Thank You, Sir, May I Have Another?

Dean Wormer once said "Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life." Well, trust me, it's a great way to spend a weekend.

I went back to my alma mater, North Dakota State University, in Fargo for Homecoming. The event gives me and my buddies an excuse to act like we did in college one weekend a year.

I think we succeeded. Most of us were fatter than we were in college. We drank for about 10 hours straight on Friday and then another 13 on Saturday, so I think we may have been drunk (I may even still be drunk as I write this entry). And the stupidity goes without saying due to the drinking.

My best friend and college roommate Spam and I made the trip together. I can't 100 percent remember how he got his nickname, but I think it was because he shotgunned a can of lunch meat and then crushed the empty tin on his forehead to impress some girl.

Spam now works at Lex Luther College, where he designs buildings and evil schemes for the Legion of Doom to use against the Superfriends. Unfortunately, all of his time and effort usually gets fucked up by the Wonder Twins and their pet monkey, Gleek. So he was more than happy to get away from that kind of work stress.

My buddy Jeff's wife and family actually evacuate his Fargo home every year for Homecoming weekend to accomodate us. I'm not sure where Jeff's family goes into hiding, but I heard it's a nearby fallout shelter. They wait there for a few days until the beer fart fumes clear and the air quality is determined not to be a health risk.

One thing that never changes: It was great to hang out and throw back countless beers with my fraternity brothers again. It's amazing how telling the same stories we've heard and told hundreds of times are every bit as funny as the first time.

Besides being 1 year older, here are some things I noticed that made N.D.S.U. Homecoming different in 2005 than it was back in my heydey in the late 1980s.

While driving near campus, we saw a few extremely attractive female students. Back in the day, we would have been hooting and hollering out the windows like a cat-calling construction crew. This time, the car was eerily silent, making me realize I wasn't the only one who probably felt like a pedophile Tom Cruise for thinking a girl half my age was hot. I was also able to compose myself enough not to jump on any furniture, or go on Oprah to gush about it.

We stopped by the fraternity house I lived in for 3 years while in college. It just wasn't the same. Mostly because it is "dry" now, meaning no booze of any kind is allowed inside. I tried to reassure a couple of current members that even though I had the choice to be bombed for my entire collegiate career, it could always be worse.

"Hey, at least the university only made you 'dry,'" I told them. "Think if the rules were governed by Arrid or one of the other antiperspirant companies. They'd probably make the house 'Extra Dry' or 'Ultra Dry.' Then you'd really be fucked. They wouldn't even let you have running water in here."

The fraternity used to be wetter than Sea World. Non-alcoholic beverages were not permitted. We constantly had keg parties, and would look for any kind of excuse to drink ("Ooo, we have an intramural hockey game tonight, let's get a keg"). We even stocked beer and cans of Purple Passion in the pop machine to make sure our underage members could drink whenever they wanted. Those antics wouldn't fly these days.

The house currently ranks at the top of the national rankings in fraternity house collective GPA with a 3.75 or something. When I was in the house, we had the collective highest blood alcohol percentage nationally at .239. I was on the Dean Martin list.

Not wanting to depress the current members with stories from our glory years and drive them to drink, we decided to go bar-hopping at all of our favorite old haunts. Jeff gave the current president of the fraternity his library card so we could take a True Merit Bowl (an award we won back in 1988 for overall fraternity excellence despite our drunkeness) out of the house and with us on our bar crawl, as if we were pro hockey players parading the Stanley Cup around. The Bowl became a community drinking pitcher at the local pubs. We found out it holds a pitcher of beer and looks even better with half a lemon wedge on the rim.

We even went to our old favorite strip club. Some guy shoved $5 down my shirt when he saw the size of my man hooters. I told him and some nearby strippers that I was used to such attention being a former Chips Ahoy! dancer (Chippendales plus-size guy).

Later, one of the strippers was making her "sales pitch" to us, bragging that she had once been a figure skater. I told her that I had also been one. She didn't seem convinced that a 300-pound plus dude could be graceful on ice skates.

"You were a figure skater?"

"Yeah, have you ever heard of Sesame Street on Ice?" I asked.

She nodded that she had.

"I was Snuffalupaguss."

She believed me until I told her my career ended when I skated over thin ice, fell through six inches to the cement and broke both of my ankles.

Later, an African American stripper from Des Moines took the stage and had the most disproportionate body any of us had ever seen. Her ass was bigger than a garbage truck, and I think she even made a beeping noise when she backed that booty up. It was like someone had implanted JLo's ass on top of her's. My friend Jimmy commented on how he's the anti-ass man, how it "disgusted" him and he couldn't deal with that.

Being the true friend I am, I immediately sought out the woman with the wonderful caboose and told her how my friend Jimmy just loved her ass. So, $20 later, I had this very nice young lady shaking her shit right in Jimmy's face. I even bribed the DJ to play Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon during the table dance. Buying dances for your friends is really the best way to spend any kind of money in one of these establishments.

OK, so it wasn't quite as Animal House-esque as it once was 15-20 years ago. We didn't sabatoge the Homecoming parade. No one screwed the Dean's wife. No one shot and killed a horse in the Dean's office. We didn't try to pick up Fawn Leibowitz at a local women's dorm.

But we drank a lot of booze and bullshitted until we were blue in the face. We gorged at Taco John's three times - including twice in one day. Two of my 40-something friends went streaking through a private house party when their bet ended in an unexpected draw (which is way funnier than two stupid 20-year-old guys streaking through a party). The bottom line is we were still fat, drunk and stupid, which was probably enough for double secret probation in Dean Wormer's book, or at least put us on an Old School level.