June 04, 2004

Before going to the convocation, you should blow your mind with booze and acid. The three-hour long ceremony is so shatteringly stupid that only vivid, drug-induced nightmares could make it bearable.

“It’s going to be dull,” Zorianna warns you in the morning as you make breakfast for the two of you. But because you feel fatherly pouring coffee into her mug, you decide to arrive at her graduation sober and respectable. Besides, it’s too early in the morning to start drinking heavily.

So put on sunglasses and a brave face before leaving the house with her by your side. “You do look like my father,” she laughs. She too looks stunning with the breeze playing coolly with her hair and her classy black dress covering her firm, white breasts. You talk about Baudrillard as you watch her strange smile, and because it’s such a beautiful day filled with such beautiful people you imagine (wrongly) that the ceremony will not be as bad as you anticipated.

“It can’t be too dull,” you tell yourself again once you meet your beautiful friends who are graduating: Trevor embraces you warmly before picking up his gown; Corwin looks menacing in black; and Mel is dignified and eager to head towards Western.

And you sit near Trevor’s family, lovely one and all, ready for what’s to come. You think you might get to enjoy this after all, especially once you decide to take some pictures of the graduates. You move into position, ready your camera, and get elbowed out of the way by anxious parents willing to kill to get a good photo of their children.

“Fuckers,” you mutter. There’s no sense competing with doting parents for pictures, so you sit down disgusted and spend some time photographing the photographers. Graduates are still filing out as you leave to take a piss.

By the time you return, the President of the university has finished asking for donations in a monotonous voice, and everybody is edging forward in their seats for what’s to come. But the ceremony won’t get better. Someone starts moaning in an uninspiring voice about Canada. That’s when you rush back into the bathroom to jerk off for ten minutes. You’re starting to regret not injecting booze, drugs, or animal tranquilizer into your veins this morning.

And then the real fun begins. Six hundred graduates are called up one by one and receive a handshake and a piece of paper telling them where to pick up their real degrees. Once you realize that this painfully meaningless roll call will go on for the next two hours, you get on a bus and leave for Kitchener.

When you come back two hours later, the five thousand people present are clapping like mad as the graduates are prodded back into their cages. You missed nothing. On the way out, you suspect that all those people able to endure so much tediousness for so long have access to more potent drugs that you do.

The sea of people crushes you when you make your way towards Zorianna, and you feel they secretly resent you for having left. She smiles happily with a bouquet of flowers in her hands. You grab her and run together towards Laurier.

“We’ll see you at the reception,” you yell to Trevor who’s perched in his black robes on a ledge.

At the reception, hundreds of people are crowded in an intimately small space. There’s no chance of getting near the booze or the food, so you run with Zorianna up to the third floor and spill water on the people below from a balcony. You’re finally happy and childish, both of you, and because you’re also hungry you head towards Mel’s Dinner. While eating, she laughs and dances to the music and you feel wonderful.

You need a good drink to wash down the memories of the ceremony, so you grab two bottles of wine from home and head for the park. The wine sparkles in the sunset, and you play chess by the lake trying to forget the day. You’re both cilled to the bone as soon as the sun sets, and you walk back towards Laurier holding each other tight to warm up. A smile breaks across your lips and you’re no longer cold.

In the concourse you exhaust each other with talk and laughter and then drift asleep on the dirty couches, your knees touching. An hour later you wake her up gently to take her home, and in the morning you make her scrambled eggs for breakfast. She leaves for Toronto in the morning, and you slobber all over her shoulder in the doorway.

That’s what you get for attending her convocation.