Maypole

For the past 15 years I've been throwing a party called the Maypole.

A few years before I moved to California, I was living in a Chapel Hill apartment affectionately named the Ugly House. It was perched on one of the most dangerous curves in town, right on the rim of a steep hill that plunged into a patch of undeveloped woods. So one day for the hell of it, we built a dock off the back of the house. It was as simple as taking two long planks and nailing them to a tree that shot up the slope. Then we topped off those planks with smaller boards so we could walk out and enjoy an elevated view of the woods. There wasn't much to see.

Then inspiration struck. We nailed a plastic doll face to the tree that was holding up the dock. Next we took spools of colored yarn and anchored them to the tree. We took the other ends of the spools and wrapped them around rocks. We hurled those rocks as far as we could into the woods, then crawled through the brush to find them. We stretched the yarn as far as we could into the wilderness, and when the spools ran out we tied the ends to the nearest trees.

When we finished, we had an amazing maypole of brightly colored strands that fanned out into the trees.

Over the years the party has evolved from a musical booze-fest into a relatively family-friendly affair. This year we did have a guy doing keg stands at 4 in the morning. I crashed just before the sun came up.

The maypole party is one of the few traditions that has endured through our years in Los Angeles. As old friends scatter and new friends join the fray, this is the one time each year when we get close to bringing everybody together. I highly recommend it.

My Crime Against Science

While channel surfing last week, I happened upon the film, Shattered Glass. It's the true story of young journalist's fall from grace as it's revealed that he's fabricated ridiculous news stories. The movie conjured up a dark memory of a crime I once committed against science.

I think it was my sophomore year in high school. I was working on a biology experiment. A friend had gathered a water sample from a local lake, and we placed it in an incubator for about a week. Assured that the sample would be teeming with microorganisms, we placed a splash of the water on a slide and had a look through the microscope. What we found was lackluster - some big chunks of dirt and a few random fibers floating about. Having sharpened a #2 pencil in anticipation of recording my discovery of a new lifeform, I just let my imagination take over.

The report I turned in featured a fantastic sketch of a bizarre octopus-like creature attacking an amoeba. My impressive hydra monster even had eyes at the ends of its tentacles.

A few days later I was called into my biology teacher's office. He had a very serious look on his face as he pushed my lab book across his desk. "Do you want to tell me about this?" I enthusiastically blazed into the story of dredging the sample out of the lake slime, then how I carefully monitored the incubation period. I think I even described the amoeba's frantic struggle to escape the micro-octo-monster's deadly clutch.

The teacher shook his head in dismay, then launched into a lecture about scientific ethics. He was right. I had stretched the truth...well, okay it was worse than just stretching. I still got a decent grade for the project, and I learned an important lesson about the fine line between fact and fiction. When creating fiction that's disguised as fact, don't get too carried away.

If I had just left those eyeballs off the tentacles.