OXFORD CONFIDENTIAL: Oh Sure, Nobody's Ever Been Busted in a College Town for Underage Drinking...

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- Five boxes of cheap bagged wine.

Five boxes. Twenty-five liters of yuppie rotgut.

I've known winos in my life who'd kill for that kind of suburban hooch.

And a case of bottled water, a jar of peanut butter, sugar-free jelly, three bags of pita chips, two bottles of sunblock, three bags of salad, a bottle of whey protein, a gallon of skim milk, and some baby carrots.

I couldn't help but look into their shopping carts as I squeezed between them heading down the cereal aisle.

CARTS. Plural. One cart for the booze, one cart for the food.

Two girls.

Correction. Two young women. With more than six and a half GALLONS of wine in a shopping cart.

A common enough occurrence in any tiny-ass Midwestern college town, the week before classes start and the day before the residence halls reopen for on-campus students. The Local U, in fact, is well-known for its undergraduate binge drinking problem.

And trust me. There's barely anything for a guy my age to do after work in this burg in August. I was a student myself once, and I've drank away my share of dog-day afternoons as both an undergrad and a graduate student.

But here's the problem.

One of the girls - sorry, young women - is wearing an old t-shirt, with the words _____ High School, Class of 2007 sprawled across the front.

And they're openly discussing the fact that Ms. Tee isn't of legal drinking age, discussing things such as the party they're planning and it's location, cracking jokes and saying things like Oh don't worry. The cashiers are Townies. I'm, like, buying so...

Aside from the pair, I'm the youngest person within earshot. There's an elderly couple checking out granola and rolling their eyes at the girls, a 40ish dad type with two teenage girls listening in, too.

There were 10 people in that aisle alone.

* * * *

Here's the deal, for the record.

The ability to purchase alcohol is limited, in all 50 states, to those over the age of 21. And retailers, well, tend to train sales associates how to properly I.D. those who are purchasing alcohol. In Ohio, it's not just illegal to purchase - it's illegal for anyone under 21 to even drink alcoholic beverages, unless it's purchased by a parent or legal-age spouse.

And in Ohio college towns...

Trust me. If one girl rolls up with a shopping cart full of wine, and the girl behind her is underage, and there's even the slightest hint that they may know one another both parties are getting carded. And odds are nobody's leaving the store, 21 or not, with that much wine when an attempt to skirt the law is that, well, obvious.

If the clerk's in a really bad mood, well, they may even involve law enforcement. And those charges, in Oxford Fucking Ohio, even off-campus, can end up getting a student in a lot of trouble on-campus. Violations aren't just a civil offense; they're also potentially an academic disciplinary offense...

I keep shopping. But something's eating away at me.

I dunno - maybe it's being a good citizen, or maybe I'm just shocked that, well, apparently, there are people naive enough to believe the college myth that says Everybody knows we're drinking, so why hide it?

I keep passing these two chicks in the aisles and, well, they're still announcing to the world that they're planning this huge party, that so-and-so just turned 20 and they were, like, gonna get her so wasted...

Hmmm. Are they ... stupid? Brain-damaged? Too many days in the tanning salon, maybe?

No, I tell myself, they're probably just sheltered and don't know any better. Just fucking kids...

* * * *

Finally, I couldn't take it anymore. The school year hasn't even started yet, and some decent citizen is going to narc them out to the store's management, they'll end up getting in a lot of trouble...

I track them back down on the other end of the store.

"Hey ladies? You know, nobody's stupid here."

I'm smiling and talking as softly as I can. They try to play dumb. Ms. Tee crosses her arms over the logo on her chest. She's nervous and knows, well, she's wearing her underage status across her body.

The other young woman is not. She's as brazen as the best of them; a quality I'd find refreshing under normal situations.

"Excuse me. We don't know you. And this is for me. I'm buying it and she has-"

"Do you know there's about 20 of us 'Dumb Townies' walking around here who you've just announced to that there's gonna be a huge-ass party on _____Street where YOUR wine's gonna be used to get a fucking 20-year-old drunk?"

That shut her up.

But, trust me, it's better me being a dick about it than a cop. I don't have arrest powers.

* * * *

Look, I drank under the legal age. I'll admit it. Most people do, at least those who drink.

But I never, ever paraded around with my older friends, the ones buying for me, discussing my intent within earshot of everyone from off-the-clock municipal employees to store clerks and retirees. Some things require a clandestine approach and aren't meant for a fucking audience.

And yes, for the record, I think the 21-and-over laws of the land are complete horseshit, feel that the congressional blackmailing of individual states (there is no mandated federal drinking age; however, states without a 21-and-up law on the books lose federal highway funding) is, well, not helping anyone, and I don't care how much those Mothers Against Drunk Driving bitch, their statistics just don't add up.

