Freshman year in college, my worthless redneck roommate wanted to hit the rush parties. I though, for a moment, maybe a few stray neurons wandering the vast, unexplored country of his so-called mind had accidentally bumped into each other and sparked a thought. Free beer. Free drugs. All you had to do was make conversation with a handful of future salesmen, which isn't really that hard to do when you're too drunk to use three-syllable words. I wasn't aware that he was bringing a pen. Little did he know.

That's not foreshadowing. Just a fact.

I didn't mind that he'd pledged - it was his life, which didn't have enough momentum to get up to "assistant manager" anyway - but he kept trying to drag me along. He'd tell me how Oliver, Scooter, and Booger were such great guys. "Then why do they have to buy friends?" A few days later, it was all about how cool it would be to live in the frat house. "I could bust up the furniture and take a dump under the radiator if that's what you like." He finally left me speechless when he told me that frat boys get all the best looking girls. I just couldn't think of words small enough to make him understand that I'd been to the same party, got so crocked I made conversation with a stuffed muskrat, and still could not have been interested in the squalid little rock-apes they called their "little sisters" ....

... though I'd considered taking off with that muskrat.

In all fairness, they might have been semi-attractive, or at least medium-plain, about twenty pounds, a few hundred beers, and a several-teen ménàges-a-vingt-trois ago, but a lifestyle that's fundamentally no different from that of a crack-whore tends to leave them looking like they went face-first into the hardpan, waddling around with hemhorroids like artichokes, and smelling like something that sticks to the lid of a dumpster - or in other words, the perfect companions for the kind of company they keep.