...they keep pulling me back in!

Tomorrow, I embark for Los Angeles, hopefully for the last time. The remainder of my miscellaneous crap still holds up a corner of my old Rose Avenue apartment in Palms, and I'm pretty sure it still has that good ol' Marcus odor, just to remind my old roommates of what they had to put up with for two years and one year, respectively.

It'll be difficult, though. In a mere 17 days, I have reassociated myself with the East Bay; the smells, the sights, the feelings, the friends, the food, the drinks, the drugs. I have maintained a mostly comfortable online relationship with most of my Los Angeles friends--I'll get in touch with you soon, Siobhan, I promise--and have plunged in head-first with my buddies of yore.

I really miss these fools. I often can't get a good quote out of any of my college friends if I tried to pry it out with a crowbar, but the quips of the so-called uneducated degenerates with which I socialize up here come at a priceless and steady rate. As I head into the South--what should be Annie Lennox's follow-up to her Oscar-winning song--I will leave you with some of the verbal excrement my ingeniously spirited friends, and myself, let drop without fail.

(Note: Most were likely "under the influence," but then again, you'd expect that from me.)

"I am the cockjab of responsibility..."

"It's fun to have a room temperature friend."

"It was after we blew up all that macaroni with those M-80s...that you tried to kill Billy with a shovel."

"You threw a toaster oven off your porch at her!"
"I did?"

"This is the reason I never want to go to Madagascar."

"I've seen you immobilized in your decadence."

"I was 5'11" and 125 lbs! I thought I had AIDS!"
"Yeah, AIDS is not good."

[non-chalantly] "Marcus, your beer is on fire."

(In addition, we discussed the validity and legality of hunting raccoons. Why, I'm not sure.)