i forget the occasion, and there may not have even really been one.. but one of my favorite memories is of playing volleyball at red river outdoors in the red river gorge.

actually, it only started with volleyball.. bourbon volleyball, that is. see, our friend, fluffy, really loves bourbon and takes advantage of any chance he can get to get as much bourbon as possible in his friends. accordingly, he invented bourbon volleyball: a game where every mistake (read: point) is penalized with the player(s) in error taking a shot of bourbon. on aces, the whole team took a shot.

now, i was down there with y and she doesn’t drink very much.. ok.. at all. and while she wanted to play ball, she didn’t want to pay the price. as a compromise, we decided that she could play and that i would take her shots. after the second game, rhino stepped in and helped out.. but only because my liver screamed out to him.

needless to say, the lot of us were quite intoxicated by night’s end. we turned off the cars and their headlights.. and that’s when the first signs of trouble showed themselves. the warning came innocently enough: a green disc gliding silently, gently through the inky night sky. it stopped, made a fast, blurry loop, and was back on its way from where it came. then a pink disc joined it.. chuck had brought his glow-in-the-dark frisbees (leave it to the hippies to think of such things). so far, it was just innocent tosses.. the occasional errant throw came a little close a head now and again but it never seemed provoked. the night drifted on warm and soft.

suddenly, bright blurry green sticks crashed down next to a some of us. and like that, a neon war was declared in the night air. the enemy – the dark shadow “over there”. the objective – pelt them into submission with any glowing orb, stick, or disc you could find.. and the occasional stealthy, non-glowing volleyball. that was the best actually: i’d sneak off towards the edge of the woods, walk slowly and quietly becoming a mere shadow myself, and then, when this shadow an arm’s length away, i’d pelt nail you in the small of the back with the “missing” volleyball and scurry away before you could retaliate. i always wanted to be a secret agent man.

at one point, a grand plan occurred to me.. it was time to capture an indian princess. i sighted the target in the distance with her flowing white dress on, now spotted with grass stains from the evening. making like i was going for a glowstick, i ran across the imaginary line in the sand.. and then made for the mark. i picked her up, threw her over my shoulder, weaved, stumbled, and laughed the whole way back to the vw bus where i threw her in and shut the door. we had her! and since she was bent over double in laughter, she didn’t even fight it. still, a small border war ensued. despite the best efforts of the coalition, her now fiancé and the rest of the glow stick launchers freed her from the bus and the brown terror was loose again. (by the way, i say brown only because she would say the same herself and proudly. she truly is one of the most beautiful people i know, inside and out.)

after her escape. the night moved on filled with streaks of neon gel and we all grew tired eventually. we collapsed in the grass around 2am, exhausted and drunk, watching the stars spin in the inky sky faster than the universe even envisioned. y and i stayed up and talked with don for an hour or so, amusing ourselves by how much alcohol and general abuse that poor man’s body could handle and still function (that’s a relative term). by 3am, dreams of mattresses danced in our heads and y and i made the trek back to lexington. thankfully, she stayed up with me, chatting it up the entire time. needless to say, the next day we didn’t get an alpine start. 😉

i’m still amazed that no one lost an eye.