Get Off Me Lawn, Ye Wee Bitty Fucks

I currently live in a town called Amherst, Massachusetts.  It's relatively small, the 41st largest city in the state¹, but certain readers may recognize its name more easily than Methuen or Leominster or Haverhill or Woburn or Billerica², all of which are more populous but lack the cultural secret-weapon Amherst has: it's a big college town.  Amherst is most importantly the locus of one of the multiple campuses of the University of Massachusetts, and its effect on the way the entire town functions is impossible to ignore: the town's population and business go way down between semesters, and the bus schedules and stops and whatnot also are determined by the colleges in the area, UMass most of all.  I'm 22 and I moved here last year, but I'm not a student of any of the schools in the Five College Consortium³.  Despite this, there have been several advantages to moving to this area; there are a lot more people in my age group here than there were back in Vermont, and I have proximity and access to not one but several botanical gardens.  Of course, as w/ all things, you've gotta take the rough w/ the smooch.  Sometimes UMass can make living here a pain.

One thing I didn't learn about until after I moved here was UMass's annual tradition called 'Blarney', which occurs in early March and seems to follow a loose structure: wake up, put on a Celtics hoodie or some other green apparel, get together w/ your friends and make your way to one of the nearby apartment complexes, and start getting fucking hammered.  Crucially, Blarney is not St. Patty's Day, but I haven't personally been able to discern w/ any certainty what the difference is or why it exists, other than that it just provides another opportunity for college students to consume obscene quantities of alcohol.⁴  There is none of the pretense of celebrating Irish culture, it's purely just a capital-P PAAAARRRRTAYYY! for its own sake.  Which is fine, if that's your thing.

However, it's very much not fine if it isn't your thing, and it isn't mine.  For a variety of neurological factors (autism, introversion, mild agoraphobia, noise sensitivity, etc.) I've never been equipped to really even handle parties of 20 people, let alone thousands.  I am what a lot of college students would call No Fun.  Frat culture gives me the creeps and as far as I can tell most people involved in fraternities, or sororities, or in the greater university drinking/partying culture, are irredeemably boring and vapid.⁵  Blarney is the sort of occasion on which I'm reminded that I kind of live in a bubble; most of the people w/ whom I interact on a daily basis are people whose company I really enjoy, to whom I feel comfortable making chit chat, and Blarney is one of those things that serves to remind me that there are so, so many more people out there I can't relate to at all.  So Blarney was, needless to say, not an event I didn't intend to attend.  The problem w/ this is that when I said 'one of the nearby apartment complexes', I meant one specific one, which is the one I live in.  As it happens, my building was the epicenter of the whole ordeal, which made its consequences sort of inescapable.  The photo on the right was taken from my bedroom window at 10:11 AM, and the party had been raging for hours by that point.  This woke me up early.

In fact, this photo doesn't give the full picture at all.  The thing about these apartments is they're arranged in a square, w/ a shared courtyard in the centre which is accessible via sliding glass doors from each apartment's living room.  This means that when the courtyard is completely crowded w/ Blarneygoers, some of them are pressed up against the glass and can see me, and I can see them.  (The mere act of going downstairs to get an apple from the fridge in the morning was slightly terrifying.)  What this means also is that a lot of the apartments in this block are used as conduits for people to get in and out of the fray, and for all they know mine could be one of them, so people were constantly knocking on the doors trying to get in, and once I made my way downstairs and was spotted the knocking on the glass grew frenzied, w/ frat guys yelling to open the door and going "I'M GONNA TAKE A PISS IN YOUR LIVING ROOM!" and stuff like that.  Literally.  And it was at this moment that I started to grow concerned about exactly how strong the glass was.  The crowd's blood was coursing w/ alcohol and testosterone and adrenaline and it was apparent that at any moment things could get so out of control that someone would crash through the doors and the place would get trashed.  I didn't ask for any of this.  This was, fortunately enough, the first time I've ever felt truly unsafe in my own home, and it was legitimately traumatic in a way I could feel even in the moment, and I'm still reeling from it a couple weeks later.