I will not repeat my "Not Ready for Primetime" lecture because, well, everybody who's been on a college campus knows that, regardless of bullshit neo - prohibitionist laws, regardless of the number of lectures from advisers and parents and authority figures, the vast majority of underage drinkers are going to find ways to get their hands on booze.

But it's still illegal. While some elements of our society may give kids breaks, other concerned citizens still have the right to report crimes and cops still have to do their jobs.

And while I tend to give myself tend to give underage drinking a wink and a smile, well, I can't turn my back on someone pinning that sort of legal bullseye to their back.

* * * *

There's no law that gives a college student the right to plead I'm in College and this is what college students do, not a court in the nation that would accept that as a defense in the event of an alcohol-related death, not a jury in the world that would accept that as a defense if somebody left that party fucking blitzed, got behind the wheel, and killed somebody.

Pardon the cliche, but, hell, it's not hard to drink responsibly. And to behave responsibly, even as an undergrad in ratfuck Oxford Fucking Ohio. Just be smart about it.

Us grown-ups tolerate underage drinking because, well, we'd generally like to give people the benefit of the doubt and assume they're smart enough to handle it. Hell, most of us were when we were underage - we're still alive, right?

Some people, however, do everything in their power to prove that they can't handle it, assume that, well, their actions in college are somehow excusable, automatically forgivable to all.

But if you're dumb enough to wander around a store, as a legal drinker, with an underage friend, announcing to the world that you're planning on getting another underage drinker drunk enough to puke, well, nobody wants to read about another alcohol-related tragedy in the paper and somebody may say something about it.

* * * *

Oh, and using chapstick on the backs of your hands? To make it easy to remove those Sharpied black Xs ya get in bars and clubs when you're underage? You know, every door guy and bouncer I've ever met knows that trick.

Welcome back to college, kids. Let's smart out there, as well as responsible.

To borrow a phrase from that classic 1980s G.I. Joe cartoon...

Now you know - and knowing is half the battle.

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PRAYING FOR IGNORANCE NEVER SAVED A DAMNED SOUL: Of Quantum Mechanic Dreams & The Nightmares of Blind Faith-Based Education

If we had a reliable way to label our toys good and bad, it would be easy to regulate technology wisely. But we can rarely see far enough ahead to know which road leads to damnation.

- Freeman John Dyson,
Physicist and Mathematician,
from Disturbing the Universe, 1979

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- I began my own college career back in the Fall of 1996 - not as an aspiring journalist, not as a future writer or librarian, but as a hopeful young physicist.

Yes, I wanted to be a formula jockey, a Quantum Mechanics grease-monkey, a Man of Science.

Okay... better explain this a bit...

... I guess I was what educators call a gifted, advanced student - basically, a polite way of saying that you're intellectually retarded, but in a good way.

So gifted and advanced, in fact, that I never had a "Freshman year" in college - I completed 30 credit-hours, a whole academic year's worth of classes, while still in high school. And despite all of my drug abuse and violent tendencies back then, I even managed to rack up enough credits in integral and differential calculus to officially earn my nerd stripes.

Hell, I figured, aspiring physicists need calculus at an early age. And how I loved physics! How I dreamt whilst drinking MD 20/20 in high school of toying with the EPR paradox for a living!

My senior year in high school, I'm not ashamed to admit, I spent quite a few Sunday afternoons on the porch of a sorta famous, Soviet defector physicist, picking his brain, drinking vodka and eating pelmeni whilst being lectured on both my brutish immaturities and Bell's theorem...

But I digress.

To this day, well, even long after my dreams of being one of those hardened, wild-haired theorists were squashed by my inability to pass those annoying chemistry courses, I'm still fascinated by the fact that everything on this planet falls with a gravitational acceleration of somewhere between 9.78 and 9.82 meters per second, squared.

I just wasn't cut out to be a physicist. However, I did find a calling as an information scientist...

Sorta.

* * * *

Thankfully, the world is run by better men and women than myself - real scientists and mathematicians who could get past those courses, who went on to run our world's research labs, to design and formulate and project the trajectories of our Mars landings and Deep Space probes, who figure out new ways to calculate our distances from and sizes of the smallest atoms and the largest suns.

Yes, Men and Women of Science created our modern world. Those men and women solve the layman's unsolvable, dedicate their lives to studying what many of us simply don't have the fortitude to comprehend. The politicos and armchair quarterback and celebrities be damned!

