2003-11-03 - 12:11 p.m.

Some of the costumes at Hampshire College's Halloween Party:

-The Royal Tennenbaum Family

-12-sided Die

-girls in hotpants

-guy who broke apart a glow-in-the-dark skeleton and pinned it to his clothes

-a time machine

I heard Eugene Mirman say that at his school they have a thing called "Trip or Treat". I played at his alma mater on Friday night.

You make up your curriculum at this school. Mr. Pennygaff of the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus studied Anarchist Theory and Eugene studied Comedy that included an hour of stand-up for his final project.

I proposed to the crowd that I would enjoy knowing that someone would study time travel. That's ambition. Even if their final project-which I hope would be a time machine- failed. Personal projects that exhaust one's resources and time that fail is a wondrous thing to behold! I'm not talking about tax dollars going to that star wars bullshit. I'm talking about a lone scientist that builds something so fucking awesome that it doesn't work. It's like when you see a car crash at a NASCAR event. Only better because you see the pain, the time, the money, and thought of one individual go to shit. The next time may be failure again. But there's gonna be sometime when that scientist builds his Tesla coil. He's gonna go back in time and grab a brand new campaign button from William Jennings Bryan and bring it to me and say,

"Look what I have found! A loser's trophy!"

I loved playing that school.