Leaving Williamsburg
It was a good weekend, albeit a bittersweet one, as I had the chance to celebrate and properly say goodbye to my friends at school. His was a much more difficult endeavor than saying goodbye to my friends back home, because I’ve done that a lot before, and I won’t be missing time with them that I normally wouldn’t have. I can only hope now that everyone at school has a perfectly boring but worthwhile semester.
Forgoing the bitter and getting to the sweet, though, it was certainly a worthwhile weekend. Thursday night was a good old fashioned beer meeting, and I got to have one “yelling at people in Wawa night” which is about what I needed to get me through til August. On Friday night I had the pleasure of going to KA and seeing Adam, Kelsey, Lauren, and Skyler, which was great.
Saturday afternoon brought a special treat, as I got to attend a Tribe men’s basketball game. Not only do I love Tribe basketball, but I am usually expected to attend and be loud. As in, the loudest person there. Forserious, when I realized I would be missing basketball season, I almost decided not to go abroad. It was a tough decision. The game was a typical Tribe home game: exciting, undecided until the last possession, with lots of threes raining down from both teams. Hofstra is a very good team, and I thought the guys played much better than their record and early season woes would have indicated. Brandon Britt, our freshman point guard played with swagger and intensity, but showed his youth with a late and crucial double-dribble. I do think he will have a chance in his career at being the best player in the CAA. He can shoot from all over the floor and can drive to the hoop and draw contact.
Saturday night, though, brought the real excitement. After a strange and wonderful voyage to Toano, Virginia, also known as the Northwest Territories, for some gator, crawfish, and good old southern barbeque, we headed back to metropolitan Williamsburg to set up for the party. Since the RA’s on campus mostly suck and no one really wanted to risk a rager in their apartment, we were forced to enlist the help of one Grayson Orsini, who graciously submitted the basement of his house for our use.
It would be an understatement to say that calling Grayson’s basement shabby would be an understatement. The place is practically feral. Due to a lack of care, inhabitants, and the bulldoxing efforts of one David St. John, the basement is an assortment of rooms with half-walls, patched ceilings, dirt, grime, dust, and general disarray. Seriously, we had to rake the leaves out of the basement before the party, because the door inside doesn’t have a bottom. It resembles, in various different ways, the home of a drug addict squatter, a serial killer’s dream apartment, a recently evacuated meth lab, or a slightly shittier badger den.
Which is why we were unsettled, but not surprised when this little series of events took place:
As we stand in the basement, wondering what possible stories each of the holes in the wall could possibly contain, a slowly become aware of a rustling, squeaking noise. I realize it is coming from above me and look to the ceiling at a large hole, half-assedly covered with a piece of cardboard.
“Hey, Grayson, what is that noise?”
We are all quickly attuned to the situation and its potential for disaster. One of my friends says:
“Oh my God, I think there’s something up there.”
It is at this point we all know exactly what is about to happen. As I am standing directly adjacent to the hole in the ceiling, I have a violent and jarring vision of a huge rat jumping out and into my collar. I begin to duck, and as I do, the rustling gets more frenetic and the squeaking much louder. A fuzzy brown blur launches itself from the hole as I cover my head and run to the opposite side of the room. Another form comes squeaking out of the whole. As I get to the corner and turn around, I finally identify the culprit. An angry and probably very frightened sparrow is making a beeline for me and Dave, frozen and horrified. It banks a sharp turn and heads into the adjacent room, zipping over the heads of my five other friends as it joins its partner in the back room. Taking advantage of this opportunity, all seven of us sprint for the exits and congregate outside in the cold. After a couple moments to catch our breath:
“What the fuck just happened?!?”
“Were those fucking birds?”
“Sparrows dude, sparrows.”
“What the fuck? We cannot have this.”
Realizing we were set to host a party with presumably dozens of people attending, including many women, we knew what we had to do. Grabbing a couple of brooms, we set back inside. After opening all of the doors and windows, we set to finding the birds and chasing them out, which took a couple of minutes. Triumphant, we again tried to reckon the events that had transpired. Grayson’s basement had yielded many magical and horrifying events, but this one took the cake. We set back again to cleaning up, but twenty minutes later, disaster struck again.
As a the rustling and squeaking returned to the same exact patch in the ceiling, we let out a collective, “oh, fuck.”
Prepared this time, we grabbed our brooms and rakes, and waited for the demon Spearows to be cast from their ceilingly dwelling. After chasing them out a second time, we determined that they must have an alternate entry into the house from outside. There was nothing we could do to stop the sparrows from getting into the ceiling.
But there was damn sure something we could do to keep them up there.
Armed with duck tape and frenzied determination, we covered up and reinforced any holes or patches in the ceilings or walls. If anybody asked what that noise was, we would say there was a cat upstairs.
After this ridiculous adventure, the party seemed relatively tame, despite its fair share of drunken people slapping drunken people, broken glass, floor-pissers, face-lickers, and table-breakers. All in all, it was a great weekend. Well, except for the Jets game of course.
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