...Speaking of passing out in a drainage ditch. A couple of years after graduation from the University of Washington, I was still living in the "U District" a mile or so from campus. On occasion, friends and I would get tickets to the Husky games and we'd head down to the stadium, pretend we were still students and generally attempt to flashback to the carefree drunken days of college life.

On one such occasion, myself and a couple of guys from work scored some tickets to the UW/USC game. Now, it was common knowledge that the security for the games was hard-ass and therefore difficult to sneak liquor into. Over the years as a student, my classmates and myself had devised many ingenious methods for clandestine stadium booze smuggling, such as a Ziplock bags of Everclear duct-taped to the inside of one's thigh, etc. Well, in planning this particular outing, we thought the odds of successful smuggling weren't too great and arriving separately, we'd all try to get a bottle in. As is typical of my luck in these situations, we were all three successful in getting a bottle in, and by an even more strange twist of fate, we all happened to bring a bottle of 151 Baccardi Rum.

Unfortunately (for those around us) our tickets were in the rather uptight alumni section of the stadium and by half time, I was throwing up into my Pepsi cup and hitting on the cuter seniors (that's "seniors" as in "retired," not as in "last year of school"). By the end of the game, I had to be physically dragged from the stadium, an arm around the shoulders of each of my less-inebriated compatriots.

Parking for a game is always a bitch, and while I had walked to the stadium, one friend had driven and parked far away, but the other had ridden his motorcycle and was parked just outside. The plan was to take the stumbling, mumbling me home on the motorcycle but not long after setting out a cop pulled the bike over and said that I was causing the vehicle to sway so much as to be a traffic hazard. My friend left me standing on the sidewalk, with a promise that I'd wait for him to park his bike around the corner and he'd come back to walk me home. This was a promise I apparently didn't keep.

Now, parallel to the road upon which I'd been left is the Burke-Gilman Trail, a popular walking/biking route that ran by both the stadium and my home. The next thing I remember after leaving my friend parking his bike is being prodded in the butt by a concerned passer-by's foot. I was face down in a half-full drainage ditch, with my head in the mud and feet on the trail, causing untold thousands of fans returning from the game to walk around me. My personal Samaritan asked if I should be sleeping there, for which I thanked him, wiped the mud from my hair and began to slowly crawl home.

I must have been passed out in the ditch for quite a while, because by the time I dragged my sorry ass in the door of my apartment, my friends from the game had come and gone twice looking for me, putting a little bit of panic into my girlfriend, with whom I was living the time. Not long after my dramatic arrival, the rest of the group returned from the search party to find me in the bathroom.

My humiliation was not at an end, however, because I shortly passed out again. This time I was found in the fetal position on the bathroom floor with my pants and underwear around my ankles, by Curious Chris, John Bowen's three year-old son. The child returns to the group in the living room and innocently asks why "uncle Mark was dead while going poopie?" This would be the same Chris who, from this experience, learns the term "alcohol poisoning" before he learns his ABC's (and who's head I inserted head-first into a ceiling fan several months later -- that showed the nosy little bastard!).

I don't know who won the game.

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