I was in my garden recently, lunghi tied up between my thighs when I spied a curious man with binoculars armed with a pen and notepad standing where there had been nobody a second ago. Curious, I approached him and introduced myself.

He identified himself as Dennis Locke-Smithe, a biologist for the Leaky-Fosse-Goodall Institute of Unintended Learning and he was here in my neighborhood studying college students in the wild.

He had come to the right place. My neighborhood contained one of the more concentrated wild populations of college students in the Northwest. I was almost surrounded by the noisy and often destructive creatures.

Locke-Smith was eager to discuss his findings and delighted to find me - a "native" source of information about his target population. With the enthusiasm of the converted, he showed me his observation "blind" - a pile of garbage bags full of beer cans stacked in one corner of the yard on top of a filthy sodden derelect sofa.

Locke-Smith's finding were remarkably accurate and aligned with my own. These findings included the following:

** He observes that once an alcohol receptacle is empty, it becomes invisible to the eye of the male college student. This explains why the lawns outside their dens remain littered with empty bottles and bright red plastic glasses for days after one of their ritual congregations.

** Due to some undiscovered genetic trait, male students believe that garbage exponentially increases in mass weight once it has fallen out of a garbage container. Intuitively knowing that the garbage is just too heavy to lift, male college students ignore it.

** The male college student is suprisingly perplexed by the mechanical complexity of the common screen door. They are simply incapable of mastering its intracacies, so they leave such doors open all the time.

** Male college students identify plant life as having one of two purposes - something to urinate on or something to pull down to demonstrate their masculinity to each other.

Locke-Smith has been cautiously approaching one particular puddle of males in hopes of earning their trust enough to gain entry to their den.

(a "puddle" defines a group of male college students who operate as a collective unit - typically the inhabitants of a single den)

Locke-Smith speculates that the interior of a puddle's den is probably cleaner and better organized than a pig pen but dirtier and more chaotic than a bombed out building. He won't know until he gains access. He's also painfully curious about the role that garish neon bar signs and Budweiser posters play in the interior life of the puddle.

Curious myself, I asked Locke-Smith why he was so focused on the male of the species. After all, in terms of percentage, there are more female college students than males.

Locke-Smith replied that the majority of female college students were simply not that interesting. They studied, worked hard, kept tidy and attractive dens, and actually nurtured the plant life around those dens. The females that did not, tended to gather in male dens to exhibit an odd shrieking bevahior that appears to be a mating display based on vocal capacity - both of decibel level and rapidity of vocalization. Locke-Smith says he finds these shrieking displays physically painful - although he does like the tits.

Locke-Smith and I had much to share. Unfortunately, he spotted a puddle moving down the middle of the street headed toward a congregation of males - each member carrying a 12-pack of Old Milwaukee and bellowing at each other. Excitedly, he bid farewell and scampered off - camera and digital recorder in hand hoping to capture more data.

As for myself, I returned to the peace and quiet of my garden knowing that the peace would be short lived.