Frat Row: Two Images.

The First Warm Day on Frat Row [April 4, 2013]

It's fifty degrees and the university is reborn; for the first time you notice the grass--dull, transitory, yet promising.  Coats are forgotten, left at bus stops and hanging off of backpacks.  A man is running.  Couches have been pulled out onto cement patios; community is formed in mauve.  There is even something elegant in the casual way one of them leans back in a lawn chair, resting a can of beer on his thigh.  Stereos blast, and, for some reason a bike is perched on a window sill on the third floor of Delta Beta Phi.  "Let's make the most of our lives like we're gonna die young," the radio sings.  A finch pecks at an apple core.

The Second Warm Day on Frat Row [April 25, 2013]

It's the second warm day on frat row, after a long delay, a jump of the gun, they're ready again with more pomp and circumstance than you're used to.  You're amused by the innocent volleyball nets, ball pits, patio grills, the speakers jammed into century-old moldings telling you to chill, motherfucker, up and down the avenue, silenced only by the bus' exhaust.
The leaders of tomorrow; tossing the pigskin across the alleyway already littered with fresh solos while the girls lean against the railing, shoving their asses out like cats in heat.  On the next block a group smokes hookah and laughs.  They will be businessmen, most likely, and even though they're older than you, waltzing the afternoon away, they'll likely amount to grand men in expensive suits and you pause, only slightly, as you walk onward, not daring to think you've done everything all wrong.