I Even Went On To Higher Education, Once.

here is a link to the audio version, in case you would rather listen to this blog: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8yPRxsAiXw

     Oh...the vast, and wondrous days of the U.S.S. Commode. What exactly was the U.S.S. Commode you may be wondering? Was it one of the various oil tankers that sank in the late eighties like the Exxon Valdez? Perhaps it was one of the United States of America's proud Naval ships? No, it was an old camping toilet. A relic of better days that was found in the dusty back lot of an old second-hand junk store...With a strong emphasis on the junk-part. It was rescued by two college sophomores who happened to have an eye for beauty, or at least fifty cents, which was precisely what the old rusty camping throne cost us. It was the first day of my second year, and Eric, the friend that I had requested as a roommate, and I were looking for something to put in our room. Something so unique that it would grab the attention of friends who were in our room and dazzle the ladies with our sheer creativity and skills of insight. When we laid eyes on the discarded, and long forgotten metal piece of....uh, camping gear...we knew we had struck gold. This classic historical piece clearly had the potential to become the artwork that would tie our room's theme together.

     We cleaned it up, repainted it blue and white, and boldly and proudly stenciled U.S.S. Commode in big black lettering on both sides. After we had it all decorated, we began to think and concentrate hard on the best use for our proud oddity. We wanted it to serve a grand purpose, so after a labored two seconds of intensive deliberation, it was decided that the tank part of the U.S.S. Commode would be a planter, and the bowl-part could be filled with ice and would serve well as a cool place to keep beverages. You would just lift the lid of the U.S.S. Commode, reach in, and pull yourself out a frosty one. Pretty neat huh? Unfortunately, our attention wavered, and after we had visited the women's dorm, we forgot about our beloved centerpiece and all our plans for it. It still stood boldly and confidently in our room and became the subject of more than a few inquiries. Questions that usually started with something along the lines of,"really?".

     After graduation, the U.S.S Commode came home with me and may reside in my parent's basement. I wish I had pictures of the old tub because I'm confident that you'd enjoy them, but sadly I don't. However, I can assure you, readers, that the U.S.S. Commode was real, oh yes, she was very real.

I should start at the beginning, though, with my freshman year at college. It was the fall of nineteen eighty-three, and I had just graduated from High School, as evidenced by the picture below.

     After graduation, and not knowing what I wanted to do, I decided that it would be a good idea to go to a two-year College in Hesston Kansas to acquire my Associate of Arts degree. I may, however, have made an overstatement when I said that I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do because the truth was that when asked to think about what I might want to do, in reality, it was closer to, "Uh, yeah, I got nothing." However, I don't want to give anyone the impression that I was not a good student and that this was not the right decision for me. It was, and some of my best times happened in those two years. I was also a solid B student, with occasional forays into the mystical world of an A.

     Reaching for the elusive A grade for me, often resembled trying to blaze a new trail as I sought to hack my way through a dense jungle armed with only a toothpick. Achieving a perfect grade was not entirely impossible...but a task that included a level of concentration and effort that I did not seem to aspire to...nor was very often willing to give.

     I did have ONE interest. I enjoyed cooking, and so took a campus job as a food prep. I met and made a great friend, Brian, who was also a food prep, and that just so happened to live in the same dorm, on the same floor as myself. Brian and I had a motto that people shouldn't mess with us because "We are Food Preps and we prep the food that YOU eat!". Later, of course, the motto was slightly changed too, " We are Food Poops, and we poop the food that you eat!".

     So, one weekend a month and two days a week I would go off to poop the food. What can I say? It was nineteen eighty-three, and apparently, I was still amused by toilet humor. You really can't blame me though because I'm a guy, and everyone knows that girls mature at a younger age than boys. I mean, aren't girls pretty much emotionally mature by the second grade, and guys are like......well, I'm forty-nine now and haven't got a solid grip on it yet, so you do the math. But Brian and I got a lot of miles out of our legendary status as food preps, and we worked together in the kitchen for both years.

