This has nothing to do with sports in anyway, but I was inspired by The Sports Muffin’s Marathon Day post. I detail this college flashback in hopes that it inspires my still young readership to take part in something like this. It’s natural and it’s imperative to achieve spiritual enlightenment. I heard the Dalai Lama pulled one of these on his 6th birthday.

Anyhow, back in the ol’ college days, we realized that every month has it’s own specific holiday except August. August has nothing except the glorious August 21st, which is my birthday (I’ll be 30 this year…). So, we came up with our own holiday for the dog days of summer. We called it Big Fun Day and this is it’s story:

The premise and the ground rules of Big Fun Day are these. A shot glass of whiskey is placed on your bedside. Your alarm is to be set for 8:00AM. Before your feet hit the ground from your bed, you must take the shot. From that point on, there are to be no vegetables eaten and no utensils used. Other than that, you just must drink heavily for the entire day. Here’s some Big Fun Day stats:

Patron Saint of Big Fun Day: Big Fun Bobaganoush.
Official Drink of Big Fun Day (and I’m dating myself here…): Surge & Rum, eventually dubbed Surgeon Rum (“Paging Surgeon Rum, Surgeon Run report to my belly STAT!” will be announced many times over the course of the day) It’s nothing more than Surge cola and Captain Morgan’s Spiced Rum, and it’s actually very delicious (try it with Vault these days).
Official Symbol of Big Fun Day: Buttering The Tree

So, we woke up at 8:00AM, took our shots, and by roughly 8:15AM our apartment was filled with 10 early morning drunks. By 9:30, we were sufficiently drunk and decided to fire off some left over fireworks from the 4th of July. We had masses of the oversized bottle rockets and Roman Candles. We started trying to light the bottle rockets, first by sticking them in empty beer bottles, but they kept tipping over. We then tried to stick them in the ground, but the soil held onto the sticks so tightly that they just exploded on the ground where they had been stuck. We needed something less viscous than dirt, but heftier than an empty beer bottle. So, we found a large tub of Country Crock butter in the fridge. Perfect marriage! The butter held the bottle rockets firmly in place and allowed their release perfectly.

After a few rockets shot from the butter tub, we got an idea to take a gob of butter and slather it on the end of the bottle rocket, thus creating The Butter Bomb. Unfortunately, the gob of butter on the tip of the rocket weighted it down enough that the rocket shot across the street and into the woods, where it exploded and promptly set a small forest fire.

We ran across the street and tried stomping it out to no avail. Eventually, we emptied out a garbage can, filled it with water, and ran it into the woods. After a few trips back and forth with the garbage can of water, and dodging traffic and hoping against hope that the police don’t drive by to find a group of drunk college students extinguishing a self inflicted forest fire at 10:00AM, we finally had the fire out and we all had scorched, filthy bare feet to show for our heroics. Frustrated with the opening of Big Fun Day, I picked up the butter, reared back and slammed it’s contents against a tree where the congealed goo clung for the rest of the day, thereby creating the “Buttering The Tree” tradition.

Shortly after that, the grilling commenced and the drinking continued. A grill full of hamburgers, chicken, and sausage and every fist with a hoochy drink. Hours rolled by, meat was consumed and booze was downed when the mailman wandered up onto my porch to deliver a couple of packages. I had forgotten that a couple of weeks before, I had signed up a couple of fake accounts with Columbia House. It was that moment that the patron saint of Big Fun Day, Big Fun Bobaganoush, had bestowed upon us a bounty of 24 brand new free CDs for Frank Grimes and Sol Rosenburg. We rocked out, drank, ate, and made outlandish bets.

It was sometime in the afternoon that I was wagered against to drink a Tuna Salad Cocktail for $50. The Tuna Salad Cocktail was a 44 ounce big gulp filled half way with Aristocrat Vodka, two large cans of tuna’s worth of juice, a dollop of mayonaise, a splash of vegetable oil, pickle relish, salt, pepper, and ice. The jist was this: I had 10 minutes to drink it and then an hour after that to not drink, eat, or smoke anything without throwing up. Any puking would result in disqualification. I downed 90% of the cocktail in record time, but the last remaining bit was a slurry of cheap vodka, chunks of tuna and floating gobs of mayonaise. I took a deep breath and slugged the remainder back. Oh, man, was I on the brink. I heaved a couple of times, I saw the $50 slipping from my grasps. But, like the champion I am, I held on tight and fought it all back, pissing and moaning for another hour until the $50 was mine.

As dusk began, my roommate, thoroughly intoxicated decided to climb a tree by the road, chattering like a monkey, and swing from the branches while throwing pine cones at cars. Occasionally, we would sneak out and shoot Roman Candles at him. He eventually stayed up there long enough for us all to forget about him. Theories were later theorized that he fell alseep in that tree.

The night bared down on us, and some of us went home, some went to the bar, some stayed around, talked shit and continued drinking.

The following afternoon, I was regaled with the following story from my roommate who had apparently found his way out of the tree and to somewhere else in the town: “When I pulled up, I could only smell beer and burned charcoal. I walked around the corner and found you asleep in a chair on the front porch, and next to you was a perfect pyramid of beer cans, that was covered and surrounded by puke. It was like some weird performance art piece or something. I woke you up and told you to go to bed, you started taking off your clothes and barely made it to your bedroom.”

So, now that it’s August, don’t you owe it to yourself and to Big Fun Boboganoush to celebrate Big Fun Day this month?

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