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James Moore
445 Paul Hardin Drive
Chapel Hill, NC 27514
Running Drunk and Without Your Glasses Through the Campus of UNC and Other Fun
Activities
Running drunk and without your glasses through the campus of UNC is a very unique
activity.
“Ackland…Hanes Art Center…Hill…”
Sure, there’s Dance Marathon, catching a game at the Dean Dome, or climbing the Bell
Tower on Senior Day….
“Smith…New West…Memorial…”
But when compared to running drunk and without your glasses through campus?
“Gerrard…Campus Y…Hanes…”
Nothing is as versatile.
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…
And before the young man knew it, he was running through the campus of UNC, and he
was very, very drunk.
With his lungs belting a furious duet of fatigue and perplexion, an atomic impulse rises
through the young man’s chest like a house fire, dilating the portals of his veins, overloading the
tendrils of his muscles, painfully precluding any instance of thought or memory. Names, places,
and all the other countless words that form his brimming past compact into one pulsing and
angry syllable of static. His mind shuts like an iron box. No thunder enters. No whisper escapes.
As the young man runs a wind pregnant with the whispering transit of leaves spins through his
ears with a ghostly joy, but the young man’s heart is a a beat that out-beats the world. Only two
things of this universe remain. The die has been cast. In a voice as puny as hope the young man
says them over and over:
1. I am running without my glasses through the campus of UNC.
2. I am very drunk.
Rushing black flanks his path. He stretches desperately towards the light.
In an existential sense, it is all very infantile.
…
Chapel Hill is the type of place where you recognize how local the dominos of causality
are.
“Carroll…Venable…”
Or in other words, it’s an interesting place for a run.
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“Morehead…Kenan….”
When running drunk and without your glasses through the campus of UNC, one may
assume that things appear as they are not.
“Wilson…Lenoir…”
But actually, the opposite is true.
“Davis…Manning…”
There is no deception involved. No funhouse mirrors. Things appear exactly as they are.
“Hamilton…Caldwell…”
That’s why the world looks so unclear.
With one thunderous, aphotic note, the Bell Tower sings the finale of the night’s eleventh
hour, its tumbling peal christening the wild breeze, its four clocks huddled square and gleaming
like a conclave of moons. A steady cannonade of rain bathes the gleaming bricks of Polk Place,
their chatter tittering across the quad like the discordant ticks of a billion clocks, engrossing the
air of Chapel Hill in a roar of sweeping diamond. This storm is not like other storms. At least to
the young man’s inebriated eye. And this young man is very inebriated.
The young man stares amazed as the storm begins to drown Chapel Hill in time,
submerging the town into one miraculous, oceanic moment, one temporal baptism, one fluid yet
eternal minute. Like a child opening his eyes beneath the water for the first time, a brand new
vision of the world engulfs the young man’s vision. History lies prone before him with a
cerulean transparency. Entire centuries orbit concurrently around him like rims in a whirlpool.
Past. Future. Present. Although he is drunk and without his glasses, the young man sees it all.
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Instead of the buildings, trees, and other structures of the world appearing as singular
nouns, independent and separate, UNC appears to the young man’s naked eyes under one plural
glaze. One thousand midnights gloss into brick. Centipedes, slithering under the steps to South
Building, weave dynasties into tectonic plates. Forests housing trees from three different
geological eras project themselves through the campus buildings, the gleaming brick recording
their shadows, anthropomorphizing the darkness, puppeteering branches across limestone walls
like the lynched silhouettes of the black and faceless men who built them. He passes other
students like a comet through space, each person shining like an astral globe, an island of color,
their lighst violent and unrepeatable, each soul a point in a rippling matrix of light that drapes
over campus like the cobwebs of an antique galaxy.
“Saunders…Bynum….Caldwell…”
Bounding across Cameron Avenue the young man darts into the Arboretum. The
crackling percussion of stomped gravel echoes behind him. A shadowy canopy swallows the sky.
The young man’s chest burns like a kiln. Unable to run anymore, the young man pours himself
onto a park bench, tilting his face towards a clearing in the forest. Drunk, gasping, and almost
blind, the young man’s eyes dart towards every rustle in the leaves, every snapping branch, every
secret pounce, every furtive murder. The Arboretum’s leafy cranium sways ominously in the
gloom.
