This is it, yesterday I waLked across a stage in McGonigle Hall and received my M.A. in Creative Writing from Temple University.

Two years of haranguing, bilieteering and hobreaching are over, once and for all. What's left is to wash off these horrible stains on my shirt, mop up the last of the bloodstains, remove the crucifix from my neck, and start making like a writer. Tonight, I must start new adventures. I've already made some pwerful and influential friends, a socialator, a comic, and a neurotic. Wonderful people those three. I see great swaths of death before us, an obscene glint in our eyes.

But this weekend will be spent with the people that made it happen, the ones whose tentacles never pulled me back from the writer's edge. They who let me piss on their floor and without ever having to apologize. Good, old friends.

But now that I have my diploma, I know that new terrors await me. Though I may consume countless vodka-tonix this weekend, though I may be in Europe soon, I know that wherever I may be, in the blink of an eye, it could suddenly become:

BAT COUNTRY!