Last night The Wife™ and I headed out to a “restaurant” to meet up with a bunch of friends. I say restaurant loosely because yes, technically they serve food, but really it’s more of a year-round fish fry where everything is deep fried, fourteen times the size of a normal portion and served on aluminum trays and consumed on picnic tables. God bless Kentucky.

Anyway, it was a wonderfully cool evening, and eventually one of our side conversations turned to freshman year in college where a good handful of friends present all lived on the same floor of the same dorm. As we unspun memories long forgotten over the nine years that have passed, we tried to recall the names of everyone who lived on the sixth floor, which lead to a rather frustratingly disastrous game of recall.

Eventually we had to part ways, finishing our beers and heading home to our respective beds. And as The Wife™ and soon settled down to sleep, we began tossing back and forth descriptions of people in hopes of remembering names. If you’ve ever tried to unstick forgotten names from the dusty corners of your brain, you know how aggravating this can be. Or maybe it’s just me, because I’m obsessive, and once my brain starts churning through letter combinations in search of a first or last name, I can’t stop. For an hour and a half I laid there trying to recall everyone that I could from 1998’s sixth floor of Kuhlman Hall. It was rather nice to call up memories from when I was 18 years old, glances from faces that I never really saw again after that year permanently etched into my brain along with one or two letters from their names.

I should have called it quits long before, but it got out of hand. I suppose the game eventually ended when I screamed out “McKnight! and…and…Mulligan!! Hahah, I finally got them both!”

Mumbles from The Wife™ signaled that I had both won and lost at the same time. She had been asleep for quite some time, leaving me talking to myself in the dark.