9 October 1988

The end of my senior year of high school was marked by the big pagan fertility rite: a time for the official deflowering of virgins, for the spilling of blood, for the worship of the goddess, for the sowing of the crops that would sustain us another year.

Chief among these events was the survival-of-the-fittest competition among the males, a domination ritual to determine alpha status and pecking order. The rite had been highly subverted by technology-- weeks before the actual rites, computers had begun running thousands of simulations, every male against every other male in every possible circumstance and condition.

There was also a female competition, to see who could get impregnated the fastest, but the winner this year was disqualified because it was discovered she'd been taking fertility pills.

All the men camped around the coliseum, grouping around bonfires. The women were all bunked in a house up on the hill, which we spent much time trying to see into from the nearby hills.

I expected to do much better in the mental/academic portions of the competition than the physical ones.