Oh, to be young again. Those heady undergraduate days as a new-grown adult living for the first time without adult supervision. The sheer exhilaration of it: The blundering self-confidence. The roiling, incoherent desire. The beauty and privilege of being all but completely ignorant of one’s own ignorance.
Inevitably, some guys had a house off-campus where the furniture should have been taken out and burned, but in the way of young men it was a palace to you—because that was where the buddies hung out and the Big Conversations happened, bull sessions punching well into the night, fuelled by a little learning, a lot of booze and the brick of hash that was always on the coffee table.
You threw up in that house. You had sloppy sex in that house with girls who were more fucked up than you were. One night, in the heat of conversation, you suddenly became so angry at one of your closest cronies—just in that instant you realized what an asshole he was being—you...
Christopher Dornan teaches in the School of Journalism and Communication at Carleton University. He contributed chapters to the first two volumes of the How Canadians Communicate series.
Advertisement
Advertisement