It is a widely known fact that if you are in the right place at the right time that strange things are bound to happen. It is also widely known that there are several places on the earth with portals into the pits of Hell. Widely, I assure you, there's nothing narrow about these facts. There is one place on earth that takes both of these in play and I would like to tell you about it now.

I moved into the Dominion apartment complex my sophomore year of college. It should be stated before we go any further that when you say dominion you shouldn't say it like any other word. You should say it in a deep raspy evil sounding voice. Just try it out, chances are there is someone around you that will know what you are talking about. At any rate, I moved there because I knew someone there and I ended up meeting a lot more. I'm just gonna split out several stories here to make them easier to tell.

The Venezuelan Soccer Team
As I said I had a couple of friends that lived there and one of them had a downstairs neighbor, wait that's neighbors, that we really believed was the Venezuelan soccer team. My friends and I know nothing about soccer, and thus it is easy to classify someone as a soccer player. Yeah, we're dumb. Anyways there were these nine guys that lived in this little two bedroom apartment and we figured that 9 guys must make a soccer team, again we have no idea about soccer and so we just said 9 sounds about right for soccer. We had these imaginary games that they would play against other soccer teams. It was all really quite amusing until we saw them all leave the apartment at the same time and pile into one car (ala clown car) and bring a big bag of soccer balls with them. I still wonder if they beat the world cup champion.

Satanic Offerings
There was this guy that was very very very religious that lived in the apartment complex. You didn't really know that he was religious until after he had invited you into his home and gotten you to sit down. Then he hit you with all sort of God talk from some hidden God book like a God preaching freak from the hereafter. (I just wanted to see how many times I could fit God into a sentence) Well, that was what he did if you were a guy. If you were a girl he would get you into his apartment and then talk God to you to try and get a date. Sneaky sneaky. Anyway, he had done this to a female friend of mine and she tried to avoid him from then on. That's where I come in.

I've always said I'm a problem solver. Ok, maybe more like an agitator of people stuck in their beliefs, but at this point I was doing both. I told Megan to come over on Halloween to our section of the parking lot and we would make sure the the religious guy would not bother her anymore. My friend and I went out and bought five Jesus candles from Sack N Save and some sidewalk chalk. On Halloween night we made sure that two pretty viewable parking spaces were not being used and drew a pentagram with the chalk and put the Jesus candles at each point of the star. Yes yes, I know that you are calling your priests right now to pray for my soul, but it wasn't a real Satanic ritual, for that we would need goat blood. At any rate, Megan, my roommate, two other friends of mine and myself stood around the pentagram and started humming. Religoman (yeah that's what I will call him) came out of his apartment and saw Megan and began to walk over. About halfway across the parking lot he saw what we were standing around and turned around and ran to his apartment. I think he was a little afraid. Interestingly he never bothered Megan again and he moved out shortly after the incident.

Death Pod
I'm sure that Megan will like being the center of so many stories in this column.

Megan was very particular about being able to park directly in front of her door in the parking lot. She acutally got quite mad about not being able to park there. Being the person that I am I really like to play on people getting mad, I like to call it making them realize how silly they are being though most would just call it plain mean.

During part of the time that I lived there I drove a car that my sister gave me. It was a blue Nissan Pulsar from the early and it was appropriately called "Death Pod" by all of my friends. I drove Death Pod for a couple of months and then (due in no small part to my poor maintenance habits) it died on the side of the road. I had it towed back to the apartment complex where I tried without results to get the darn thing to work. It actually ended up sitting in the parking lot for longer than I drove it for. After it had been there for a few months I decided that we needed to do something with it. We thought about having a car bash event where people pay to trash the car, we thought about leaving it in the front yard of some frat house, but we ended up pushing it around the parking lot until we could put it in the parking spot directly in front of Megan's door. Megan was not happy.

Jason "I'm Gonna Throw You Over The Balcony" Alexander
I hesitate to tell this story because in combination with the last one you will think I am a real meanie. I guess that's ok though, I am trying to refine my image.

Jason Alexander is not the actor from Seinfeld. Well, he is, but this is not him. I think that this Jason may have some pent up rage due to that fact. Despite the fact that he is not the Jason Alexander from Seinfeld he still lived just a few apartments down from me and was a good friend of mine.

Jason and a lot of people in the apartment complex got addicted to this online game while we lived there. Jason also got a job working in Dallas and spent a lot of time there. For a short period of time Jason was either at work or playing the game. With that in mind my roommate and I decided that we should make a concerted effort to steal his computer.

Breaking into the apartment was quite easy, everyone in the complex left their windows open during the day, so while we were at work we took the screen off and absconded with the computer. We hid the computer in the laundry room and waited.

Several hours later Jason stormed into our apartment furious. He was certain that Stuart, my roommate had been at the root of the plan when in fact it was the other way around. He searched Stuart's room top to bottom and then came out and said, "IF I DON'T HAVE MY COMPUTER BACK IN FIVE MINUTES I'M GONNA THROW SOMEONE OVER THE BALCONY!!!!"

With that we pulled out his computer and put it back together in his room for him. We never pulled anything like that on him again, but his roommate really wanted to pull out all of his stereo equipment out to the parking lot and act like we were having a big yard sale just when he got home from work.