     At the end of each school year, there was a traditional talent show, named The Bill Show, and the two of us worked up a performance that included some stand-up comedy and the parody of a famous song...done while we played air guitar on handball rackets. We had a friend play the song on a boombox and then cut the music at the chorus of the song so that we could shout out our improvised lyrics. During the first year, we did ZZTop's Sharp Dressed Man, which we changed, from,"every girls' crazy about a sharp dressed man", to, "every girls' crazy about a sharped dressed food prep." The second year's performance had us singing the Kansas song Carry On Wayward Son. We changed the lyrics, from,"lay your weary head to rest, and don't you cry no more," to, "lay your weary spatula to rest and don't you prep no more!".

     There were two male dorms on the campus. The one I was in was a large two-story building. It was an older building, and I had a room on the 2nd or top floor. The second men's dormitory was a larger, more modern brick building. The dorm I was in was named Green Gables, and a lot of my memories came from time spent in that house. On the first floor, right inside the entrance, was a large common room with couches and a television.

     All of the students at that school took the same required class in the afternoon, called Foundations, which was a mix of Western Civilization, History, Ethics, and Religion. Following the afternoon course, I would sometimes join a large mob of guys who would make a run for this television room so that we could quickly acquire a good seat. We would then proceed to get our daily addiction appeased by watching General Hospital. Pretty pathetic, a bunch of eighteen and nineteen-year-olds glued to a soap opera, but I guess it could have been worse.

     Then there was the day that the other dorm decided to attack our dorm. We were in our rooms and the next thing we knew; there was a horde of screaming maniacs running towards us. They were throwing water balloons and yelling challenges at us. We had a fire escape on both sides of the building, and they began to climb it. One guy on our floor got the brilliant idea to push open the emergency exit door, whereby he would fling a bowl of urine at whoever just happened to be out there at the time. This kid was not the brightest bulb that our dorm had to offer, and even though it may have seemed like a stroke of genius, he only managed to splash himself when the spring-loaded door shut right before the crucial flinging of the urine.

I know....I know.....but these shorts were in style then.

      By the time that I entered College, I had my studying style roughly figured out. There were just a few rough edges, but I was quickly able to smooth these out and become quite comfortable with my long-established style. If I were to give my style a name, a technique that had been perfected and had been in the making for twelve years, that name would have to be procrastination. Putting impending studies to the side became not only my style...but an art form. An art that was supported by all my close friends who, I joyfully found out, also practiced a form of the skill. That's right, I am referring to procrastination as a skill. Anybody can just lazily put something off, and sadly there are a lot of disillusioned people and amateurs running around.  To do it thoroughly and comprehensively you really have to want it; you have to own it. A good procrastinator will spend his time giving himself alibis and begin by laying the groundwork for very plausible explanations as too why they did not accomplish a task or assignment on time. They do it this way...so that when the deadline comes and the final push is inevitable...when they are within the throes of sheer and total panic and questioning themselves as to why they waited, they will be able to scroll back in their mind and begin to see and understand that there really was no choice...all of the current madness now becomes clear.

     Once in awhile, after arriving at this realization, a profound euphoria and feelings of purpose will settle upon the person who waited until the last possible nano-second. To be genuinely skilled not only means that one has to be able to know when it is still possible to put something off in favor of another event...but also when they have to hit the bricks, meaning that they are entirely out of spare time and the only time left will be needed to accomplish the task before them. You may have three months to do a primary assignment but if you can do a credible job, with a few shortcuts, in four hours than you wait. You can not give in to pressure, and you can never allow yourself to do anything with the task in question before that four hour deadline. To the untrained eye procrastination looks like chaos, but it is a self inflicted, and controlled chaos. It is a paradox because good procrastination only comes from proper planning, foresight, and diligent execution over time. If I could just figure out how to put off my plans to procrastinate.....

So, yeah, the picture was staged...okay, I get it, but I thought it would be nice to show irrefutable evidence that I did know how to study......And, No, it wasn't my first time.

