While I was an undergraduate at Lawrence University, there was an organization called the Yuais. Formerly a chapter of a national fraternity, the group had lost their charter when the president of the local chapter was black and the vice-president was gay (or vice versa; legends differed) -- and they proposed, in response to declining pledges, that they let women in. Reincarnated as the Yuais, the organization was known for its public declarations of hedonism. I first encountered them during my sophomore year in the student center, where two quite drunken girls, holding each other up, sung the Yuai anthem, which seemed to praise unwed pregnancy and young death; a more normal student, perhaps seeing my appalled response, said simply "They're Yuais" -- and I though, "gee, there's a group I'll never join." Always one to challenge myself, I did the following year.

To be a Yuai meant that you were part of a social experiment, one both sexual and social, a Bacchanalian cult in the truest sense, a community of libertines eternally negotiating their tolerance of those members linked, by attitude or religion, to repression in some form or another. There were orgies and much passing out on couches or in bathrooms. Bu it was also a society that sought to transform language and social interaction. When we met, in cold Wisconsin, we embraced. We lifted each other in the air and played like children on the greens, children who were, in our more responsible alter egos, computer network engineers and respected scholars. The word "yuai," we were told, meant, in Japanese, something like "peace and understanding." We wanted to make "hello," like "aloha," resonate with signification of love.

Yes, we were drunks, some more than others, but it rarely affected our classes. Yes, we did drugs, sometimes for hours, but it was rarely our life or an obsession. It, like the process of slowly getting naked over the course of a six-hour-long nocturnal party in an apartment, was about shared experience, a roadmap to a new, more open society, if only one of twelve or twenty.

And we lived. Gods, how we lived.

I realized, while there, that we were deprogramming ourselves. I protested Yuai initiation, only an excuse for a social ritual, because all of our gatherings were initiations into another mode of being. A mode more passionate. A mode more balanced, though it appeared to all the world less so, that we were all drunks, social outcasts beyond redemption.

We had a phrase: "A Yuai is someone who was picked last for kickball." Meaning in grade school. And, with few exceptions, we were -- or remembered that we were, felt that we were.

I'm not sure anyone else is that different, really. I suspect that the jocks, the popular kids, the President -- they all feel crushingly alone at times. But in the Yuais, when you felt alone, there was Katherine, our frequent hostess, or someone like her, who, without taking you aside, without allowing you to believe you were secluded, eased you back into the group, where you found that, despite your well-honed instincts, you weren't alone after all, that there were others, others of interesting minds, who shared your isolated subjectivity -- and in the drinks at a homemade bar, remarkably professional and well-tended, with a dormitory miniature refrigerator underneath, that was enough to elicit a smile, to break the imposed otherness.

There are a million stories I carry of them in my head, stories of smoking pot with professors of world reputations, in dorm rooms or some secluded basement entered only by those who could figure out the code and knew what was going on. Stories of cult films and shared trips to the comic book store, gyros on the way home. Stories of a dozen people who knew some area of comics or literature or film of theatre, who wanted to speak foreign languages and live as Wilde. Stories of lust and obsession, of heartbreak and alienation from the alienated, but none of that mattered. No, it was the whole, the inexpressible experience of it all, passionate, experimental, frank -- the oddness of watching Josh play tricks with his horse-like testicles, pulling them up and down like yo-yos, without using his hands -- stories of adding A1 sauce to vodka, after drinking all day, just before a play, on the grounds that someone said that was how the Russians did it and it seemed a noble experiment at the time (and I'd still maintain it was), only to attend the horrible postmodern play, where I, high in the bleachers on the far side from the door, realized that I was going to need to vomit after two hours of sitting through tripe and proceeded, sensing immediate danger, to dark across the thrust stage as the lights went out, vomiting all the way, so that the actors came out to bow and found, as the lights came up -- and I walked home to pass out, past strangers who saw me fleeing the theatre, staggering and with vomit on my clothes -- the stage splashed like a Jackson Pollock painting with regurgitated liquor of all types, a bit of A1added for aroma, a poetic finish if ever there were one, a bit of performance art as commentary, a postmodern surprise on the perpetrators of postmodern surprise, my finest artistic accomplishment.

I couldn't make up such stories if I tried, I mourn, nor could they encompass or contain the experience.

And now I'm wondering when, perhaps accompanied by some photo, from those years, of me quite convincingly in drag, some journal will carry this caption: "DID YOU KNOW ... writer Julian Darius once... ."

So tip a shot glass and toast the Yuais, a window of time, a utopia of social experimentation, a colony of crazies that once lived somewhere up north.

YOUR ASSIGNMENT THIS WEEK

This column is the second to make up for the six weeks that this column was on hiatus.

See Smoke (Appollonian Bacchanalia 18), released on the same day as this column, for information about updates.

No assignment for this column as it's only the second in a series of columns posted at the same time, and there's one for one of the others released on the same day.

Yes, I am insane. Well, perhaps.