Dateline: Pacific Beach, Sun God Morning. The time is 6:59 and 59 seconds and all is quiet. The clock’s dastardly second hand has other things on its mind, however, and lurches forward a tick, sending the hellish sounds of my alarm clock careening through the air.
I groggily come to, and in my thoroughly pickled state it takes all I have to roll out of bed and crawl into the shower. The thumping sounds of Daft Punk begin to emanate through the house, which is odd in a place where usually there is no action until at least noon or 1 p.m. My associate, one Mad Dog Madden, was up and at ’em as well and we headed out to our initial drinking destination.
The Night Owl was alive with early morning drunkards. Most seemed to be locals in for their typical pre-work eye opener. There were also a few UCSD students in attendance, or at least I assume they were due to the massive amounts of wounded soldiers they left behind. But these kooks soon cleared out and we were able to drink our two-dollar breakfast special gin and tonics and shoot a round of pool or two with the locals.
Once we were able to extricate ourselves from the Owl’s clutches, we headed for some grub to help us clear our cloudy domes. Once we got some sustenance down, it was time to somehow find our way to good ol’ UCSD.
Luckily, we were in the presence of Ms. C-Deezy, who had the whole bus schedule mapped out and calculated. We loaded up with drafts and hopped on the trusty 34 northbound bus.
The bus driver shot us a mean-spirited glare, perhaps because Madden was rolling with a twelver of Busch Beer in his hand and a bumping ghetto blaster on his shoulder. Eventually we arrived at UCSD and got down to business.
Drafts were drained, cocktails were mixed and Jell-O shots were gulped. Before I knew it, I was wandering library walk in a full-sized lobster outfit, distributing Neil Dennis composite pictures to the bewildered Triton student body.
It was probably one of the more hilarious things that I have ever experienced, as many of our fellow students recoiled in horror at the idea of a drunken crustacean handing them pictures of some mulleted madman.
Many hours of booze, drugs and cigarettes later, it was all over and all was nice and all was good — except for the fact that a member of our crew was inexplicably lost and very clueless about the layout of the UCSD campus, because he had never been here before. So we wrote him off as detoxed, or passed out in a thorny bush, or wandering the canyons with Spanky, the drug-addicted hobo who has an affinity for young college boys. But he turned up back at the Cage eventually, none the worse for wear.
But the weekend was not yet over. Not by a long shot, as it turned out. I was awakened from my much-needed slumber and summoned to an undisclosed location for the annual Guardian vs. Koala drunken sloshball fest-o-rama. I had missed the annual showdown last year, having woken up at the crack of 5 p.m. So this year it was on. I still managed to show up a couple of hours late, and I arrived to see a slew of rowdy, intoxicated journalistic professionals engaged in a fierce match-up.
Many beers (and even more brawls) later, the game was coming to a close, and it was promising to do so in dramatic fashion. Former sports scribe Billy B had stepped up to the mic a few moments later to settle a dispute old-school style — with a mano-a-mano drink-off. The poor Koala kid never knew what hit him, as Bill pounded his two cups of suds before the other dude could even finish one.
So the table was set. The Guardian faithful stood eagerly poised on the sidelines as the Lobsterman stepped to the plate, down two runs, but with two players chillin’ on second, sloshball style.
The Mighty Lobsterman took a swig from his trusty, ice-cold draft and stepped up to the plate. A pitch was thrown, and with a resounding thwack, the ball went sailing toward the right field fence. Both runners came in, knotting the score. Then our favorite junior sports playa, Mr. Isaac “”The Stick”” Pearlman, stepped into the batter’s box, took his stance and proceeded to smack a ball into center field that sent the Lobsterman racing home with the winning run.
Dropping a shoulder to knock out a raucous loudmouth who was blocking the plate, the Lobsterman touched home, and that was that. Guardian wins, Guardian wins, oh my goodness Guardian Wins. Word.