I’ve heard a couple of times now that the season is ripe for a Veishea riot.

It’s been a few years.

The festivities look to be well-planned and exciting.

It’s been an active political season.

And there’s a concert that weekend — next weekend.

Now from a news perspective, Veishea riots would make for some high-profile stories. Veishea attracts national attention, after all, and we’re talking about a whole lot of people, probably more than 100,000. Mass gatherings in Ames of any kind, friendly or foe, are newsworthy events.

But don’t riot for me, Argentina. In fact, don’t riot at all.

I was in the middle, for a brief not-so-shining moment, of one of the last Veishea uprisings over on Franklin Avenue a couple years back.

It was pretty lame, entirely pointless, really.

I’ll paint the ugly little picture for you: A couple of buddies and I decide around 9 p.m. one Veishea-laden evening to check out this way-too-hyped party with this really exclusive guest list. I think it was limited to a combination of the ISU Directory and the Ames phonebook, probably in that order.

So we get there. We hang out on some lawn for about 15 minutes with just under 1,000 people that we don’t know. Once in a while we’d run into somebody that we had in Statistics 101 our freshmen years. That really made us feel like we were part of the “in crowd.”

Wow we were cool.

In the course of about 90 seconds, the party crowd ballooned to encompass most of the Wendy’s parking lot and nearly an entire block of Franklin Avenue.

Here’s where the bulk of the riot activity begins.

Some call it mass harassment.

I guess I would, too.

The crowd was relatively tame until a car would try to drive down Franklin. Then the super-cool guys would launch bottles and bang on hoods. You know, real mature stuff that takes a lot of courage, like scaring a little girl in the back seat of a car half to death.

That lasted for about 20 minutes, when my friends and I decided the fun was too much and we’d have to go home. But being the highly intelligent mammals that we were, we were sucked back into the chaos by the patented riot attention-getter: the car tip.

Only these drunks were either A) too stupid or B) way too drunk to actually tip the thing.

So it was more like the car rock.

Five or six guys would build up their drunk muscles and move in for a 5-or-6-minute rocking period. They’d put three of them on each side and get the little thing going.

I honestly don’t think they realized that with people on each side, they were working against each other.

And even if they would have actually got this vehicle rolling, somebody was gonna get squashed.

Oh how I laughed.

It got funnier.

They kept getting tired.

They’d rock the car back and forth for a little while, get winded, take a 10-minute beer break and have back at it.

I didn’t think making an ass out of myself in front of 1,000 people sounded like a riot, but what did I know?

They never did get the car tipped, but settled, rather, for more petty forms of vandalism.

So I guess as Veishea riots go, this one didn’t quite measure up to the violence of years past. That’s a good thing.

What’s not a good thing is the possibility of something similar or more serious happening this year.

Veishea is one of the most exciting times in an Iowa Stater’s career. I’d hate to see the Veishea privilege lost on my watch, no matter how interesting of a story it would make.

So don’t riot.

But if you just can’t resist the urge, limit your riot area to the junkyard. At least there you can only scare yourselves and the cars are much lighter.

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Chris Miller is a senior in journalism and mass communication from Marshalltown. He is editor in chief of the Daily.