xtcian

8/3/02 Okay, so this is

8/3/02

Okay, so this is the sort of journal entry you're supposed to write when you're fifty-three and start being entranced by nature the subject here is my pumpkin patch – but I swear to god, there's a Chi Psi frat party going on in my yard as I speak. Metaphorically, of course.

My fraternity can best be described as the place where hyper-intellectual, world-wise former dorks ended up when they wanted to flex their newfound social muscles. We usually got the girl, but only after a profound struggle, and only after she had dated some asshole Phi Delt first. Chi Psis at Carolina ran the school; we always had the student body president, the head of the athletic association, the editor of the paper, and we were the de facto home of the Morehead Scholars. I'm not sure what the Lodge looks like socially these days, but when I was social chairman, we mixed with all of the hottest, most Southern sororities the ones that would never have given any of us the time of day in high school.

We were total dorks, but most of us had never had access to women like that before (and those who didn't move to New York, never again). I used to have a problem justifying my place in a fraternity, which seems to anathema to everything I believe in, but age has taught me that people who hold contempt for a general idea - without interest in understanding the shades of gray that accompany them tend to be some of the most boring people in the world. Tessa and her best friend Jason Lyon call it "contempt prior to investigation," and I agree that it comes hand-in-hand with the death of one's spirit.

So I'll say what I always say: if you were there, you would have loved our bunch of guys. Or at least 75% of them (like all microcosms, it had its requisite share of groaners). Besides, my rule about anything in life is "if you make three lifelong friends, it's going to be worth it," and by my count, I have about eighteen lifelong friends, so those willing to pass judgement can eat me.

Anyway, at these Chi Psi parties, eighty of us would start milling about the living room around 9pm in various states of drunken anticipation. By 10pm, we were sure none of the chicks were going to show up, but by 11:30, they would start trickling in. There were always a pack of five or six girls that really dug the mixer's particular theme - we had parties dedicated to the Boxer Rebellion (we all wore Chinese boxers), or a Coast-to-Coast Hall Crawl, where the entire second floor would become a map of the United States, and each room would have a drink that corresponded to that state (my corner room was California, and therefore daiquiris).

Our "scene" was small enough that everyone dated everyone else's girlfriends as long as enough time had passed to make it kosher (usually when both parties had other interests, so about 3 weeks), making the whole thing very communal (or incestual, depending on your attitude). In the end, it was a very colorful, intense place that sustained itself through relentless innovation, intellect, and a desire to have sex.

Which leads me to my pumpkin patch. Sometime in the last two weeks, the garden has exploded, leaving me to believe that I planted WAY too many pumpkin seeds in one place. Seeds look so little, you know? At this point, the pumpkin vines have broken free of their fenced-in shackles and begun to creep over the lawn.

our pumpkin patch is now "Little Shop of Horrors"-esque

The amazing thing about a pumpkin is that it has to pollinate itself. Male and female flowers grow on the vine at the same time, and it depends on bees to bring pollen from the male to the female. And if bees aren't around, you, the stalwart gardener, have to force the pumpkin vine to have sex with itself. You do this delicately, by finding a male flower that has just opened, and swishing it around inside a female flower.

You can tell a female flower (red circle and arrow) from a male flower (blue circle and arrow) by the large, pregnant pouch at the bottom of the females. Also, there are a shitload of males around, about eight to every female, and they start blooming weeks before the females even get out of bed.

So... a over-functioning plant that breaks free of its barriers, sprouts men that get to the party way early to woo the small, disturbed following of late women, has incestual relationships with its own pool, and then creates a beloved fruit for a weird holiday? Ladies and gents, we got ourselves a Chi Psi frat party!