OWI Weekend, ec cet'ra

Rob goes to court-ordered overnight alcohol counseling.

The Polk County OWI Weekend was designed more than twenty years ago so that Iowa could free-up its jails, and make a few bucks on the side. I arrived Friday afternoon at the Bavarian Inn to begin my 48 hour incarceration, remarking that I'd never seen such a classy jail site. I had, however, seen such a collection of corn-pone bumpkins many times before. The fashionable ones wore NorthFace fleeces, and I think everyone thought I was poor because I wore my grandfather's hopelessly moth-eaten cardigan all weekend.

For our class sessions, I sat at a table in the corner next to a young man who I thought was a little autistic and an older man who was easily 100 pounds overweight and, to my knowledge, drank nothing but Coca-cola all weekend. I quickly discovered that my roomate snored like a cement mixer full of bottle rockets, and although I had fantasies of blugeoning him in the night so that I could maybe get an hour of sleep, I knew if would get me sent home-no refund.

I learned quickly that staying away for fifteen hours of "class" was going to be no easy task. The first day we killed 45 minutes while all of the offenders put on different levels of beer goggles and tried to walk heel-to-toe along a taped line. I refused. Then, during the instructional video's examples of "songs about preoccupation with alcohol," several people brought up someone named Brad Paisley and agreed what a good show he put on. I guess I just didn't fit in with my fellow offenders.

As contradictory as it seems, I was the only one who could stomach the food without complaining, and the only one who wasn't concerned enough with the motel's hygiene to put on shoes or even socks when coming down to the lobby for the morning breathalizer.

Class consisted of lectures from our overly-enthusiastic instructor, who I call Chief John because he exclaimed that "The native populations in America hoot and holler because alcohol goes into their systems faster." You see, he liked to interject many anecdotes and tidbits with his lectures. He even introduced several terms that I had never heard and was therefore forced to invent definitions for, including: "acid reflex"-the inherent reaction one has when another throws acid in the face and "battered women syndrome"-a condition in which one experiences digestive discomfort from eating too many battered womens, often leading to acid reflex. He was also prone to using the phrases "ec cet'ra" and "Does that make sense?" I wasn't comfortable enough with him or my classmates to point out that no, it usually did not.

Instead I admired the paintings around the motel, including two identical likenesses of Neuschwanstein Castle, both taller and wider than my body lenth, which hung in the conference room. Lunch both days consisted of mystery meat sandwiches that tasted like they had been dropped on the floor and stepped on with a bare foot. Even this decrepid escape from class was ruined by my overhearing Chief John in the background, "You know if a horse died and you weren't going to eat it, you'd send it down river to the next people. Pretty soon the pilgrims realized that it was better to live upstream."

The whole thing was almost surreal, and I knew that I would just have to keep quiet and wait it out until freedom rang Sunday afternoon. So that's exactly what I did, amidst the conversation which exhibited a lot of double negatives and not pronouncing the -g- at the end of words. In fact, most of my new friends seemed to have rarely, if ever, ventured outside of their social trailer park to consider any social phenomena beyond the fact that men play sports and women make scrapbooks. By the time 5:00 Sunday afternoon rolled around, I was delirious. I still didn't know where I was and it felt odd to speak from my lack of doing so for 48 hours. But I had survived, and I couldn't have felt more ready to go home for a night of scrapbooking.