     I mentioned earlier that everyone was enrolled in a class named Foundations, or Foundies for short, as we referred to it. It was a heavy class and worth five credits as I remember it. During the year, there were three significant assignments, all of them including three or four book reports, hand drawn and very detailed maps, and essays on various subjects. The finished result was usually at least thirty to forty pages and was to be all organized in a three-ring binder. The sane and clear-thinking student joined study groups and spent at least thirty minutes of their study time every day to successfully finish the project on time. My friends and I acceded to no study groups, nor did we spend any time on any day working on it. We waited until the day before and then would go to a twenty-four-hour doughnut shop in the next town over and whip the whole thing out. I remember these being very desperate times, but also some of the best times. In a complete doughnut-glazed, and coffee-ground laced stupor, we were able to get the assignment done, handed in on time, and always managed to get a good grade. And I am not making this next part up, nor am I under any false sense of memory here. I once got one of these assignments back, after the professor had gone through and graded them, with a big circle that was done in red ink around a paragraph that I had written, that said," This was very nicely worded." Huh? I asked all my friends to read it and tell me if they could understand or make any sense of what I had written. No one could, and it remained a mystery. Whatever it was, it had gotten me an A, so I didn't question it too seriously.

     Two of my excellent friends, Craig and Mike, and I used to study all night at a local twenty-four-hour truck stop restaurant. We would consume large amounts of french fries, pie, soda, and coffee. There was also an arcade in the back, so we would often take study breaks,(I don't remember a lot of studying going on), and play copious amounts of pinball. We played so much pinball that it felt like we were taking ten-minute breaks to study, not the other way around. It was also the three of us that got a hold of the master key to the girl's dorm, which we put to excellent use I assure you. Unlike the boy's dorm of which there were two, there was just one girl's dorm, but it was the most prominent building on campus. It was a 2-story building that housed the campus bookstore, student lounge, and snack bar. It was also a very long building, and all the girls were housed on the second floor.

     Hesston College had a very successful Nursing program that was the starting point for many careers in that field. As such, one of the things that you could find on campus was a very well stalked medical lab. There was a multi-floored building that was entirely dedicated to teaching, both through lectures and by working hands-on in one of the several labs. One of these labs is where the three of us come into the story. The college owned a full-size, and anatomically correct, practice dummy that weighed about ninety pounds. The lab was open to students until eleven p.m., so armed with a walkie-talkie and a flashlight, I went into the building at ten forty-five, and when no one was looking, I snuck under the bed and remained there until after closing. Once the building was empty, and all was dark I called Mike and Craig, who came right over. There was no alarm on the building, and it was relatively easy to let them in. We proceeded to steal the dummy and smuggled it into the girl's dorm. We were able to get it into the bed of a girl that was gone that weekend, but whose roommate was asleep on the top bunk. We put the dummy on its side, facing the wall, and partially covered the head with a pillow so it would look like someone was still trying to sleep. Later, we got reports of an entirely freaked-out girl over at the girl's dorm when she made the shocking discovery in the morning. Of course, we were as puzzled as everyone else and never let on that we did it, especially after we heard that the anatomically-correct dummy that we had stolen and carelessly mishandled was worth thousands. I'm only confessing now because I believe that the statutes of limitations have run out, and even if I am wrong about this, I also don't think that Kansas can extradite me from Oregon. We also poured packets of Kool-aid mix in the women's shower heads so that the morning would start off on a bright note.

Well, the two years spent at Hesston College sadly came to a close, and I had to say goodbye to some of the best friends that I had ever had. On a positive note, though, I did graduate, as evidenced by the picture below.

Okay, a cake MAY not actually prove anything.....but you're just going to have to trust me.

I graduated in the fall of nineteen eighty-five and in the winter of nineteen eighty-six I began a twelve-month Culinary Program at a local Culinary Institute. I finished that and received a certificate in late December of that year. Below is the only picture I could find of myself in my Chef's uniform.