Must be a college thing...

After two days of baking in the noisy sun at Progday, it was time to rejoin the world: Take a walk amid the small-town reality of Chapel Hill, North Carolina... As fate would have it, we had arrived just in time to see it explode. With students. With students' families. With sorority ritual strangeness.

It was Labor Day weekend and gaggles of beglamorized teeny-boppers were everywhere. Gaggles? Nay, mobs. Mobs of students in matching gowns on various street corners all waiting for something to happen. As we walked, nearly everything we saw could be explained with a shrug and "...eh, must be a college thing..." There were about seventeen thousand billion students crushing the streets of Chapel Hill. Many of them were smashed like well-dressed vienna sausages in the pubs and restaurants we sought, and we began to suspect that we would starve here, on the streets of this affluent college town.

But salvation! We got a table at a restaurant with rooftop seating and a great view of the saturated, blood-red sunset as it spread overhead like a levitating carpet of fire. ...and the gargoyles.

Afterwards, a walk, which concluded with the scene in a shop window of a headless mannequin with LOVE across its bossom. Most walks don't offer that.

...must be a college thing.