"A Drunken Orgy of Blood and Vomit" -- The Scottish Exodus -- Andrewdevenney.com

The Scottish Exodus

An advert image I put on the page and sent to friends and family in email.

A front page button. Don't recall what it linked to, but amusing nonetheless.

Our friend, Matt P. McCabe, who went to Scotland for same graduate program. This was his "stern" picture.

A Drunken Orgy of Blood and Vomit: Christmas Cullings and Pub Pogroms

3 January 2001
Merchant City, Glasgow

My beautiful and sagacious wife has one consistent complaint regarding the web page, and no, it isn’t perceived blasphemy, mother. She hates my essay titles. "Hates" is perhaps too harsh a word, so "dislikes" would probably be a better fit. It’s a dislike tempered in the hot coals of her creativity, a nagging sense that interesting titles make people read essays. This is sound thinking on her part, backed up by the website hit numbers on the various essays; silly me simply assumed that if you came to the website, then you were looking at the content. My mistake. I understand today’s post-postmodern society better now. I understand that titillation draws attention, sex sells, and violence. . .uh, violates and thereby attracts. Count me among the converted. I’ll never bore you with asinine titles again. Only drunken orgies for me, thank you very much!

The holidays in Glasgow have been slow and disrupting for us. Web content on my part has slowed to a crawl, which some of you have noticed and asked about. Patience, people, I do have work to do other than playing RISK and muck around with the website. Some of you just don’t understand how difficult it is to think for a living. Heh.

I’m not a holiday person. Andrea is, until the point where she is not, and then it’s all downhill from there. Glasgow was teeming with people, pushy, manic, and overloaded with House of Fraser bags. Mega-sales dominated storefronts. Hoarders rushed out for that last minute supply of Christmas crackers only to be greeted with dwindling supplies on the shelves. On Christmas itself, the City Centre was practically desolate. I took a walk in the afternoon to see if anything was open. The only people out were the homeless, teenage thugs (something never changes), and a bunch of Arabs walking around like they owned the streets (which they did that day). It was so damn eerie. It was the only time I’ve ever walked around Glasgow and felt unsafe, and I never feel unsafe. Go watch a movie called Night of the Comet and you’ll understand what I felt like. I got the hell off the streets in a hurry.

The local Scottish climate was even jealous of all the fun the earth was having in the upper Midwest, what with sub-zero temps and enough snow to choke a walrus, so it decided to have some fun too, dropping the temp to that dread below 0 Celsius freezing point and dumping a bunch of snow on Britain. After Christmas, mind you, not before. Six inches in Glasgow, and the damn city shut down. Literally. I’m not kidding. The pussies didn’t even shovel the sidewalks. People just kept trampling it down into slush. Andrea just loved that. To top it off, Borders shut down at five p.m. one day because of the weather, and the snow was already melting and the temp rising when they did. It’s the same effect as rain in Arizona: one inch and the whole place falls apart.

Other than the weather, the Christmas/Hogmanay interregnum was fairly dull also. Our regular routine was still screwed because of the Scottish belief in taking as much time off as possible at every opportunity when presented. The bright light at the end of the tunnel was the arrival of McCabe’s fiancée Angela and our friend Duncan. When they finally made it to Glasgow after weather-related traveling hell, it was a relief to have fresh faces to talk to.

It was with them that Andrea and I spent New Years/Hogmanay with, in Babbity Bowster no less. Duncan staked out a table at 3 p.m. while Andrea and I trickled in around 5:30. Over the rest of the night, we watched our friends get shit-faced, engaged in brain-hurting and glorious intellectual conversation on a whole host of topics, and generally had a damn good time. The events are more a smear of images now than anything truly ordered. My screaming at Duncan during a discussion of historical reality because he kept playing Devil’s advocate just to annoy McCabe and me. Andrea and Angela talking about a dildo named Mr. Perfect (don’t ask, but he works underwater you know). My making Andrea cry because I said such nice, sweet sentiments. McCabe rolling and smoking enough cigarettes to give Chicago lung cancer. A drunken Duncan after midnight pinching Angela and Andrea’s butts as he squeezed by to get to the bar. You could barely walk throughout the crowded room without rubbing up against other people. When midnight hit, everybody started hugging, kissing, and shaking hands. It was an introvert’s worst nightmare.

Andrea and I left around 1:30 in the morning. Glasgow was an utter madhouse. For their Hogmanay celebrations, the city closed off huge sections of the City Centre, including our neighborhood, for a massive street party. People were everywhere, doing everything you can imagine, and then some. Some guy ran up and made us say Happy New Year into his cell phone. I counted at least eight people pissing against buildings right in front of the port-a-potties. Some girl holding a half-full bottle of wine stumbled in front of us on her way to puking in an alleyway. There were more police officers on the street than I have seen in total in all my time here, eyeing drunks about to fight and letting cute girls wear their police caps. Amazingly, there were only a few pieces of garbage outside our building’s front door. On a normal weekend, there’s usually more.

Neither of us had a hangover the next day (I don’t even drink). Our friends couldn’t say the same thing when they came over for brunch. Heh.

Just another month in Glas-ghetto.

---drew, I do like it here…really I do…honest…