Max trying to convince Courtney that sleeping with him will make her boyfriend love her more.
By my count I have driven home to Hanover for the Christmas holidays approximately 8 times since graduating high school. It’s scary to think about how that number, much like Alex’s ass hair and Pappas’s dry streak, will only continue to grow. And as I make the same monotonous drive up 93 and 89 North each year, staying awake by packing lippers and giving myself boners thinking of fantastical hookups that will never be, the same questions always seem to headline my thinking; which of the touch-holes I know will be around, how will I get my car home each night, and most importantly, which girl might slip up and inadvertently have sex with one of us?
First I’d like to thank the group of Pontius Pilates’ who decided to spin their dradles somewhere else this year (Gaybe, Alex, Sk, Saul). There was also the welcomed absence of the lame duck boyfriends’ brigade, namely Tim “gayer by the day” Draper and Mike “TEFL for life” O’Donnell.
Once I pulled into town it was time to revert into the standard problem drinker mode, which consists of not calling your parents to tell them you’re home and going to pick up Max from wherever he passed out the previous night.

Mairk is scheming.
In an effort to find bars with an atmosphere more closely embodying a “Loutish Vulgarity” to Main Street’s “Polished Casual,” we stumbled into India Queen, where I would spend a large part of my Christmas Eve and Christmas night with various Hanover Jews and townies. No other place in Hanover offers you the option of a whiskey and coke ‘neat’, curry at all hours, and a bartender who genuinely looks like he is trying to decide whether you are real or not.
Highlights of the week include:
• Christmas Eve drinking with Max and Eli where questions such as whose life is more pathetic, where at midnight could we go to shoot guns, and how best to talk Max out of getting a twelve-pack and drinking down at the ropes course were answered.
• Tom vomiting in the Willey’s driveway after he was invited up for a “party” but was really just a ploy by Max to get people to come up there so he wouldn’t be drinking alone.
• Tom subsequently passing out in T-Dick’s 6 year-old niece’s bed, covers and all (those are your uncle’s drunken shit-bag friends honey.)
• A classic Smalls’ pairty complete with hot older girls, moving the dining room table down to the basement to play Beirut, and a late night tirade by a furious Mr. Smalls which Ryan and Jillian wholeheartedly ignored.
• A groundbreaking weekend sexcapade carried out by Buck Baker and Ms. Richmond School ‘96 which included a dramatic bloody nose injury suffered during the initial encounter from a wayward Charchie elbow.
Funbags, seconds before Dave "taught her a lesson."
• The text messaging and calling of Tom and Alex immediately following the hook up to relentlessly make fun of them for not being Baker.
• A humdinger of a party put on by Mairk in leb-town that introduced two new ‘Scoma girls to the Hanover scene and who were promptly surrounded and accosted by members of the graduating classes of ’97 through ’99.
• The next day when a large group of us got hammered in town following the realization that the Patriots were getting screwed out of the playoffs with an 11-5 record courtesy of another stinker by suck ass Brett Favre.
• Later that night stumbling around downtown with Mahler, Max and some younger kid looking for a secret spot to get high and then eventually giving up and smoking a bowl right on School St.
Max and Ashley get confused while man-whoring.
And thus all of my earlier questions were answered in spades, as they always are.
It’s somewhat comforting to know that we can still tie it on like we’re completely oblivious to the expectations society has for people in their mid-twenties (and we are.) Sure our sperm may be “lazy”, our alcohol tolerance “alarming” and our potential a little “peaked” but that doesn’t mean we’ve stopped enjoying ourselves on that glorious free fall to the unforgiving ground.
So another Hanover holiday season comes to an end and we’re all still alive, nobody has “come out” or is serving time for killing a stripper (yet.) I say here’s to another year of questionable drinking, risky behavior and a general ambivalence towards responsibility. Who knows, maybe 2009 will be the year it all comes together for us (but it probably won’t.)
Cheers.