Since I don’t follow basketball (or any big-time sports), I was blissfully asleep when UMich lost the March (?) Madness basketball thing last night. If I had been awake and watching, I might’ve gotten involved in the whole thing, even though I don’t really understand basketball.

When I checked Twitter this morning, my feed was full of photos and videos of couch burnings here on The Planet. That was all a couple miles away from my quiet neighborhood but I do not quite understand why it has become such a “thing” to burn couches in the street after sporting events. The nasty in me attributes it to entitled rich college students and there are plenty of those in this town. But… I am not so sure that I wouldn’t’ve been out there drinking beer and having a good time if couch burning had been a thing back in my day…

Didja know that the night of my high school graduation, friends of *mine* were involved in burning picnic tables? It’s true. It was a “tradition”. The tradition was that the new graduates would drive all the way out to the Big Pine picnic area on Whitefish Bay, build a big faaaarrr (picnic tables?), and drink beer, etc. until dawn. My boyfriend at that time was a sophomore at the local college. He grew up in town and had gone to my high school. He went to my graduation. Friends of his (also townies) got the faaaarrrr going by burning picnic tables. A good drunken time was had by all and somehow we made it home without incident. Except maybe for Miles’s little brother… Was that the night he became crippled? Naw, it was prob’ly some later event. But still, he was out there that night, a 7th grader or thereabouts drinking beer at a high school graduation shindig… (Miles was a friend, not my boyfriend, just to be clear.)

Did I think that burning picnic tables at a state park was a good idea? Well, no, not really. But I was young and suffered from a crippling case of low self-esteem and somehow the fact that *my* friends did this made me feel “cool”. That particular boyfriend really was a good person and so were his friends… They were not rich college students. My boyfriend was paying his own way through college delivering bundles of newspapers on a motor route throughout the eastern UP. One of his friends was already a father, one who managed to figure out how to take out a loan to pay his 17-year-old wife’s family’s telephone bill. I wonder if he ever finished college. I hope so. But not hardly the typical rich UMich student. Oh, not that all of the UMich students are wealthy either. Here I am, stereotyping…

And then there is SAES, one of our loverly local graffiti “artists”. Apparently he has been caught? I can’t quite remember. We also have Gexir. Neither of these guys are Basquiat and I think they should just give it up. But they are [probably] teenagers who can’t quite figure out how to express themselves… Been there, done that…

That couch burning thing? I dunno. I have a couch or two that I would kind of like to burn. Party in the street next weekend? Be there or be square!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 9th, 2013 at 6:43 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.