Ever since I was a kid I would always look outside my window when it was raining and think to myself "Gee, wouldn’t it be wild and carefree to go outside and walk around without an umbrella and just get soaked to the bones and to hell with my boss!!!" Well, that bit about the boss is recent, but the rest I’ve been thinking since childhood. June 12^th was our chance to do just that.

It was a good sized crowd that turned out huddling around the corner opposite the Dakota. While the rain was pretty steady, it was also relatively warm, so getting soaked wasn’t such a big deal. For a hare, Peter remained remarkably dry and well-kept underneath a large red umbrella, while poor Kyle turned up looking like something the cat dragged in. I don’t know what kind of breakdown in responsibilities those two negotiated but one of them certainly got the short end of the stick. Meanwhile the pack’s conversation revolved around topics like "Damn, why don’t I ever remember to bring a change of socks to these rainy runs?" and "I hope it will be short". Ha ha! Short trail? Must have been a virgin who asked that. The instructions for the pack and virgins and visitors was remarkably concise; I quote: "The trail starts over there". And we were off.

Kyle had thankfully reset the trail with massive blobs of flour so we were able to run at a pretty good pace. In fact we were done with the promised "three miles only" part of the trail within half an hour which left us another 45 minutes to find the remainder. The trail went into the park, dicked around a bit, headed over to the east side where everyone was ready to go to the On-In and carry the hares out on their shoulders singing songs of pure hash-happiness, but, as usual, we had a few more miles to log before we could drink. Somebody please tell me who enjoys all these long trails? You tell me and I’ll tell you "New York Road Runners Club". Come join us at the bar afterwards. OK, the trail really wasn’t so long but when you’re slogging around inside ten pounds of fully soaked jogging clothes with rain pouring down your face feeling like you’re running inside a shower, the scale goes "one foot = ten yards". Anyway the trail was holding up remarkably well. Although the rain seemed to not have much effect on the marks, after one hour of running, nature’s other natural erosion processes started to be a concern.

We headed back towards the park and lost the trail at a check around 72^nd and 5^th. This break allowed Rebecca to show us her bare shoulder with her new temporary Chinese tattoo in more detail. I forget what it was supposed to say, but it seems that with the rain and shirt had rubbed off half of it so that all that remained was the ideogram for "Tart". 20 minutes later Bill came back and completely surprised us Check Squatters by telling us he found trail. The surprise was not that Bill found trail, it was that someone actually came back to mark a check. Maybe this is a Full Moon thing, I don’t think I’ve seen that before.

Happily we set off and continued into midtown where we ultimately hit the other new standard in trails: the check one block from the On-In. I know, I’ve done this myself, but they’re annoying. When you are really, really dying to get into the bar and slip into a pitcher of beer, you have to check yet once more. I can usually rate a trail by how many times I say "oh, fuckit" or "goddammit!" while running. Since I am such a complainer a ranking of six fuckits per run is normal and means nothing. At the final check I was saying nothing but. I did take the opportunity to check out the latest issues of Fortune, and Newsweek at the nearby newsstand, but drat! It was tough finding them what with all those covers of pornography getting in my way.

The Shandon Star, site of the 666 run last year, is a good bar with a good beer selection and it also has one of those steam table counters full of food near the front. Master of the Steam Trays was a wizened old (probably) former hasher who every now and then would leave his domain to give a lucky table another bowl of pretzels. But as soon as we saw him he would get shanghaied by the hashers (usually Ariane) and then leave them on our tables to much applause.

Mike Hoffman conducted down-downs which were short and sweet since it got interrupted by the pizza. If you weren’t there you missed the look of shock on Ewa’s face when Peter discovered that she hadn’t paid hash cash, yet was one of the first people to get a slice halfway down her throat. It was a mix of "should I finish this first, should I pay first, or is there some way I can get the $15 while still shoving this down my throat and breathing through my nose so I don’t suffocate?"

Over the course of the evening the civilians started to arrive: Miho, Roy, Geoff, Alice, Mike Bahamonde, Andy, and then this bearded Serpico look-alike that turned out to be Guillermo. Good thing he made his identity known quickly as Peter, thinking he was a regular Hell’s Kitchen stumble-drunk, was just about to kindly ask him to remove himself from our company. Jimmy showed up later on with a former co-worker of his. Seems this gentleman has been on the wagon for two years and decided to break his fast and for some reason he thought that Jimmy would be a good guide for reintroducing him to the ways of drinking responsibly. Jimmy sweetly suggested that they go to the On-In whereupon they immediately sat in a booth with a pitcher and some hasherettes and started chunking. Just the thought of this evilness still makes me laugh.