The laptop upon which I'm typing was made possible by the tireless efforts of mathematicians and scientists, by complex mechanics and programming and circuitry engineering that boggles the mind. The wireless Internet connection I'm using right now, the Internet itself, is the creation of our planet's collective genius.

There isn't too damned much in our technological world, in fact, that wasn't made possible by someone's research, wasn't first an idea first published in someone's dissertation or thesis, wasn't cooked up in some cold lab or drafty classroom.

Men like Freeman Dyson, yes, choose to build for us worlds of knowledge where faith is meaningless without critique and calculation, where even the best theory relies on some unseeable, intrinsic faith as it approaches the point at which it is to be tested.

Our Albert Einsteins and Isaac Newtons and Richard Feynmens and Copernicuses, our Stephen Hawkings and our Igor Tamms... their works represent Man's desire to come as close to whatever that mystery is that some call God as man can get without being driven insane.

Blessed be the thinkers, for they are the ones chosen by whatever powers that control this existence to be both condemned and praised for daring to imagine the unknown.

* * * *

As I listened to this group of college students huddled together, I recalled, for some reason, that passion I once had for physics, that sacred brushing of the face of God found in integers and variables and, yes, even the potential to discover the mechanics behind The Universe's meaning.

The undergrad prayer group (or some such thing) was debating amongst themselves, asking each other questions about why more people don't simply turn to prayer whenever the world gets under their skin, why people dare to argue that the supposedly infallible words of God were never meant to be taken literal, why kids in their science labs roll eyes whilst they argue that their Sunday School teacher told them that evolutionary theory is a conspiracy theory against Christ and the Southern Baptist Convention...

One woman, I overheard, was going to call her youth pastor for a letter, a letter to get her out of certain readings in a general education class. God created the world, so the legend goes, in six days - He took Sundays off to watch football. How dare she be forced to read heresy at - GASP! - a university!

It was to be her mission to end such things, to exempt the Flock from the wolves in the pastures of intellectual pursuit. The other group members nodded their heads in agreement, suggested things like a prayer for guidance and strength and for the faculty to all embrace that Jewish carpenter of lore...

* * * *

I'd write more about their alms and concerns and strange conversation, but, well, I'm afraid that the teenage aspiring physicist still buried inside me would puke up a rather tasty blueberry muffin the adult me really enjoyed.

Let's just say that some conversations, for one who believes that Faith, Reason, and Knowledge are the three-legged foundation upon which our great future is built, are simply hard to stomach repeating in the 21st Century, even for me.

And let's just say, too, that the next evolutionary biologist, genetic researcher, or geographer I meet will get a hearty thank you for dedicating themselves to shedding some light on our species' origin, on the history of our world, on how our own bodies work and change over time.

* * * *

What a waste of life, to debate such things with a groupthink faith devoid of reason! To waste the kinetic gift of spiritual faith, to waste a belief in a beautiful, loving god by plotting to stop Man's quest for knowledge over something as silly as a personal offense.

Constant agreement to maintain our sense of control in life's grand experiment, with prayers to eliminate the disconcerting variables that fly in the face of our beliefs, yes! That's the solution to the world's tangible problems, to understanding things like our DNA's mysteries and the existence of space-time!

Pray for it to all go away! Ask the youth pastor for a protest letter in support of some horseshit called Creation Science!

Organized religion really may be on its way back to its primordial roots of cruel buffoonery and superstitious stupidity, if this is all that is left of the Spirit.

Hopefully not, but, well, if I were one day forced to choose between faithless Science and thoughtless Religion, my take has always been to use the Bible for kindling if it gets in the way of curing cancer.

That sucking sound you hear? Normal around these parts, actually.

* * * *

I will never understand how anyone could attend college with an expectation that their belief in an Earth that revolves around a prayer group or a church doctrine will be simply validated as common knowledge, that the exploration of the mysteries behind our world and existence, our glorious Sun and heavenly galaxy's workings, shouldn't be taught because some people find such things Satanic.

To think, and to be challenged to think, is in the minds of some folks a damnable offense. And that's tragic. How little we've really learned from our great thinkers, artists, and, especially our scientists over the whole of the Human Existence.

At the root of the great tragedies of this world, from the purges of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union to the horrible events of September 11th and the various genocidal insanities of our modern life, one always finds some similar need to protect Man from our ideas, from our science and logic and reason, art and literature and other beautiful things.

The greatest damnation, of our gods and of ourselves, comes from our own quixotic quest to keep our world blissfully ignorant. Ignorance is not bliss.

Instead, it is merely the Mephistopheles of our fears, of our desire to stay stagnant, creating worlds more hollow and meaningless than any illusion Doctor Faustus could ever invent.

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