Did you ever play on a slip-n-slide as a kid? I never did as a kid, only as an adult, but only when I was in my twenties. I don't do foolish things like that any more. Partly because I'm busy doing foolisher things like slide through Brooklyn in the dead of winter with the good company of other grown up idiots at hashes like the one two weeks ago. A mess, it was. A cold, slushy mess. We met up where we were supposed to, although what in the hell possesses us to do these things I still don't understand. I'll say it again: A mess. That's what I have to say about it. Brooklyn was a mess. Slush city. I came up out of the subway and slid around, setting a P.R. of getting soggy in mere seconds above ground. Since only commuters were to be seen, I wandered across downtown Brooklyn's snowfields to the other subways exits, half seeking other hashers, but mostly hoping to escape to my nice, warm apartment. Wished for some snow shoes. No luck. Wished for some crampons. No luck. Wished to escape unseen. Some luck on that front for a while but then I was spotted by some silhouettes off in the distance near a soggy train exit, exactly where hashers are supposed to be, except some were across the street, too. Then it was all over-I was spotted by cardinal oconnor and sucks. There would be no escape for this hasher, despite fogged up glasses, despite soggy feet. And sure enough a few others trickled in, illustrating a lack of good sense all around. However, lacking all signs of common sense (this is the theme for this writeup, and that night, and most hashing episodes), we just continued to do what we thought we were supposed to do, or what we were not supposed to do, which in a hash is what we are supposed to do. So we peeled layers, added layers, re-layered layers. It's a short trail, our hare promised. So short, in fact, that in a chain of logic I can't follow, Paul had had to take the subway to Manhattan to get his car to drive back to the start to manage the bags. So he showed up after a while with his car, and our bags had a nice cozy ride to the bar. Everyone has to have priorities and for newyorkhashers it's our bags, which probably could tell some stories, which would make for a good write up, the hash from a bag's point of view, maybe, but not this one because it's almost done, lucky for you. So we seatbelted our bags into Paul's car for safe delivery to the bar and we slipped and slid away, looking for flour or any other non-indigenous sludge. The main problem with flour is it's just so snow colored. The trail ran us around Brooklyn some. I think it was Brooklyn. Although I can never recognize Brooklyn south of Williamsburg. So I'll have to believe it was Brooklyn. Where we ended was Brooklyn and where we started was Brooklyn so probably it was Brooklyn in the middle too. Long blocks. We had some long, slippery blocks in there. A lot of snow blending with flour. A lot of losing and finding balance, but only in the literal sense. Not too many hash crashes. I body blocked Flying Albatross once or twice because there were really awful puddles of sludge, but he regained his balance in the nick of time and didn't fall and didn't hold a grudge. A lot of stopping and starting and staring and blobby blotches on snow. Next snowy hash we're bringing Sherlock Holmes magnifying classes and glob-consistency-checkers. Slowtoblow came out from the upper west side for dose of nostalgia so he could pretend to be a kid in the snow in the old hood, just like the kid in a the bunny snow suit in that movie. Finally we made it to Mooney's where are hare was waiting to reward us with beer and singing and happy to see that we all survived the slips. We think. Christine went home early and the night deteriorated from there, ending with pointless arguments about secrecy with too many voices yelling the same thing. So since this write up went nowhere and if you're still reading you shouldn't be but you are, here are more chunks of uselessness for you, compliments of one of my stepmothers: When you rearrange the letters of "President Clinton of the USA," you get "to copulate he finds interns." Sarchasm can be defined as "The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the reader who doesn't get it," and foreploy is, "Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of obtaining sex."