We were unwrapping a carpet in the Internationalist Bookstore when V. & L. mentioned a mob of people running by the store, at about 11:00. We all went outside to watch, standing on the little raised entrance of the Internationalist, as an audience observing a basketball game.

Groups of people walked by, all students, yelling "Waahuuuu!!!!!", "UNC". In every group there was usually one person who yelled at us, or at the cars. The yelling was what seemed to get the mob arousing its energy. A public display of happiness of the extreme, I did not sense it otherwise. How more happy can one get, then yelling "Waahuuuu!!!" in pure joy and unashamed publicness on the streets? Still, not everybody participated. Only those who were able to act in a fashion similar to being drunk, since being drunk allows one to take off the clothes and act out of the ordinary with the excuse already built in. In the groups of people, yelling leaders and smiling followers combined, and often the yelling sort of crossed people: if one yelled, others yelled. In general, I think the groups were either half/half mixed in gender, or large groups of males. Less frequently large groups of females passed. The groups of males were—as anticipated—acting most drunk, in the sense of uncontrolled behavior. Everybody walked in the direction of downtown, all neatly on the streets, nobody on a bike.

Within this stream of people going east toward the center of Franklin, was the stream of cars, very salient because of the continuous honking of horns. Most of the cars would have one or two guys leaning out of the windows, whose purpose was clearly to interact with the stream of people on the sidewalk. This interaction also seemed to extend to other cars, although this was less clear, and also more difficult due to the speed. Most cars were expensive cars, either sportstype cars or SUV’s, and all of them drove relatively fast considering the goal of communicating with the crowd. Most cars had two people inside, in the front, often with clearly visible beers in their hands. Many cars also were filled up entirely. Some had stiff, large poles with flags out of the window, zooming by at large speed, like "UUUNNCCCCCCCCCCCCCCeeeeeeeee………….!!!!!!!"

With increasing flow, the cars seemed to be getting stuck in front of the police line, which had already closed off Franklin center. L. laughed at one car, remarking that it was funny how honking cars would feel somewhat embarrassed when they were standing still. This seemed to imply that the speed was part of the honking. As if honking without the speed is like drinking alcohol free beer.

Back on the sidewalk, we noticed one black guy walked by himself. He looked at us—standing there in a row as the audience of the passing crowd—and said something like "Alright!"—excitement—"a big W". We wondered what that meant, and concluded it probably meant "Win", and not some unconscious reference to the strategies behind the ballgame, with three players in the back and two in the front. An older woman also walked by, and stopped, seemingly because she knew L., but I am not sure. She seemed happy, dressed in a longer coat, and alone. "I happened to be on Franklin", she said, "It is so much fun to see this". She seemed to be having fun, but also ambiguously clinging to us, outsider observers, still nicely in a row. Then an older guy came by, said hello, and she went with him further. Both L. and V. immediately talked about how the woman appeared to have been uncomfortable. "She feels like she needed an excuse to be here", L. said. Two younger guys came by, and one of them put up his hand, as to invite me to give him the "5". So I did. It made him happy, I think. The girls laughed. "Do you know him?", they asked? It surprised me, explaining it by theorizing that clapping hands with strangers is more intimate than I imagined. In the air, a helicopter went in circles.

We decided to head with the crowd, all of us similarly excited by this general display of cheering and shouting, speeding and honking. Walking that way I noticed a large crowd of guys crossing the street the opposite way of the general crowd, and encountering a car full of yelling guys as well. They seemed to all merge, and the walking crowd surrounded the car, everybody yelling and cheering, putting their hands on the car, half-dancing around it. I wondered what they would do, and it seemed like one of the guys inside the car was interacting somehow with the walking crowd. Then they all went on again. Walking it seemed chilly. V. noticed an undercover cop car driving in a side street. V. and L. decided to run a bit to get warm (L. had been running back and forth already, forgetting some things). I stayed behind and walked against a stream of people now seemingly going the other way, away from Franklin. I noticed all of them were uncontrollably excited and happy, and most of them would interact directly with me, yelling, something I am not used to encounter in the south normally. I noticed two people coming my way, both walking in a line less straight than a circle, and wondered if they were drunk. Closer, I noticed a big guy almost drooling, walking heavily to one side, with behind him a girl, who in passing looked straight into my eyes and revealed her total drunkenness by the simple slurred expression of "ahuh" (laugh). V. noted that people were coming off the buss—a wonder it was still able to go—with beers in their hands. On the streets many people seemed to be carrying beer. At University Square three Mexican guys sort of approaches us screaming, but their foreignness to the experience was revealed in their hesitation. V. and L. returned their enthusiasm in a similar half-participative fashion. I am not sure what they thought, but they tried to participate.

Arrived at the center of the street three police cars and a row of glowing pons had blockaded Franklin Street, and a massive crowd of people already had overtaken the broad street entirely. In the distance burning fires were somewhat perceivable. A definite anarchistic feel was perceivable, everybody yelling, cheering, and screaming. No music was heard, just many people yelling. L. ran upon some friends of hers, four girls, who were seemingly so excited they screamed from the top of their longs, dancing around L. in circles. One of the girls was nothing but a screaming blond-brown hairball of pleasures, dancing and yelling, trying to get everybody to participate. They screamingly parted and went on. I decided to ask a police officer his opinion and walked upon one, a black man, hanging out in the police blocking line. He seemed relaxed, but a bit surprised I wanted to ask him a question. I asked him if this was normal behavior, and he replied "oh yeah, it is always like this with a big game." I told him this was a bit unusual to me, since in the soccer world such parties of sports-happiness only occurred when national teams beat another country, and not so local. He mentioned it would probably not get out of hand. He did not seem to be interested in talking to me, so I went on.