Suddenly, from an adjacent cluster of shadows, a part of the forest rises from the
stillness: a black outline of a man separating itself from the jungle walks slowly towards the
young man. An abysmal sense of synesthesia hits the young man’s stomach like a ballpoint
hammer. In his drunken state, the young man cannot tell who this shadow man is or what this
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shadow man looks like, but somehow the young man can sense a smile fissuring across the
shadow’s face.
“Smoke looks to like you it a need”
The young man cocks an eyebrow as the syllables scramble away between his ears.
“Saywhatnow?” slurs the young man.
“I said: It looks like you need a smoke,” says the shadow, slower this time.
The young man acknowledges the English, but in his drunken trance capturing each one
of the shadow’s words is like trying to hear single raindrops in a maelstrom. The shadow looms.
Tar Heel through and through, the young man defers to his more scholastic instincts.
“Yes,” the young man guesses.
Without breaking its smile the shadow takes a seat next to the young man in one
continuous movement. Now able to get a better look the young man sees that the shadow is not a
shadow at all, but an old man dressed in a vintage black suit. A head of nearly hairless flesh
gleams through the dark, supporting an ostensible pair of horn-rimmed glasses, lone strands of
hair swirling from the skull like the astral paths of an orrery. The old man wastes no time. With
tarantula-like precision the old man’s fingers twist in the dark. A flimsy rectangle of paper
somehow floats its way into the fray of fingers, shrinking, rolling, becoming columnar.
“Who—who re you?” the young man stammers.
“I’m the Ambassador to Sweden,” says the old man tonelessly, a freshly rolled joint
resting in his hands like a parked space shuttle.
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Now, when running drunk without glasses through the campus of UNC, there will be a
pivotal point in the journey where the absurdity of your situation becomes humiliatingly
apparent, when a thunderbolt of rationality strikes you in the face and immediately illuminates
the dark and laughing stupidity around you.
For the young man, this is one of those moments.
“Sweden is a beautiful place. There are few better views in the world from which to view
the stars. I guess it’s no surprise then that not too long after becoming the Swedish Ambassador I
took a keen interest in astrophysics,” says the Swedish Ambassador through a funnel of
marijuana, handing the joint to the wheezing puddle that is the young man.
The young man pulls on the joint and explodes into a mortifying fit of coughing. His
raining thoughts spill into puddles, becoming flat and muddy, circular and clear, shallow yet
terrifyingly reflective. The Ambassador to Sweden continues undeterred.
“Did you know that there’s a theory of the universe which frames the Big Bang not as a
swift explosion, but as a prolonged detonation? It contends that all light and matter originate
from one central point, that all the stars and planets in the sky are constantly drifting away from
some cosmic center, tethered by ever-thinning tendrils of gravity, implying that one day all stars
in the sky will drift away from one another into individual and remote vacuums of darkness.
However…now, now don’t suck the soul out if it…” spits the Swedish Ambassador, snatching
the joint from the young man’s trembling fingers.
“As I was saying….that same theory also contends, that when the stars are at their
loneliest, when the darkness is at its most intense, a gravitational cataclysm will occur, that the
universe will snap back into place like a rubber band, and all the stars, emerging from the darkest
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corners of the sky, will unify, forming a light no bigger than an atom.” The ambassador pauses,
clasping his hands as if he were about to pray, perching the j between his ring and middle finger,
inhaling deeply through the smoking crevice between his thumbs.
“I think stars are a lot like people in this way. Sure death and distance may drive us from
each other, but I believe one day all the souls of humanity will unify, forming a light no bigger
than an atom. No one will be small, no one will be big, and not even the loneliest souls will feel
alone….I guess what I’m saying is, there’s no point in anybody ever feeling alone. All life is
connected, the universe is a perfectly unified orchestration of gravity and mass, I am not
speaking out of baseless optimism, I speak out of cognizance of gravitational law.” The
Ambassador to Sweden takes the dying roach and flicks it into the woods behind him.
“Speaking of which, it seems that we have gravitated some company….”
The young man starts as he hears a slow trail of footsteps trudging through the brush to
their left. Unsure of what to do the young man turns back to his right for the Ambassador but
strangely enough the seat is empty.
CRUNCH. CRUNCH. CRUNCH.
Squinting through the trees the young man tries to match some sort of shape to the
approaching footsteps, but because he is drunk and without his glasses the task proves
impossible.
CRUNCH. CRUNCH. CRUNCH. CRUNCH.
In the darkness around him the footsteps multiply. Patches of noise echo from all sides
of the Arboretum, each footstep slow and precise. Realizing he is outnumbered the young man
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closes his eyes and cowers helplessly on the park bench. His body tenses, conceding to whatever
doom is to come.
