Excuse me if I lack social grace. The past few years of my life have been spent in seclusion.

My body repulses the idea of telling the story, but I'm afraid that after tonight my mind may be too far gone to repeat it.

I want to commit this story to paper so that people may know how I heard the music of Eric Zan.

The first thing that greeted me at the hallway of the students hall was a beheaded fish.

It rested on a wooden cutting board with a butcher knife covered in a mess of guts next to it.

I took a couple of steps into the hallway.

I was greeted by the head of the fish.

A shirtless ginger held it in his hands as a crowd of people gathered around him.

They were all screaming, some of them trying to start chance, some of them simply shouting

the word, lad.

As the crowd produced phones to wetch this memory into eternity, the ginger lifted the fish

head in the air, took a deep breath, and swallowed it. The drunken crowd went wild, some clapped, some dry-heaved, some simply screamed.

These people would be my roommates for the next year.

I had moved to Scotland from my studies.

The universities back home were small.

The job markets were limited,

and I figured getting a start in an English-speaking

country could open up more of the world to me. I thought that moving would be the

first step towards adulthood. Instead, I got the student halls.

The building I was moved into was a work in progress.

The halls had three floors, but only the bottom floor was suited for student accommodation.

The other two floors were strictly off limits to us.

...