james brown and urban explorations

This weekend was fun. Friday night was Wuda Fisk, where a whole pile of Woochers dressed up, got together, ate potluck and danced with lamps pretending to be James Brown. I wore a tuxedo, but even my style met challenge from some shiny polyester shirts on other party patrons. Saturday I managed to wake up at 10:00, just in time to go rock climbing down at the wall. Luke and Mark showed up, so we spent a few hours playing add-on in the bouldering cave and doing crack.

At noon we collected in the LSH lobby and headed up to Bean and Bear Lakes out of Silver Bay. While trying to uproot a tree Luke got snow down his pants so he removed them. Chris Elness proceeded to taunt Luke, whereby Luke let loose with, “As soon as I get my pants back on, you’re gonna get hurt.”

After zig-zagging through the woods for hours we finally got to the lakes, fell down a cliff and visited a cozy cabin with a nail-infested welcome mat.

Hiking back to the car we decided the trail zigged and zagged way too much, so we blazed our own straight towards Silver Bay. I tried to crawl in a beaver lodge, but I couldn’t fit. In the swamp we found the remains of an ancient tree battle, and Chris showed his compassion for the victims by smashing as many dead trees as possible. We soon met up with a snowmobile trail that took us right back to the Green Dragon, the newest and possibly most permanent name for my wagon.

Following a random conversation while hiking, we stopped at the liquor store and picked up enough hard cider to drown Jonny “Beermeister” Appleseed himself. Our hiking party gathered at Mark’s place for a night of cider and Twin Peaks, which ended at 2:00 in the morn’.

As a testament to how great this weekend was, the floorspace in my room has been cut to five percent. Everything else is knee-deep in clothes, backpacks, books and a tuxedo. Walking in the dark is trecherous.

On another note, I think I need to cut back on Twin Peaks. My dreams for the past three nights have been detective stories, which while extremely cool, involve a lot of twisting, turning and waking up. I end up half-awake, trying to reason out what everything in the dream means. Even when I’m not a detective, this bridge between reality and nonreality extends into my urban spelunking dreams, which have all begun to cross-reference each other. Oh yeah, I remember that tunnel. I had a dream that I got in there and explored it. The first dream was about a month ago, and the tunnel lead to an extensive network of underwater pools and falls beneathe UMD. The second one we were in an empty bar at UMD, trying to avoid janitors wielding broken bottles. We didn’t go to the waterfalls this time, but we did find a large network of crisscrossing concrete tunnels.

I wonder if the falls network is connected to UMD’s underground nuclear reactor. The reactor was a really cool find and it made total sense for some reason. Oh yeah, all colleges have nuclear reactors. It was a huge room, like a factoy floor, with hundred-foot ceilings and bright yellow catwalks. The floor was taken up by large pools of bright blue water; probably cooling ponds. That water needs to come from somewhere, and it would make sense that it’s connected to the falls.

Maybe I’ll find out tonight.