12:00: Walked into bar. There is a man that resembles a broken golf club wearing a green polo shirt. Should ask where he got it.

12:25: The cavalry arrived. Proceeded to interrupt said golf clubs girlish sips of what was probably a drink containing dish soap. Asked about polo.

12:25.2: fucker pretended not to hear me, asked again and tried to fix my eyes into my most pleasant and socially equitable expression.

12:27 : Success! The golf club informed me that the shirt was actually an old UNT polo, back in the days when they weren’t afraid to be forest green. I informed him that those were the days when they had heart. He clearly did not understand the reference. Was then informed that he was an engineering major. Accused him of being “One of those guys” I then informed him that I was an animal husbandry major and no, that does not make me gay. He quickly scurried away.

12:29: I feel a great sense of loss, I have been abandoned by my new engineering friend. This is the story of my life, we could have slain dragons. Or bears. Or like a really big slavic dude. That would be pretty neat.

12:45 :Ran into Katie. Haven’t seen in ages. She looks at me as if she suspects me of both thought crime and sexual predation. She smells like butterscotch and might be colorblind. She left before I could convince her I was innocent.

1:00 : Inform the table that this bar now smells like motherfucker. The bar does not in fact smell like motherfucker, I am just trying to spark conversation.

1:15 : fish out brittish pound, get weepy eyed for 2 seconds before I realized that sams foot was grazing my thigh. Distraction is merciful as I hurl the pound at a wall for effect.

1:20: Attempt to play the coin tossing as intentional. “I am just like a fucking elk. I need to run free I guess and not get dragged down by other elks and their elkish indecision.” Everyone looks at me with “fucking a!” eyes and I feel like a tiny Zeus.

1:30 Guilt stricken and still clinging to the effects of the whole thing I scramble over and grab the coin. Fucking A eyes are retracted.

1:45 I am then convinced that it will be both a funny trick (incorrect) and a good way of relieving myself of coinage by putting it in a tip jar. I move through the crowd, mumbling something about the press and make the drop. I notice the golf club sitting like a sultan, daintily drinking his foamy drink. This man is clearly enlightened.

1:46 Nizar shows up with a beard that says “Oh hey man” We proceed to argue about Buddhism. repeat ad nauseum until we are kicked out.

2:20 : Beer is had and the painful relics are collected. Several house mates attempt to steal my flaming sword.

2:21 : Several of my housemates succeed in stealing my flaming sword (Morgans blowtorch.) by saying “no, you cannot use it.” I opt for lighter fluid instead.

2:22 : set the pail on fire. Too much lighter fluid. Everyone surprised when I too am not on fire. We attempt to light cigarettes off of our tiny dragon. Success eludes us and deprives us of parts of our eyebrows.

2:30 : Confess my platonic love to 5 people.

2:50 : ….. (blackout?)

