My manic roommate
It was 1982 and the Loon was in his second year of uni at a small school in the middle of nowhere. I initially had a roommate who decided to room with a friend of his instead, so he and the friend's roommate agreed to swap.

Enter K.O.

He was one of those weird twitchy guys, a scrawny little thing with glasses, wiry and absurdly strong after years of being on the wrestling team. Just talk to him for a minute and you knew there was something odd about this guy. And there was- he was a manic and intense person who could tell bizarre and surreal stories at any moment, and do it so well that people just sat there, mouths agape, listening to him.

Best roommate, ever.

K.O. was there to study Design and Drafting. This was back in the days when CAD was something that only NASA used, so he did it all by hand. He would sit at his desk, taking the occasional hit off of his bong, Ed (named after a teacher- it was a long and strange story involving Baby Huey), then hunching over his drafting board and carefully working for hours.

One of his assignments was to draw the intersection of two geometrical shapes. He chose to do two cylinders intersecting at right angles. Then he had to cut out what he had drawn and make a physical model of it. He started on Friday and worked very carefully on it, cutting it out of pale green poster board and gluing it together. The end result looked remarkably like Beaker from the Muppet Show.

We lived on the top floor of our dormitory at the inside corner of the L-shaped building. As heat rises, the room tended to be stifling hot in the winter, so we often had the window open. The wind would blow into the face of the building, causing a perpetual updraft outside our window- I used to love flicking cigarette butts out the window just to watch them spin in the air for a moment before rising up and vanishing over the building.

K.O. set his intersection on the windowsill in the sunlight to dry, and I went into the bathroom across the hall. As I sat on the bog I heard a scream worthy of Beaker himself- something like Steve Bollmer at a Microsoft convention- then the slam of our door and frantic footsteps down the stairs. I got up and went back to the room and found it empty, of course, so I sat down to wait for his return.

Five minutes later he came back, cradling his intersection, and in a staccato burst of words told me what had happened. "I had just put it on the windowsill and was taking a hit off Ed when I looked over just in time to see it lift up, float out the window, then take off like Superman. I ran downstairs and out the back door, but it was gone!" His eyes shone with a glint of madness. "Gone! Nowhere! I stood there for a minute looking all over the place, then I looked up- and it landed right in my hands!" He reverently put it back on the windowsill and closed the window.

Yup, just another Sunday with K.O.
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Mon 3 Nov 2008, 13:17, 2 replies)

I put it to you, sir,
that you are an incorrigible raconteur.
( wynoh kills threads by his mere presence, Mon 3 Nov 2008, 16:41, closed)

I'm embarrassed to admit
that I needed to verify the meaning of raconteur.

Thank you.

The best teller of tales that I have ever encountered in my life, though, was K.O. I've never seen anyone else hold the attention of an entire room the way he did.

I often wonder whatever happened to him. The last I knew he was living in a trailer in the backwoods of New York and working for Bendix...
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Mon 3 Nov 2008, 17:03, closed)