. Chris and Brian had stacked their beds on top of one another to make bunk beds on their side of the room. Well Chris slept on the top bunk. That night around 2am Chris fell out of his bed while asleep and on his way down hit the side of his face on the corner of their desk. Blood spatter was everywhere. I'm talking major CSI stuff here. Well he was still so "out of it" it didn't even faze him. I wake up the next morning and see blood everywhere. I track the blood to him and discover what appears to be the Elephant Man sleeping in his bed. His cheek was so swollen it looked like he had another head. As soon as he began to wake up he started moaning and wailing. The dude really needed to go to the hospital but for some reason he didn't want them testing his blood (hmmm). We all laughed at him for the next day or two cause he couldn't eat anything.

STORY #4
You know how at the beginning of the semester while living in a dorm you have to perform a "checklist" of what all is wrong with the dorm room, that way at the end of the semester when they find something broken they know if it was you or if it was already like that? Our room was great, nothing was wrong with it. Well we knew we were going to be getting a dart board when we did our checklist so we wrote on there, "One wall has thousands of little holes in it. It looks as if someone had a dart board and they weren't very good." Needless to say when we moved out there they were, thousands of little holes in the wall.

A lot of people know I went to Texas A&M. However, what a lot of people don't know is that for my Freshman year of college I attended Texas A&M University of Galveston. Yes, before I transferred to the capital of burritos, Redwing boots, oily baseball caps, and Robert Earl Keen... I spent two semesters on the beautiful beach side resort of Pelican Island (hint: read some serious sarcasm into this last statement). Anyway here are two absoultely true stories from that wonderful period of my life I like to call... "What on earth was I thinking?"

STORY #1

Since Pelican Island is on the back side of Galveston Island it is rightly considered the armpit (or more likely the rear end) of the island. It stinks... literally. Huge mountains of sulpher greet you as you cross the only way on or off the island... a single drawbridge. Well across Galveston Bay is a town called Texas City which produces lots of gas (as in the natural energy type). One day the wind was so bad the smell of gas drifted all the way across the bay and the campus smelled like there was a huge gas leak somewhere. I was resting in my dorm (probably watching Jerry Springer and eating Ramen noodles) when the fire alarms went off. If was about 3 in the afternoon. I was in a pair of boxer shorts, a t-shirt, and flip flops (hey it was Galveston ok). Anyway my roomates and I went down figuring it would only take a few minutes. We were wrong. They told everyone we had to leave the island right then. They were evacuating the entire campus! They would not even let us back in the dorms. So we pile up and head to the main island. But where do you go when you have nothing to do? The Strand of course. So there I was walking around The Strand in boxer shorts, a t shirt, and pretty much no shoes. My roomates somehow knew the dangers of fire alarms and were all dressed casualy and ever-so-cool looking. But there I was... no wallet, no money, no nothing... For 3 hours! I was never so glad to get back to that stinking dorm room in my life. Luckily being Glaveston, TX a large college student roaming around in boxer shorts was not all that uncommon, expecially on The Strand. The police only gave me inquisitive glances.

Disclaimer: The Strand (if you don't know) is the touristy part of Galveston where all the shops, stores, bars, and clubs are. Oh and it's also where families take their kids to see crazy half-naked college students!

STORY #2

Speaking of The Strand... Once while there, we saw this little black boy busking some 5- gallon buckets like nobody's business and earning some serious coinage along the way. We decided (my roomate and I) that we could go down there and put on our own little show. So we take our guitars and I'm going to be cool and bring my slide so we can play some Eric Clapton-like acoustic blues (we had quite the set list prepared). Well we find a spot and as I'm getting my guitar out of the case my glass slide falls out and smashes into a hundred pieces on the brick sidewalk. There went our entire routine... or so we thought. I had an idea... I ran over to a garbage can and dug through it until I found a longneck beer bottle. I then proceeded to break the beer bottle at the neck. I slipped my pinky through the neck (the mouthpiece) and proceeded to wow our audience (which actually was just a couple of elderly men trying to figure out why I was breaking a beer bottle on the ground). We played our hearts out that day and not one person gave us any money. No coins, no bills, no trash, nothing. I guess our laid back acoustic blend of Led Zepplin & James Taylor was a little to cutting edge for them to appreciate. Saddened but proud we returned vowing to one day return with some Nirvana and Stone Temple Pilots covers... that day never came!

Stay tuned! More stories to come.