A Portrait of the Hash as a James Joyce Narrative with a Jamaican Flourish

Early Wailsday evening Sweet Ho Alabama arrived at Sublette Park

Beerless to complain about the chill to arrivers who skidded up on bikes feet and in cars

Standing on a baseball diamond that Locknut pointed out was made of wood later

The pack gathered, a sausagefest save for a few sparkling harrierettes

-Welcome! O beloved friends to a magnificent fall night and glorious sunset impeding efforts to view the six humans hurtling above in space expended in vain for the haze of clouds above

When the hashers gather Disco Ass intones the rituals to fling Fake Bake Fuck out into the houses and streets of Southwest Garden and the Hill, attempting a combination of Jamaican and Irish accents before he goes

-Is this racist?

-That’s German, cries his bride, who has six pairs of shoes ready for her nuptials on Saturday, her name a summons to all his foolish blood

Visitors from Boulder and Birmingham and Raleigh and a virgin from the house next to Fake Bake and Ice Princess are as welcomed as the multitude of beer coolers and two dogs rendering the night ever wetter, ever furrier

The pack dashed into the night along the sidewalks and past the neighborhood bars and the alleged optional bar stop where the old cops linger amidst the smell of marijuana that only the walkers saw running across chick check after chick check for which Sweet Ho gave the gift of her tits once the pack were out of the prying eyes of the city lights or what passes for city in Clifton Heights

Silence, rare shouts, rarer still the whistles

After a mile and a half on the grass, the snotgreen grass, the scrotumtightening grass next to a chain link fence a trove of Natty Light and Steel Reserve awaited the wanks where they lived and laughed and loved and left as 59 Minutes Left arrived

- This trail, Dewey said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

Onto train tracks every tie a tie to an iron road every dot a check a tie to a ending path save one that delivered the pack to a hill in the dark made entirely of mud and weeds and broken glass hungry for the sins of the unwary with TSA musing into the night

-That’s the biggest hare’s arrow I’ve ever seen

-I pulled a Tazed

-Fake Bake fucked as many women as possible

Her lips touched Sweet Ho’s brain as a vehicle of vague speech ridiculing the number of chick checks and how she got lost amidst the marked checks pointing true trail in multiple ways like her beloved encountering for the millionth time a night alone lost on a trail darker than the swoon of sin

-Think you're hashing and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home

Dos cried as she welcomed the pack to the Beer Stop at her house, where Dewey and Whiney ran through the pack themselves in the tracks of the mistakes and silent whistles and absent shouts

-A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery scoffed Fake Bake before leading the pack up the hill back to the park and the bench and the baseball to devour too many chips especially the marinara ones they were really good so good Claim objected

- Don’t open so many chips

-Who is he the chip police is he the boss of us groused Sweet Ho

-Yes, literally cried Dewey

The pack circled up under the guiding hand and cries of Stink Palm to roast Just Adam for running in sandals and creative and diverse verses from Postage Tramp and the Colorado visitors attempted to El Camino the holy occasion of Just Adam’s triumphant entry via bike then feet and were roundly shamed for this by the pack, who has seen that sort of trick before and get impatient with it and maybe we can talk about what it’s like for Latinx and Muslim and Jewish residents to hear the pack shouting verses that mock them but whatever this is hashing right we sing songs about fucking dead women too and all the women in the hash still feel safe and appreciated wait is that true

The pack bestowed our love on our own TSA for 150 hashes 59 Minutes Left for 200 hashes Ice Princess for 200 after the fact and again for the love of the kennel and her and Fake Bake’s upcoming wedding even with his terrible accents and minuteman trail for which they won the hashit and drank the pack’s beer contribution in a chip bag, because the same group of people who didn’t bring her 200 band also didn’t bring a bedpan for her to drink from, instead a chipbag, collapsed with a well-placed slap from Locknut, bathing the groom’s face in beer and chips the baptismal face font of hashing,

and our love-flavored derision to Just Daniel who offered us a penguin joke and his penis and an odd kind of mating dance, who wanted to cry quietly but not for himself: for the words, so raunchy and fun, like music but also not at all like music.

- I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day, mon, signed Sweet Ho Alabama