Chapter VIII: The Revenge of Brian Powers
(September 2004 - October 2004)

"I do solomly swear that I will stop letting people put monkeys on my back. Usually at least. Sometimes people are really sneaky or have a monkey that can jump onto your back from really far away when your not paying attention. Also sometimes people promise you things if you let them put a monkey on your back. Like candy. Ah, for the joys of popcorn."
-Zion "The Book" Cao Cao

Ari continued to act insane while Zion continued to obsess over sex.

Ari's just finding brand new really creative ways to complain and demand support. She was asked out on a date by this guy on Friday, and the date went airy because she refused to kiss him. Um, how the hell am *I* expected to be supportive in all of this? Fucking ridiculous.

That same night I went over to Mount Holyoke and hooked up with a girl. Her name is Hanna and she's damn hot. So I'm quite happy now. She's coming over to Amherst tonight in fact. See, the thing few people seem to take advantage of is that Amherst is the "Five-School Consortium (sp)". The five schools are:

Amherst. Preppy, elitists, Harvard like, etc. Good for the future jobs and such, but bleh. 1,600 students or so. Coed. Guys do outnumber girls here by a bit for some reason.

University of Massachussets. Has a college around the size of Amherst, 2,500 students or so. Coed. This is a party type of school similiar to CU or something.

Hampshire. Hippy heaven. Essentially a farm built on what has to be the only patch of prairie in a 500 mile area. We joke that the grass is actually a carefully tended field of weed. Coed, 'bout 1,500 students. They don't give grades - just pass fail. Ah, to float through school without a care.

Mount Holyoke. About 1,800 students - all girls. This is one of the "seven sister" schools, so it's got a good academic rap, and many students attend due to the academic reputation despite it being all girls.

Smith. About 1,800 student - all girls. Another seven sister school. Smith is known to be more lesbian than Mount Holyoke, but even gay-heavy population at least 2/3rds are straight.

So do the math. Guys have an advantage here overall. The culture at Amherst sucks. Talked to other people about it, and it is agreed. So, I just hop on a bus to Mount Holyoke, and it's that easy. Suddenly I'm in a dance where girls outnumber guys 16 to 1. Now, for some unknown reason no one above freshman does this, so I'm guessing I will think this practice is bad for some unknown reason in about a year. But until then I say it's great! The weird thing is that this year Freshman aren't doing this. In fact I was one of only three guys that went. In the past the freshman basically invaded these schools.

Things seemed to be improving by a small amount, atleast in Zion's opinion.

The good news on Ari is that she actually seems to have switched back to normal. At least last night. Now, this could be a one night thing, but she was perfectly sane, normal, and even funny last night, and pledged not to act like a bitch anymore. I hope that this actually occurs. While I realized - and I believe I told you before - that she was a bit crazy, I did not think it was to this extent. I am quite glad for my own sanity, and my confidence that I might know someone after dating her for ten months, that she might be the person I thought she was. So that's a relief.

On the other hand I'm dating this girl Hanna at Mount Holyoke, as I mentioned. That's cool, only not - and it's not really the other hand - because I'm slowly realizing the very, very wide range of problems I'm about to encounter. Most of those you would not be the slight bit interested in. However, I am sure of the concept that I am guiding myself towards things which will not be fun.

And one must wonder, why Zion would do something which he knew would only cause a lot more harm than good. Meanwhile, the improvement in Ari's Behavior was very short lived.

Ari switched schools to the Denver School of the Arts and went wacko again. She's basically just acting really rude to me. I don't think the whole friend thing is going to work out. It just really sucks to talk to her. In other news on her end she says she's dating three guys right now and causing fights between them. I don't really know how to respond to that, but I find it a perculiar breed of insanity. My basic question to her was, "Why?" And her incoherent response seemed to just point to the idea that it was an ego trip for her.

This is probably what Ari is doing for a living these days. Of course she is paid in raw ego boosts rather than money.

