Steely Dan: Peg - Played 0 times.

I lived the first semester of my freshman year of college in an off-campus prison compound of a pseudo-dorm called Collegiate Village Inn (which I’m calling out because inexplicably it is still standing and taking money from students and because if I actually cared or had the energy to I’d be tempted to burn it to the ground under the cover of night, but you know, I truly cannot be bothered.  I’m too lazy!  Though I feel for the poor slobs who are still spending their loan-and/or-parent’s money on that fetid outhouse of a residence). 

I shared my squalid cinder block space with a ruddy, lunkish frat boy who loved The Dave Matthews Band’s Under the Table and Dreaming album, and football jerseys, and seemed to think I couldn’t tell when he was masturbating beneath the covers late at night or in the early AM hours, but come on, dude…  (I by contrast dyed my hair with Manic Panic and wore bowling shirts and Doc Martens, so!  Hello, Insta-Odd Couple!)  It was not that he was an awful human, though I did resent being locked out of the room that one time, while he was fumbling around the nether regions of a vacuous blonde co-ed.  I was more grossed out by the dining hall, where once I saw a cockroach—and this is a Florida-sized roach mind you, so, the scale alone!—crawling out of the toaster in the dining hall.  And then to return from Thanksgiving break to find our room burgled.  “They” had taken my roommate’s television and video game console and some other sundry items.  Only, and here’s the thing, the door hadn’t been prised open and the windows remained locked. Inside job, right?  It was near impossible to counter that perception.  There were passkeys just laying around the front office, and it could have been nearly anyone.  I made a stink to the “staff,” the sun-dazed bros behind the counter who were, I swear, more concerned at the time with a keg delivery than the crime at hand. 

Well! After some parental interference, I got the remainder of my deposit back, and moved into an apartment near the University with a wild-haired, dippy, over-earnest (and female) classmate. (Think:  chakras and black-and-white films and a whiff of patchouli.)

It was equally shabby, the place, with its own bug problems, and its grotty beige carpet and rotten countertops.  Still, it was immeasurably cheaper, and I had my own bedroom and my own bathroom.  I had a roommate with whom I could have soul-bearing, wine-drunk all-night chats, unburdening to each other the weighty concerns of the eighteen-year-old heart.  Alternately:  drunken dance parties.  L. particularly loved Steely Dan’s “Peg,” despite (or because of?) its dubious lyrical content. So we played the song on repeat, bouncing around the carpet in our underwear, like this is what adult people did, like this made us “grown-up.” I mean, we could barely between us boil a pot of water at the time. We were the least mature in our first blush of independence. Still!  The sheer silliness of those moments, the kinetic joy, the exuberance, it was freeing; that level of unconscious abandon cannot ever be recaptured.