I ended up being sort of rescued from the chaos by my bandmate and some of her MHC friends, who were not enjoying themselves much either, and stopped by briefly to decompress before heading to lunch.  They invited me to come w/ and I leapt at the chance to be anywhere but home.  Outside the apartments, there were still throngs of verdantly-clothed underage drunks and a few cops standing idly by, and we passed through them and their discarded bottles and cans and puddles of what I overheard some allege to be piss.  Three of us decided to take the bus and the rest took an e-taxi.  The entire street was far too crowded for the usual bus route to be active, so we had to head to the next-nearest stop and hope that we'd be able to even fit what w/ the hundreds of other people waiting.  As the bus slowly made its way into view we weaseled our way into the front and were able to secure a few seats, but any relief was immediately crushed along w/ my body when everyone else piled on.  I had to actively fight the entire bus ride to keep myself from being flattened.  My bandmate noticed a guy ask a girl her name and then immediately try to kiss her.  When we got to the restaurant, I spent the entire time staring into space, unable to eat anything or do much of anything but absently drink water.  My stomach was in a knot, and I was shaken.  I thought I had tried to steel myself for what was happening, and yet it had been even worse than I imagined.  

I spent the next 13 hours out of the house, going to work and band practice and then going out w/ a couple friends, and I started to feel better, but the whole time there was still an anxiety gnawing away at me that I could come back and everything would be destroyed.  One of my other bandmates jokingly compared Blarney to January 6th; I personally was reminded of Woodstock '99; of course these are both a bit of an exaggeration, but the point is clear, I hope: the vibes were really bad.  It makes me sick, the sort of mob mentality that leads people to believe that because you're in a huge group or it's a special event or something, all of a sudden the rules don't apply to you.  That it's okay for a day to act in ways that would be totally unacceptable any other time.  I've never understood that impulse, and I have no desire to.  And of course it goes hand in hand w/ extremely toxic masculine behaviour; having stayed out of the thick of it for the entire day I'm sure that the sexual assault-type stuff we noticed was only the tip of a truly hideous iceberg.

Which is to say nothing of the uncomfortable racially charged aspect of the whole thing.  If you're familiar w/ how St Patty's goes down in certain places (e.g. Boston especially) you know that it is in practice essentially National Drunk White People Day and that that's maybe kind of a bad idea maybe.  While there's nothing about Blarney that I could call explicitly racist, and there were certainly people of colour participating, the whole affair gave off an energy that was aggressively white in a way that even I as a white person find alarming and kind of scary.  Certainly the mostly-nonwhite Mount Holyoke students I was with found it pretty scary and I don't blame them.  And I'm sure it goes w/o saying that, despite the cops being present on the scene the whole time, there was an air of total ambivalence from every officer I spotted.  This is the kind of thing only a group of mostly white frat guys could get away with, you know?

And I really don't want to make this piece any more dramatic than it already is by bringing politics into it, but it really does feel insulting on a personal and political level: living through the time we're currently in, when it seems like my fellow queer and trans folk are constantly being used as this boogeyman of degeneracy, perpetually under attack by the powers that be on the grounds that we're some sort of threat to decency or whatever, it upsets me to no end when this is the type of shit the cishet white men of this country are doing and have been doing for ages.  And we're the ones who don't know how to behave?  What the fuck?!  If we need to blow up something stupid as a harbinger of the downfall of society⁶, can we please make it Blarney instead of, like, people changing the gender markers on their passports?

After

Thankfully and a bit surprisingly, when I arrived back at home at 12:30 AM, the entire crowd had disappeared leaving behind only an ocean of empties and detritus.  The doors remained closed and unbroken.  I survived.  But even if nothing of value was lost it was still a really harrowing experience.  And how inconsiderate!  It's not even like I'm the only non-student living here - there's a family w/ one or two little kids that I see sometimes running around the same courtyard; they live a couple doors down from me, and I have no idea how they made it through!  So even though time has passed and I've been able to sit down and write this thing, I'm still kind of outraged by it all.  The next morning, my coworker, who was there and knew I lived where it was happening, grinned and asked me 'Sooooo, how was Blarney??'  Fucking awful.

¹ (though quite a bit larger than my hometown)

² Not only did I, a native New Englander, not recognize any of these names, I was wrong about the pronunciation of each and every one of them when I looked them up.

³ These include the behemothic U-Mass Amherst; Hampshire College, which is the most obviously rural of the bunch, located sort of in the middle of nowhere; Amherst College, the richie-rich school; Mount Holyoke College, the women's college most of my bandmates attend; and Smith College, the women's college most of my bandmates hate.

⁴ Okay, after a little research, I learned that one of the local Irish-type pubs came up w/ it as a day w/ special deals on drinks or whatever to offset the loss of most students being away on spring break during St. Patty's.  So, there is a purpose, kind of, but not really, and that purpose always was just drinking, though to their credit I don't think 'Black Out Rage Gallons' were a part of the initial idea for Blarney.

⁵ Pardon the inflammatory nature of a lot of the observations here; the kid gloves are off for this piece.

⁶ You know, as if there weren't enough actual looming threats to worry about.