Walletsworth by Umphrey’s McGee
[audio:http://www.archive.org/download/um2007-04-11.flac/UM2007-04-11Set2T03_64kb.mp3]
So its Spring Weekend again here at UConn, which always confuses me. I don’t understand it. At all. Thousands upon thousands of college students from all over arrive to talk, get drunk, and stand around. And maybe pass out.
It could be the whole being on your own, independent for the first time thing that fuels this, but it still confuses me. At its highest point, there were probably ten thousand students in a single location, most of them drunk, some of them high (why must spring weekend correspond with 4/20?). Many, many, many people were falling down or passing out. I suppose they still don’t know their limit, which is funny, because they do this every weekend, you think they would have figured it out by now. Despite that, the majority that were still standing were doing so…but nothing else. There is no real reason to go to this place, except to be in the company of others who are just as drunk. There isn’t any music, there isn’t any dancing, there isn’t much of anything except for standing around and drinking and smoking.
I just can’t understand it.
Anywise, there were lots of police and EMTs around to keep things in order and keep people from dying. And I’m usually all for that. This is one time where I can’t say I feel that way. I can’t help but think that all of this takes away from personal responsibility. It isn’t like the EMTs are saving people from a natural disaster, they’re saving them from something they did to themselves. There is something tremendously wrong with this.
I do understand that it isn’t meant to be enjoyable if you’re sober. Don’t bother correcting me on that. Maybe its something I would need to be drunk to understand. But that would bring me down a long road which leads very far away from this train of thought. I’ll touch on that someday though.
Also, a sidenote: as someone who doesn’t drink or smoke, I think events like this are an excellent example of why pot should be legal. The folks who were drunk were vomiting or pissing on themselves or in the woods. The folks who were high were not. Can someone explain to me why one is legal but not the other?
As I walked back to my dorm, I heard a helicopter in the sky above me, and thought that was strange, because usually helicopters don’t pass overhead at one in the morning. So I thought it was likely a news chopper, because it was very likely that the crowd could be seen from very high up. And when I look up, I see the flashing lights of LifeStar, the helicopter that airlifts people to hospitals because they’re so bad off that an ambulance would be too slow. That means someone drank enough so that they were nearly dead, or someone got into a drunken brawl, and was near dead. Either way, this was a situation they voluntarily put themselves in. I have zero pity. None.
However, as much as I’d like to say, “don’t bother keeping EMTs on call, let those students on the ground be an example to others” I know that college students aren’t smart enough to get the message.
How can the sight of ten thousand people having the time of their lives be so depressing?