Mama, put my guns in the ground. I can't shoot them anymore!

Day one...

So here I am. I got here too late and too tired to figure out the sleeping situation, but I took a very big first step. Once it was dark, I grabbed my little LED flashlight and wandered off into the dark scary woods. I went in about two hundred yards, and for the most part I wasn't sweating it. First time in my life that I've ever been in the woods alone at night. It was a lot like the Blair Witch Project, only in real life.

Everything was cool until, as I started to leave the woods, I heard quite a scramblin' nearby (Hans warned me about this). I checked it out but didn't see anything. I thought it might have been a deer (because it was obviously walking), but I'm no Eleanor Roosevelt -- I didn't know if it was a deer, a monkey, or a tostada out there!

Then I kinda saw it for a second, and it was gone, and I thought to myself, "God I hope that was a deer."

Then I heard it again, right next to me, so I shined the light in that direction, and there it was: a doe standing no more than four feet away from me.

I don't know if I was on slightly lower ground or if it was just small, perhaps born in the spring, but we stood eye to eye. All I could see were two big yellowish-green glowing eyes and two ears the size of catcher's mitts. We stared at each other for about five seconds. It gave me this look that said, "Who the hell are you, and where the fuck did you just come from, and what the hell-hole is that super-bright thing in your hand?" Once I got a grip on the awe of being so close to such an amazing creature, I realized just how terrified the poor little mug was; so I lowered the light and poof -- gone!

Also, and this is for those of you who live in the big city: STARZ!!! There are so many stars out here. You look up and there are thousands of them. In Detroit, on a clear night, there are like five stars. And as you stand there, looking up at those five stars, something eventually whizzes by your head, and you realize it was only four stars -- the fifth one was a falling bullet.

I'm going to share this next one with all of you, but it's really mostly for Cory Stauffer.

Canfield -- corner room facing Commons and the End of the World. So I show up tonight around six, and there's a dude playing guitar in that room. When I leave five hours later, he's still playing guitar. Same room as way back when, but it's a different dude! I checked it out! Haven't heard "Sweet Child o' Mine" -- YET!!!

For those of you who have no idea what this means:

There's one totally quiet house on campus, and it sits next to one of the loudest houses on campus. The whole time Mr. Stauffer was at Bennington, living in the quiet house, there was this guy who would play Guns N' Roses and Led Zeppelin for what seemed like sixteen hours a day. Mr. Stauffer did not like this. Mr. Stauffer likes the sound of falling snow and one hand clapping. "Kashmir" -- not so much. And I know what you're thinking; you're thinking you kinda like that song. Imagine having to listen to just the guitar part for six hours.