I wouldn't have fun dating multiple girls at once. I suppose watching a catfight between them for me would boost my ego, but I think I'd mostly feel bad about causing it afterwards. The whole situation would just stink. I don't see the appeal in it. We just had our fall break last weekend and Hannah spent five days here because my roommate was in Chicago. It was a pretty damn good time. I currently don't see this as a real long term thing, and there are things that could be improved, but she's the only consistent good thing in my life right now.

And yet... Ari's psychotic behavior was only the start of a situation that was about to get MUCH more bizzare. An old enemy was about to return in an unexpected way... and its quite possible that he was out for REVENGE!... Or its actually more likely that he was too high/drunk to know what he was doing and was simply hoping to get lucky with a slutty looking girl on the bus...

Right: I want your take on this. Guess who called me last night? Out of anyone who you personally know and knows me as well? Seriously attempt a guess at this and try to make your eyes not skip because I'm not going to be annoying enough to put a lot of returns before the answer... although perhaps that sentence was more annoying. Sorry. Brian Powers.

So, that's not even the shocking part. Guess why he called me.... and no I didn't play an evil prank on him. You really don't have much of a shot on this but you should take a stab at it because I almost guarantee my answer will be more shocking. He's dating Ari.

Anyway, Brian simply called my cell, which I was VERY surprised he had, and began with, "What's up homie? It's Brian Powers! How's things?" Turns out he met Ari on a bus and was going to "hang out" with her on Tuesday. She somehow mentioned me, (how or why have not been explained,) and Brian told her that we were, "G's."

Brian's life story turns out to be that he dropped out of school. Don't really know why. And he hopes to collect disability soon for being crazy. Technically he's just manic-depressive, but if you can collect disability for that then I might have to either change my position on the disease or beat up Bush for somehow magically being more overextending with social welfare than the Democrats, (seriously, Bush is guilty of many things, but he should be solid on this particular breed of insanity.) To return to the story, Brian has no plans for his future and is currently standing around playing video games and smoking dope that, as always, seems to mystically be ever-present in the lives of people who don't have jobs and theoritically shouldn't have the money to pay for it. Brian wanted me to smoke with him when I got back. I gave him some ambigious answer in case I needed an excuse to meet him in the future and then returned to what I assume is the striking question in your mind: when and exactly how Brian became a gangster and probably black. See the lines above on his use of language if you're confused on this account. He's not talking like a bum hippie like he should be, "Dude" or "Man".

Now, if you live in my world you rarely take things like this as coincidence. I don't think you live in my world, yet I think you agree on that. So my response was to call Ari a few hours later and see if she brought Brian up. I highly suspected that Tuesday was a date, (although Tuesday's a weird ass day for a first date, IMO. Guess the day of the week doesn't really matter from Brian's perspective. That brings up a tangent I hadn't thought of before. Neither Brian nor Ari has a car. Ari's is in Englewood more than halfway to Castle Rock from Brian's house... how is this going to work? But I digress.) As it turns out I was right, and Ari was thankfully not shady about it like Brian was.

So, Ari says that she and Brian "really clicked" on the bus and that she "really likes him" and asked me what I thought of him. Umm.... last time I checked Brian wasn't on my top list for dateable guys. In fact, he may even fall below such dubious choices as Luke or Dave, (actually Dave might be a good choice in a funny kinda way.) Nor did my conversation with Brian exactly change this perception of mine. And yet I know she's not going to accept this and will essentially just yell at me. After all, she is moderately aware that I'm dating someone who I'm serious with, so recommending against guys seems weird. So I dodge the question by asking her, "What about the other three guys you were dating? Are you still dating them?"

"Sorta, but I'm over that stage. I think I'm going to dump them for Brian." Wah! Okay. I don't know who these guys are, and I don't think she's serious with them - but all of them are aced by BRIAN on a freaking few minute bus meeting? My world has turned into a blue cat. She asks me again about Brian. I try to be easy on him, but realize that 30 seconds in I have already reviewed the subjects of stealing, pornography, violence, and weed. So I attempt to moderate that by saying ridiculous things like, "I don't think Brian stole from his friends. He never stole from me," and, "To my knowledge, he's never fought anyone he liked." While these things are certainly true they negated the objective advice of, "WTF?!?"

