*The views expressed in Truesday are those of the author and do not represent Austinist as a whole. Thank heavens.* -The Editors

It was sometime after four in the morning. Several years ago. July of the summer months. We had just finished a night out making mistakes all over the city, the lake, the river, and some apartment off Riverside where we smoked out with football players who were the largest hulks of humanity I had ever witnessed up to that point in my life. The only women there were the chicks we brought with, which under other, more competitive circumstances might have been a perilous mistake. Luckily the crew was herbed, so all was particularly non-hazardous that night.

My first blunt. It was absolutely nasty. A crinkle-wrapped Titan and a fat thumb of kb. An almost sacrilegious combination of ignitable plant parts prepared for olfactory satisfaction from two opposing ends of the quality spectrum. How these two things were married together in the first place, and why the union is revisited so often by so many, remains an unsolved mystery to me.

Some things are fine by their lonesome, but loathsome in forced combination. Like incense and milk. Or tomato soup and melted white chocolate. Blow jobs and wolf traps.

My balls and cold water.

We scaled the fences on the eastern edge of Barton Springs, by the Robert E. Lee parking lot. The last of our six got caught on the top of the fence and fell. Passed out when he hit the ground. Since he was last to scale, no one noticed he was missing.

The other two couples of the group hit the East lawn running, stripped down in stride, and they all dove in. I stood on the edge, cupping the goods, wary of the plunge idea after witnessing the dudes’ less-than pleasant reactions to what was obviously a shooting sensation of testicular terror, driven by ruthless cold.

I had never been to Barton Springs before. Back then, it was pretty far south for me. In fact, anything south of the river was “way out south” according to my mental maps. Oltorf might as well have been in Weslaco. I had only heard of the springs from pieces of conversations, and considered it more of a myth than a threat to my nether region.

From the water they cajoled, cooed, and poked fun at my afeared presence on the cement lip of the dark black blanket of frigid water. Admittedly moved by their taunts, I dipped a toe in.

FUCK that. So what if it IS 102 degrees outside, at night. Some things simply don’t belong together.

Girl: [treading slowly, pale legs lazily moving through the water like she's roller skating on a SoCal beach to the goddamn Xanadu soundtrack] what, you scared of a little cold? We’re in here and everything’s coo’.

Dude: [swimming in a tight circle with eyes closed] -yy-yy-y-yeah.

Other Girl: [splashing water at me, just short of my toes, then pointing at her nips]: See? Even the boys can handle it!

Other Dude: [also doing tight circles, obviously cradling own genitalia below the water’s surface] tttttaaccllallllalfukkafukkaakkladdddds

It wasn’t a pleasant sight, really. To see all that pointless suffering. What was the draw for these people? Was it the history for them? After all, they had lived in Austin their entire lives, through the Slacker days and the filming of Dazed and Confused. To them you didn’t question a late night dip in Barton. It was simply what you did.

But I’m not from here, so I was having considerable trouble believing any of it made sense.

And it wasn’t just that it was obviously cold. It was more that it was an abnormally cold body of above-ground water which in the cloak of night looked more like a lake of motor oil, with a diving board over it. The whole scenario was uselessly nonsensical. I was definitely taking the brakeless chemical train, and I simply couldn’t be sure that anything I was witnessing actually existed.

When a person battles with themselves concerning whether or not they belong in a particular situation, combined with the possibility that due to chemical interference the situation in question doesn’t even exist in its perceived form, the brain tends to bust out with something wholly unrelated to handle the turmoil. In my case, I used a heated game of tabletop tennis to settle the dispute.

My Practical Mind manned one paddle, trying to play a safe game using logic and strategy, making claims that being at the springs was illegal, dangerous, and potentially only happening inside my subconscious. These were all carefully placed shots, aimed at breaking down the opposing side with piecemeal efficiency.

But the other side of the table was occupied by the wildly gesticulating nonsense of the Drunken Buffoon. No strategy. No plan. Just overly confident and irreverently dismissive. The well placed shots of the Practical Mind were beastishly hurled back with little more than the grace of luck to guide them. But that’s all it took.

Unable to get a proper foothold in the game, my Practical Mind started slipping, fissures formed in its foundation, and with a single weak return of the Drunken Buffoon’s chaotic grunt-shots, it soon plummeted to its weary demise.

With one single no-look power stroke, the Drunken Buffoon plowed his way to victory over common sense, and my human form found itself standing on the diving board, staring with profound apprehension down at the rippling, unknown abyss below.

I’m not really sure if the others were still there in the water by then. They might have been. All I do remember about the next ten or so minutes was being submersed and entirely confused. The water was even colder than I had feared, but I was compelled to keep in the grips of discomfort. The murky black surrounded me like misfortune. Goddamn what weirdness.

When I surfaced and made my way to the edge, everyone had already made their way up the grassy knoll to violate one another in the moon shadows of the majestic oaks. As I sat there on the edge, confused by the shivers of my legs and the sweat of my forehead, I heard the voice of our fence-fallen and forgotten compadre drift out from the darkness toward the parking lot.

“Assholes. I think I broke my face.”

Funny, I was thinking the same thing.