We walked with the stream of people in the direction on the first bonfire we encountered, and joined the circle of people gathered around it. A carton box was burning a relatively small, but hot fire, and about three guys had already taken of their shirts and were apparently playing with the fires by jumping over them and running through them, while exclaiming cheers. More and more guys joined, some of them actually standing in the fire with their jeans for a few seconds. At one point one of them took of his jeans and threw them in the fire, standing in his underwear in the cold, cheering and yelling. A fellow across of him yelled at him to "please not to that", "don’t let me see you in your underwear, man!", he yelled, having a beer in his hand. The guys were acting to be "out of control". Clearly under the influence, I still doubted if the drunkenness was heavy enough to be losing such control. Still, the energy of all the cheering people made all of us feel tipsy by default, surely influencing behaviors. At one moment a group of six or so shirtless guys had all been jumping around, and ended up making an inner circle. They cheered and yelled in disharmony at first, but as soon as they recognized their spatial bound, they all followed the most obvious of all adolescent cheers: "FUCK!, FUCK!, FUCK!, FUCK!, FUCK!". I do not think their claims of agency actually extended to the sexual domain. Not only were they too drunk, it seemed more a macho male-bonding experience, unveiling the unconscious complicateness of linguistic expressions available in the context of sports. I decided to have the event shock me on behave of the ultimate ideological nothingness of the experience. I wondered and mentioned to V. "what would happen if all these people could be this motivated to support an IMF protest". Of course my ideological perspective could be taken as a cop-out of a perfectly valuable moment of sports-craziness. But I could not help to wonder what brought these people together with such vigor. What was this all about? The amazing power of sports in American culture was an overwhelming fact.

We went on to a larger bonfire further up. All we saw was a mass of people in front of us and in the distance a sort of audience stand on which people were dancing and cheering to the happenings around the fire in front of them. The stand was under a large tree, in which several guy-like characters with bare chest had already climbed, yelling at the crowd their favorite and especially very cool expression of happiness. On the stand one guy had taken of his shirt, dancing very sexy to the tunes of a trumpet, which had slowly arrived in my awareness as a new phenomenon. Music! I had wondered why there were no more instruments in a crowd as large as this. Did nobody think to bring a drum, trumpet, or whatever? I also noticed that hardly anyone was dancing, thinking about TV images of South-African mobs dancing on streets of apartheid protests. We could not get close to the fire—which seemed to have become quite large—and it appeared that the mass of people we had been following was now closing us in. We retreated in the direction of the sidewalk on the north side. I lost V. and L. there, and stayed underneath the Bank entrance, watching.

What struck me was the segregation of the audience. Groups of African American people hang out together, dressed in full expression of ultimate coolness. They would only interact with other blacks and not with whites. Groups of Indian girls and guys hang out together, doing the same thing. I did not see any Mexicans, and only a few Asians. Groups of forty years olds, melancholically looking at the crowd from the side. In the midst of all these groups some particular older guys, drunks?, could be singled out, talking to anybody around them. But the majority of people were white, mostly undergraduate, 18-25 year old student crowd. After a while L. and V. caught up with me again, telling me they had been waiting on the opposite side of the channel of people they wurmed themselves through and I refused to. They had found a friend in the process and the four of us headed back to get a beer. A talked to one more cop. When I walked up to him, I noticed his uncomfortable wonderness and bewilderness, as if to say "are you actually going to talk to me?", and when it appeared I did, he relaxed a bit, saying that this was quite normal. I am not sure if I believed him. Some of the cops I had noticed were dressed in special fluorescent gear, walking back and forth a bit nervously. I pitied them, and wondered how on earth they could do anything about the gigantic bonfire in the distance through which innocent, drunk, citizens were running, with others hanging high in trees ready to slip and break their necks. What does a policeman do in such situations? They looked tough, dressed in full action gear, with big shoulders and a frowning, authoritative face. A face that lightened up when I talked to them—carrying neither bad news nor a breath of Budweiser. It was sports, I realized, and sports are "good". It kept them calm and approachable, perhaps.

I was suddenly grabbed firmly by the "friend"—a black guy about 35—and dragged along with him, V. and L. Walking back I noticed a large group of people singing songs—UNC cheers—together in a large elliptical circle, all lifting their arms up in the air in synchrony along with the song. One of them was sitting on the shoulders of another looking over all of it. A drunk, black guy bothered the friend, who uncomfortable took distance. Another guy was standing on the side pouring beer out of a can in front of the police, who did nothing. Passing Michael Jordan’s pub, V. noticed it was closed. We both were surprised. If one place could celebrate with the crowd it was this one, but inside it was empty. Why? Was it not interested in attracting a rowdy but oh so thirsty basketball crowd? We made it to the Irish Pub, never seen as crowded, and with a jazz combo playing, and ordered a pitcher of Samuel Adams.