Hippie Vignettes

This is for tragicmulatta, from my college days.

On, I believe, North Professor street, once upon a time there was a house that was shared by hippies and goths. This counterintuitive combination spawned, at some point, an adoption of a wolf cub. The wolf lived in the house, terrorized the other, non-lupine pets, and was called "wolf" because the lupophilliac hippie believed that "you can't name animals, man." The year dragged on, the hippies smoked weed, the wolf grew , and eventually due to some *incidents* was deployed to the college arboritum "to be wild," which is why when you were walking home late at night in the winter, and you heard HOWLING, it wasn't the wind, and it wasn't your overactive imagination, either.

While the wolf was unique in its own right, at least in my four years at the small progressive college, every the hippie coop next to my freshman year dorm housed some hippie dumbass who would buy or adopt a snake. Every year the snake invariably escaped, and every year some patcholi-smelling freshman girl named Sara or Becky would find the snake (lethargic from all the second-hand weed) curled up in the shower, and there would be screaming and hysterics and recriminations and eventually history would repeat itself with the new crop of freshpersons.

The year before I started college, a rich hippie with a hyphenated name became a legend as one half of the "dead monkeys" duo. At our college we had "winter term," which was basically an excuse for people to come up with the most ridiculous projects and fuck around for a month. This duo declared their intentions of studying marmocet monkeys in Peru. Indeed, they returned from Peru with some hippie hemp bags and three marmocet monkeys that they bought at a market in Lima. How did they get them across the border? By doping them with valium, of course, and putting them in the shirt pocket. Unfortunately, they were delayed at the airport for almost 24 hours, in the course of which they kept feeding the monkeys valium. One of the monkeys died somewhere around the "Welcome to Cleveland" sign, the other monkey expired shortly after the return to the dorm. The monkeys were thrown out into the smoking lounge garbage can, where they were found by the janitor, who promptly called the CDC and the town was nearly quarantined, Outbreak style. The coda to this saga was straight out of Bret Easton Ellis, involving FBI warrants, the sale of $2000 of baking soda in lieu of Ecstasy, and a flight to Algir by perpetrator #1. The hyphenated hippie returned to the campus next year, with a taciturn, worldly air around him, which he used to seduce virginal propsective students.

There is no other group that provokes more intense and visceral schaudenfreude in me than the hippies. Which is why, when some hippies built a raft for the purpose of some stoned sailing in the aforementioned arboritum (Home of the Wolf!), which was emphatically counterindicated for swimming or sailing, I can't say that I was heartbroken when their raft, turned over and they all got weird skin rashes after a dip in the waters of the arboritum.

There is more, but you all are invited to share as well! We can all cheer up tragicmulatta with Hippie Tales.