-Sean Ball

The ocean is vast,uncharted, deep, full of mystery and probably a few more adjectives that I won’t bother to mention. To some people the ocean is a fount of wonder, a blue neverland of discovery bursting at the seams with terrific zoological, medical and even anthropological revelations the likes of which end up on magazine covers, ignored by the vast majority of people and only cited as obscure facts conjured up in the midst of some kind of ice cream social, or wherever faux sophist’s gather to discuss the ramifications of a possible atlantian stone rectangle, or the medicinal properties of sea urchins. For these people the ocean is a stepping stone on the long hard journey towards becoming an obnoxious asshole, but that’s only because they don’t understand, they couldn’t possibly understand! The ocean is not your friend. That bears repeating, so i’ll say it again. THE OCEAN IS NOT YOUR FRIEND! For too long people have rolled their eyes at the frenzied warnings of those disshevled truth sayers that have preached the horrors of the ocean, once upon a time I was just such a person, but then again I once spent 9 months in the fetal position. Just what turned my smile at the prospect of a visit to the beach into an expression of sheer and uncompromising horror? Sharks. To put it plainly it only took eight inches of shark to convince me that the only reason the ocean exists at all is to precipitate my demise, hosting the first organisms and gestating them via slow evolution until it had cooked up beasts suitably tailored to but one task and that was the brutal murder of Sean Ball. Granted I used to love the ocean, but that was all changed the day my father pulled in his line, heavy with some thrashing catch. “Hey Sean look” he said, bearded machismo smothering  his tone, and it was at that point that I realized the folly of my nascent worldview, there were things bigger than us out there, man isn’t champion over nature, man is still ultimately fragile and the arrogance inherent in the assumption that we were capable of literally taming every aspect of nature made me feel quite foolish indeed. However standing at the pinnacle of this pyramid of revelation were the dual realizations of both my own mortality and the fact that sharks are really, really frightening, for on the end of his line, flopping ineffectually, was some kind of infant shark.  I seized up for a moment, even at that age I could draw the parallels, here we had this apex predator, potential unrealized, out of its element and utterly helpless, much like the admittedly romanticised media sharks, those immortalized upon the silver screen, defined by an array of dancing lights and menacing stringed sections. My father called to me again “Come and take a look at this.” Elated at his catch, but he might as well have been asking me to stick my hand into a wood chipper. I remember feeling very anxious, because the implications that this brought to the table were heady indeed.  It was a force of nature, albeit diminuitive and conquered by a 30 year old ICU nurse, but one that would have eventually grown into a swimming engine of destruction, driven only to feed, occasionally reproduce and convince me to keep my feet out of the sea. But I digress, that shark, floundering about with it’s gills struggling fruitlessly made me realize that I was going to die.  Bear in mind i’m seven years old at this time but the fear that that shark instilled in me has haunted me to this day and initially forced me to acknowledge my own mortality. Now one shark was enough to drive me to phobia, however he cast his line again and several moments later called back “I got another one” or something along those lines, he hoisted his line up and there it was, another one! There were people frolicking in this water and that seriously needs to be considered. People were floating, laughing it up and listening to 80′s hair metal while finned devils were swimming about in their unholy bacchanal, pumping out man eating hell spawn and turning what was held as a secure beach into a nursery for these cartiligenous demons. Needless to say I started freaking out, rushing to my father and inquiring, nay! I was demanding to know just what the deal was. At that time I was under the impression that the ocean was full of dolphins and whales and all other kinds of colorful fish, who would just kind of hang out and do flips and stuff, while a contingency of sharks just swam around and acted like total dicks to all of the other non threatening sea life, like greasers in a one sided 50′s movie, little did I know that there was that whole darwinism thing, a truth that would transform my dream world of friendly propoise that were sustained by magic or nuclear batteries, into the unforgiving dog fish eat dog fish reality that all sea-life had to contend with. The day ended and the shark count rose to three and we eventually left the beach for our hotel room where a long night of horrified contemplation awaited me. I lay awake most of the night reevalutaing my view of the entire human race, what control did we really have? We can make rough prediciton as to the occurence of natural disasters, we can take baby steps to safeguard our buildings, our cities but all in all we are at the mercy of nature. This, naturally was very distressing as all of my life I had been fed this drivel about man’s mastery over the earth, I mean it’s a nice thought, but hardly true. After that summer I became somewhat bitter for a few seasons, regarding sharks with the keen interest that one would regard photos of botched plastic surgeries, it’s painful, but interesting and looking away requires a titanic effort, one which I didn’t seem to posess as I flocked towards any piece of literature I could find, weathered many a shark week all in an effort to one day obliterate my horribly irrational phobia. My plan didn’t quite work out as I had intended, sure I became a lot more knowledgable and the whole infinitesimal probability of being attacked by any kind of shark was comforting but the sheer brutality of the of their method and horror stories of survivors of shark attacks were enough to further foster that horrendous fear that was sparked that fateful summer da