CRUNCH. CRU—
And then, just as it seems like the footsteps can’t get any closer, the air falls into a lifeless
silence. After a few tortuous seconds the young man pries open his eyes, hatching each pupil
with the inquisitive caution of a newborn. At first, the lightless dome of the Arboretum floods his
vision in one intractable blur. But suddenly, a column of moonlight leaks from a break in the
storm ;clouds, forming an expanding circle of light in the clearing before the park bench.
Black and dimensionless against the lunar tint, thirteen deer pass through the clearing
single-file , their oar-thin limbs rowing noiselessly through the moon foam, their slender necks
dipping curiously as their noses scan the lucent grass. The young man locks his lungs. The deer
file back into the trees on the other side of the clearing, disappearing one-by-one. However, just
as the last of the line drift into the woods, the shortest and frailest of the pack freezes in place, its
eyes wet and artless, its puny ears dished in the young man’s direction.
Now, under normal circumstances, trading stares with a baby doe in the middle of the
Arboretum would fill any sober eye with reverence and poetry. But unfortunately, the young man
is still quite drunk and without his glasses. So after a comical sequence of emotional
miscalculations, the young man spouts the most poetic combination of English words he can
come up with:
“You—you trying to fight?”
Without warning the young man leaps from the park bench, giving chase to the baby
deer. Naturally, the frightened doe darts through the trees and loses the drunken young man
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within seconds, but the alcohol raging in the young man’s veins acts as a false buttress to the
young man’s confidence. An entire nation of leaves slaps the young man’s face within moments.
Having completely lost sight of his newfound nemesis the young man charges wildly through the
arboretum, batting his arms like machetes through the vortex of trees.
After thirteen blistering cuts (five of which would be indecent to detail) the young man
bursts from the Arboretum and sprints through the parking lot of Morehead planetarium, nearly
tripping over the sundial on three separate occasions. Hitting the sidewalk the lights of Franklin
Street crown the horizon like the shore of a new and dazzling world. An entire dictionary of
laughter vitalizes the air, quickening the piston fire of his hamstrings, quickening the gears of his
soul. He cannot see. But that’s what makes running drunk and without your glasses through the
campus of UNC such a versatile activity. One doesn’t have to see.
“Fucking Harrison!”
Just as he passes in front of Time Out the young man stops, recognizing the malediction.
“Dude!” Another young man jogs across the Franklincrosswalk and over to the first
young man, whose name is apparently Harrison.
“Yo Harrison you’re fucking drenched!” yells the second young man. “You’re not
seriously taking a jog in this shitstorm are you?”
“Uh…” Harrison looks around, drunk and confused. He feels as if he knows this second
young man, but due to his drunkenness and the fact that he is not wearing his glasses he cannot
tell for sure. Harrison once more defers to his more scholastic instincts.
“
Yes,” Harrison guesses.
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“Huh,” the second young man squints into Harrison’s face. “Don’t you usually wear
glasses?”
“Yeah.”
“Where they at?”
“Not sure.”
“Huh,” says the second young man. “It’s a cold world.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Harrison says, pointing to his eyes.
For a moment the two young man stand in silence, listening to the sounds of Franklin.
The bars are hitting their peak now, making the streets feel so alive it makes a guy wonder if any
moment of one’s subsequent life will ever contain more life than this one.
“Wanna go to Old Chicago?” the second young man asks Harrison after a while. “I heard
they got $2 pizzas.”
“Sure,” says Harrison, following the second young man into the Franklin crowd.
There’s this other theory to the universe. It contends that the founding principle of
existence is that it is endlessly multitudinous….
“Yo, can ask you something.”
“Sure, Harrison. Shoot.”
“Do you know who the Ambassador to Sweden is?”
…That our universe is of one of an infinite set.
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“Ain’t it like that John Kerry guy?”
“John Kerry? Huh.”
That our universe is like a bubble in the ocean, surrounded by an uncountable number of
other bubbles that are as vast and as multitudinous as ours.
“Why do you ask?”
There’s a fascinating implication to this,
“Well, because…”
That these worlds, these endless permutations of possibility, sometimes cross and
converge, interchangeable parts of one holistic system, until one world contains them all, until
the words “one” and “infinite” become synonymous.
“….because I think I just smoked a J with John Kerry.”
“….dude that’s bitchin.”
One night running drunk and without your glasses through Chapel Hill does little to
refute this theory.
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