Is this your first year of college? Are you sitting reading this right now while the bustle of campus life rises around you with carnival gaiety? While others boisterously greet one another and form alliances that will last a lifetime, you sit nestled in your copy of the Weekly, with the sinking questions, “Where is my place in this edu-grandeur? Have I already missed my chance to [as we say in the big city] bust a move?“
First impressions are very important. If you don't do something bold to say, “This is me! Look out, world!” on your first day of class, chances are you never will. Entropy's cold undertow will pull you under, and four years later, you'll graduate without your instructors ever matching your name with a face. Then you'll be absorbed into a corporate mass from which you'll be cast off at age 65, spent and broken.
We will not let this happen to you. The very fact that you are reading the Weekly proves that you were born to lead! You are one of us!
Right now, this instant, I want you to roll this paper into a tight cylinder, approach the biggest, loudest alpha male in the cafeteria/commons/library/dorm hall, cram one end of the cylinder into his nose, and from the other end shout directly into his brain pan, “You, sir, may forget everything else you learn in this institution, but you shall not forget me!“
You may then sit down and resume reading this paper.
If you are a man, you can be assured that Mr. Alpha Male will cede his dominant status to you, though perhaps not before pounding your pussy ass into a fine powder for a couple of years until you pay him a significant “please stop pounding my pussy ass and go away” honorarium; $12,000 is the prevailing rate, plus lunch money.
If you are a woman, he will probably marry you. In either case, your future is assured. No need to thank us.
You will, of course, still have to show up on campus every so often for the next few years. This can be bewildering, particularly if you have come here from a small town like Zep Rules, Colorado, or Running Joke, Virginia. For example, the UC Irvine paper, the New U, now routinely carries a police log, citing a big-city range of campus crimes: thefts from cars, thefts of cars, identity theft, lasciviousness, drunkenness, assaults, hate crimes. I guarantee you: it is only a matter of time before this grisly headline appears in the New U: “Futon Damaged in Drug Raid.”
Compare this with a small-town police log, such as one in a recent issue of the Sequim Gazette, from nocturnal Sequim, Washington. This is real, actual stuff, repeated verbatim here:
Aug. 19, 10:24 a.m. A woman called to report the udders of cows at Sequim-Dungeness Way and Old Olympic Highway appeared to be too large. Aug. 21, 4:25 a.m. A 30-year-old female caller from an undisclosed location requested medication to shut off her brain. Aug. 22, 2:51 p.m. Three large dogs were reported running loose in the 100 block of Independence Drive. Aug. 22, 5:37 p.m. Three cows were reportedly wandering the roadway in the area of Towne and Woodcock Roads.
Back when I was well on the way to dropping out of UCI, you could literally cross the street from the campus and find cattle grazing. Some classmate friends and I once chased a herd across a hilltop—for credit. Then the steers in the herd turned and chased us—also for credit. With our college-honed minds, we were quickly able to discern the essentials of the situation: “Those cows sure have large horns. Those cows there, the ones stampeding toward us.”
Somewhere there exists a Super-8 film of this, as we were making a movie titled Boca de la Vaca about a dairy-based vampire. We used a lot of cow and milk imagery, though our vampire mainly attacked people in voting booths. This was our final project for a class titled “Sociology of the Horror Film.” Reflect upon this as you spend six hours a night with your biology core textbook: we got A's in the course just for pointing a camera at some cows.
It was the most popular course on campus, with well more than 400 students enrolled. Those bodies meant more campus dollars for the department, prompting a jealous professor in another department to start a course on the psychology of comedy movies. That professor's recurring premise was that since Freud said laughter was a release valve for pent-up repressions and Marx said it was repressions reaching the boiling point that led to righteous revolution, comedy was counterrevolutionary. We all had a good laugh over that.
This was after the Vietnam War, when Gerald Ford was president. A spirit of stoned ennui had settled over the campus, broken only intermittently by streakers. For those of you too young to remember, streakers were naked people, sort of like your current Girls Gone Wild, except instead of being vivacious drunk chicks showing off nipples harder than Mardi Gras beads, streakers were most often solitary, hairy-assed guys running al dente through the cafeteria when you were already having a hard enough time eating a Sloppy Joe.
In this atmosphere of meaninglessness there arose a tacit understanding between the faculty and students, one that seemed to say, “Look, we'll act like we're teaching, and you act like you're learning, and maybe we'll all get through this okay.”
Hence “The Sociology of the Horror Film,” which screened such B-movies as Blackula, Count Yorga and Vampire as well as works by Italian budget director Mario Bava. Every week, the instructors would give lectures relating Blackula to Erving Goffman's Frame Analysis theories, or introduce arcane acronyms like BBV, for “Bava's Busy Foreground.” It was all a bunch of amiable bullshit, but it has stuck in my mind for decades, while Wuthering Heights has not. Indeed, about the only other standout memory of my college years was a Human Sexuality course that showed cheap porno flicks—in one, the female participant was so disinterested she picked at zits on the guy's back while he did her—and where the professor demonstrated male ejaculation by taking a flying jump off a lab table.
In keeping with those uptight times, the only genitals pictured in the official class textbook were diseased, chancrous ones. (For extra credit, what's the Latin for “I came, I saw, I chancred”?) Are we less uptight now? I visited the UCI Bookstore recently, and the current $87.65 text, Human Sexuality: Meeting Your Basic Needs, still ignores the college student's basic need to eyeball puds and pudenda sans pustules. No one likes girls who have gone too wild.
What is the spirit on campus today? In my visit to Irvine, the prevailing mood seemed to be one of torpor and disengagement. Granted, this mood might also be called “summer vacation,” since classes hadn't begun yet and no one was around. Still, it was right in line with what I hear about college students today: that they're too busy pursuing a career, swapping MP3s or getting drunk to be engaged in the student's traditional role of being society's conscience. Unlike Tiananmen Square, if a U.S. student laid down in front of a tank, it would be because he/she was too drunk to stand.
C'mon, kids, pull yourselves together! You've got your whole future ahead of you, and no besotted, stumble-tongued frat boy is ever going to be elected president of the United States.
But then, who needs to be elected to be president anymore? Party on, dude. Here is all you really need to know to make a success of your college years—the recipe for:
Jim's College Rum Cake
Buy a cake. A sponge cake is particularly good. Douse it in rum. I don't mean sprinkle. I mean douse. Pretend you are a brave fireman and the cake is fire.
It is ready to serve. Get ready to graciously accept the accolades that will come your way, such as, “My udders are too big! Will you help me out of this bustier and into a youthful indiscretion?” and “Wowie! I'm so full of rum it feels like Captain Morgan's pissing up my ass! Thanks!”
