Nutshell

Imagine a man. The man is tall. The man is fat. The man is blondly bearded and his blond hair is unfashionably long. The man is young, but his weight and his beard and the hard set of his eyes make him seem older. The man is dressed in dark clothing. He is wearing too much clothing for late spring in a desert climate. He wears his black jeans and black sweatshirt as though to shield his shape against the outside world, as though he would as soon wear steel armor over his skin as cotton. He wears a backpack on his back and the backpack is full of books that cause his broad shoulders to stoop.

He stands at the foot of a bridge that spans a city street. A human flood comes at him over the bridge. Hundreds of eighteen-year-olds with perfect or adequately perfect or at the very least perfectly adequate bodies come jogging at him. The eighteen-year-old bodies are wearing nothing but underwear. The eighteen-year-old bodies wave and shout and cheer and wave their hands in the air with drunken exuberance. Their sweat smells of alcohol. Their sweat is eighty proof.

The man sets his jaw and locks his eyes. He deliberately stares at the point in the air fifty feet directly out from him. He deliberately does not stare at the nearly naked breasts. He fails, locks his eyes again.

The man takes a breath. He closes his eyes and bows his head. He opens his eyes and raises his head. He forges into the human flood, going against the current. He is jostled from all sides by young flesh, the soft flesh of women and the hard flesh of men. He forces his way forward through the flesh and the laughs and the screams of ecstasy, refusing to concede one inch to the circumstances. He is a darkness among all the bright nudity.

The tide overtakes him. He is pushed back.

Unable to force his way through the flood, he heads to the street to take a circuitous detour. Nearly naked people clutter the sidewalks and clutter the air with their loud chatter. One of the naked girls walks opposed to him on the sidewalk; she sees the hard set of his eyes and sees his beard and his fatness and his darkness and shies away, scared. Her boyfriend with moves protectively in front of her, putting the wall of his abs between the girlfriend and the man. The man does not stop. He looks at the girl's shivering breasts as little as he possibly can.

The man reaches an intersection, sees people standing next to the base of the streetlight, doesn't trust their judgment, reaches out to push the Walk button himself. Naked people crowd around him. One of the naked girls loudly and drunkly asks him if he did the Undie Run. Without ever looking at her, the heavily-clothed and heavyset man shakes his head and says “No.” She then asks another waiting and standing person if he did the Undie Run. She says they do Undie Runs in London, which is where she's from. She is very clearly lying; her voice is from nowhere near London, although now, as if to give some force to the lie, she remembers to torque her vowels a little bit, but the effort is inadequate and unconvincing.

The light changes. The man and the others cross the street. The man walks the several blocks to finally get to the parking structure, and walks to the far end where he parked his car.

It is only when he comes to his usual space and finds it empty that he recalls that he parked in the parking structure on the other end of the college campus. He realizes that he has, in fact, been going the wrong way this whole time.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give unto you the life of David Michael Kammerzelt III in a goddamn mother-fucking nut-shell.

(Last night actually happened exactly like this, almost.)