I also have another question to raise. Why is Brian my bestest old buddy now according to Brian?

Anyway, once I realized that I couldn't really give her advice not to date him and I had done my job not to recommend it I managed to skip back to how she planned to dump these three random people. They turn out not to be serious, although there was a bit of ambiguity there, although the notable parts is that one is 24 and another has bought her a couple items worth over $100.

But back to the main question: is there anything I am obligated to do on this Brian development? If not obligated, *should* I do anything? Or is the right course just to ignore this fiasco?

Back when Zion and I had attened a shitty private school called Denver Academy (All the unspeakably stupid stories I have about Denver Academy could fill a whole new book. Or did I tell you that already?) one of the other students at the school was BRIAN POWERS! One thing you need to know about Denver Academy is that there were only two kinds of students there: Rich kids whose parents wanted to brag that their kids were at the most expensive school in the city and total fuckups who had already been booted out of public school. Brian was without any doubt a member of the fuckups group. Brain was the catalyst for several of the stupid stories of Denver Academy, not the least of which was the cheese throwing incident that probably would have gotten our teacher fired right in frount of our entire class had she not been so outrageously angry over the thing that her boss was actually afraid to confront her and quitely slipped out of the room.

Another thing about Denver Academy though is that because its such an absurdly fucked up school to begin with, incidents such as these are to be expected every day and its very rare to see anyone kicked out of the school for it or even diciplined in any sort of real way. Despite that fact the most amazing thing about Brian Powers is that he is one of the elite few who actually managed to get himself kicked out of Denver Academy. He managed to do this by attempting to buy drugs in the middle of class one day. By passing a note asking for the drugs... to a girl that didn't even like him! She left the note on her desk and some nosey brat whose name I have long since forgotten found the note and turned it over to the teacher.

Brian was dragged out of class later that day. Nobody knew why and that night we called him. And by 'we' I mean almost everyone in Brian's class. We had recently discovered the outrageously cool invention of three-way calling which we used to great effect to often get anywhere from 5-50 people on the phone at one time, something that often caused great confusion but was also quite entertaining. This perticular night we had about 15 people on the phone when we called Brian and asked him to disclose the details of why he was dragged form the class room that day by several angry looking men. Brain told the unspeakably stupid story of how he had attempted to buy drugs in class that day and we decided we needed to call up the nosey brat who had turned him in so that we could cuss him out. This turned out not to work very well because said nosey brat had no friends and his mother was quite suspicious when he suddenly gained 15 friends out of the blue one night who were somehow calling all at the same time. That was followed up by the brat in question hanging up the phone on us and his anwsering machine then recording Brian threatening to kill him. The tape from the anwsering machine was waiting for us at school the next day.

Yeah, we got into a lot of trouble for that one. I think that was probably the point where Brian's popularity began to slip.

Of course, there were many, many more prank calls made later on in life by our band of trouble makers. Eventually we decided that it would be funny to start blaming Brian for all of these calls. So whenever someone we were making a prank call to asked who we were, we gave them the name of Brian Powers. We were also quite eager to give out his home phone number and address to anyone who asked for either of those things. We often joked that Brian was probably becoming a paranoid wreck because of us and all the people we had gotten him in trouble with. Brian of course did not know this and we did not know if he was actually getting into any trouble because of us due to the fact that we no longer spoke with him. Although it may explain the whole manic deppresive thing mentioned in Zion's story above.

But, the Brian Powers problem was quickly resolved:

Ari decided not to date Brian, who won't stop calling her. Her three reasons were 1) Tons of drugs 2) Dropped out of high school, no job, no plans for future 3) Brian is my "good friend". I pretty much shot down 3, and disputed 1 a bit since at least it's just weed to my knowledge, but she told me 2 was good enough on its own. I kinda had to agree with that, but I would really prefer it if she could find someone else.

And so ended the Revenge (or attempt at getting lucky with the slutty girl on the bus) of Brian Powers. Sadly, Ari continued to act like a Psycho so maybe the real winner here is Brian for not getting mixed up with her in the first place.

Go to Chapter IX, On the Fence