CSI: The Home Game - Episode: "At a Memory Loss"

By staff writer Dan Opp

It’s an otherwise typical Saturday or Sunday or—if you’re really adventurous—Christmas morning. Your brain slowly drags you back into consciousness by bludgeoning the inner wall of your skull with 10,000 neural sledgehammers. Your bladder feels as if it’s going to rupture faster than the in-seam of a freshman fifteen victim trying to squeeze into her high school jeans. Your clothes are scattered about the room in chaotic fashion. That’s assuming you were coherent enough to remove any of your clothing before crumpling into a drunken heap on top of your bed or toilet or—if you’re really adventurous—grandma. There’s a stain on your carpet that wasn’t there yesterday. You have a mysterious bodily injury in a rather perplexing location. There’s a stain on your pants that wasn’t there yesterday. It would seem to the casual observer that you had a night to remember. The irony of it all is that you can’t remember one damn thing. You blacked out.

Once you’ve come to this realization, there is no need to panic. In fact, this is a very big moment for you. You’ve just landed a starring role in the new, hit drama “CSI: The Home Game.” The evidence is all laid out in front of you, but what does it all mean? If you want to crack the case of the previous night, you need to act like a real TV detective, so get ready to make some incredibly precise conclusions based on questionable logic and patchwork field interviews.

But before you do all of that, you need to gather your thoughts (and your clothes) and ask yourself the seven standard questions: Who? What? When? Where? Why? How? and Is it true that every guy has tried to go down on himself at least once? Better yet, you need to ask one of your friends the seven standard questions since you obviously don’t remember jack shit about what you did last night. As a general rule, if the first thing your friend does when he sees you is say “Dude….” followed by several minutes of incessant giggling, you should probably sit down. It’s going to be a long and interesting interview.

You: WHO was I hanging out with last night?

This seems like a laundry list of the usual suspects. A couple things, however, stand out to you as odd. First, Kelly hasn’t hung out with you since your grandma drank a bottle of 151, projectile vomited, and cleaned up the mess with Kelly’s new perm. Second, all of your friends have curiously generic names. The fact that you were hanging out with the Finnish national curling team isn’t weird to you at all though. They may specialize in a sport that blends shuffleboard and housekeeping, but those guys know how to party.

You: WHAT were we doing?

Friend: We were playing asshole for a while to pre-game and then your grandma caught Kelly marking the clear cards, so she flipped the table and started urinating on Kelly’s new Prada handbag. Kelly ran away crying, but your grandma was still pissed off so she broke into your neighbor’s Hummer and drove through the window of the hardware store down the street. She looted the store and came back with a truckload of pipe bombs.

You reluctantly accept the fact that Kelly has most likely vowed to never hang out with you again until the state’s legal system finally catches up with your grandma. But hey, she should’ve known better than to mess with that crazy hag. You’re somewhat comforted to learn the origin of the carpet stain, but you’ll have to move the couches around again to cover it up. It’s going to take some creativity to conceal this new stain without revealing any old ones. Amid these concerns, you pose the next most logical question.

You: WHEN did we head out to hit all the big parties?

Uh oh. The last time you did a round of those, you awoke in front of the campus dining hall wearing nothing but a peanut butter thong. It wouldn’t have been so bad if the raccoons hadn’t found you before public safety did. Despite this disturbing memory, you couldn’t help but wonder…

You: WHERE was the Finnish national curling team during all of this?

Nice. You can always count on those guys. If it weren’t for the Finns, your chances of getting with a Swedish runway model would be approximately equal to the odds that the Catholic church publicly accepts evolution as scientific fact. However, you can now strut around proudly knowing that only one of the aforementioned scenarios is completely laughable and absurd. You snap out of your erotic daydream rather quickly when you realize that your grandma and a mother lode of explosives are now unaccounted for.

You: WHY wasn’t anybody worried about my grandma and the pipe bombs?

Mysterious injury in a perplexing location? Check. Stain on the pants? Check. The story of the night forgotten is now revealing itself to you like Pee Wee Herman at a movie theater. There’s only one question left to answer. It’s the key to your investigation, the Rosetta stone to your drunken hieroglyphics.

You: HOW much action did I get?

Friend: You were making out in the corner with one of the models for quite some time and I thought you were destined to score, but then she left with the Finns and you ended up futilely trying to go down on yourself, but that’s nothing to be embarrassed about.

You: IS IT TRUE THAT EVERY GUY HAS TRIED TO GO DOWN ON HIMSELF AT LEAST ONCE?

Case closed.