Dear Life,

Saturday immediately following UT’s loss in the SEC Championship, I chose to drink, as many of my friends did. Yet while they mellowed out with their two beers or so, I shotgunned my beer count into the double digits. It seems you, life, have blessed me with the inability to exercise control over alcohol. Needless to say, only a mere hour into my drinking and my lips were already glistening from the spit that accompanied my drunken shouts. I threw in the towel rather early and gave the University of Tennessee’s ‘drunk bus’ a call. A bearded man pulled up to the corner of 19th and Highland, and opened the bus doors. Being the only passenger and refusing to let the rattle of the bus make the only sound, I struck up slurred conversation with the driver. He claimed to have to pick up four other people, all of which were no shows. So in a thirty minute midnight conversation, me and Larry the bus driver talked politics, women (in place of the word ‘women’ I had used what I felt as the more accurate word at the time ‘Cunts’), but mostly life. I believe our discussion hit a high note when Larry confessed his dilemma. You see, Larry had been offered a coal truck driving job that paid ten dollars an hour better, but he would spend an extra hour everyday commuting for this new job. I consoled my dear Larry. “Yeah (hiccup) man, life’s got some…tough stuff. But man, commutes suck!” Larry and I hit a special chord that night.

-W.B.