Early 90s Drunken Adventures in ‘Gray Flag #2’

 

Gray Flag #2

Litzine, Chris Auman, 28 pgs, Rooster Cow Press, chris-auman.com, $4.50

If you haven’t had too much to drink and ended up in a mosh pit, were you ever truly in your early twenties? Anyone who has gone on drunken adventures and loves music will relate to Chris Auman’s collection of stories and drawings, which are excerpts from journals he kept while attending the Story Workshop writing program at Columbia College in the early 90s.

Some of these anecdotes are more mundane than others, but they capture the essence of being a young adult and making questionable choices: “After we left, Bob and I ended up swimming across a flooded stream to his house. We thought we could just wade across and maybe get our feet wet. I was neck-deep though and we got completely soaked […] That was one of the stupidest things I’d done in a long time. It was fun though. It felt like being twelve again, only wasted.”

Though this zine collects stories that are now almost 20 years old, it turns out that going to shows, working shitty jobs, drinking at band practice, etc., are timeless activities. I enjoyed this zine and look forward to reading more of Auman’s work.