Dartmouth College. I sit and contemplate my return after a hideous break nearly a year and a half past. I have returned. Despite my vain, boisterous claimings, I have returned. Is it any wonder my pipe is so hungry tonight?
Dartmouth College. The faces have changed but the costumes remain the same. Suffice it to say that it is appropriate that a Festival of Puppetry should accompany my return.
Dartmouth College. That villainous pit of bureaucracy, which seeks to strangle with its rules and to profit by its power.
Dartmouth College. This would be my venue. This would be my audience. This would be my medium. This would be my credential. All once more.
But where? Upon what platform? Where would my words appear? There is only one reasonable answer: In The Dartmouth. "The D." Which makes a questionable claim to being America's oldest college paper and generates too little news and too much circulation. The stumbling "Grey Lady" of the campus press which stands one slim piece of drywall away from being an official subunit of the Dartmouth News Service. That magnet of half-witted social climbers who abuse the written word to serve their Tartikoffian ends. Who would elevate campus leaders just to watch them fall. Who lay claim to half-remembered ideals of "objective journalism" and who rank their supposed friends in a thinly veiled masthead.
As I read through the latest issue of The Dartmouth, I greatly distressed and nearly abandoned the idea of writing altogether.
I? Write for The Dartmouth? My words appear among the musings of semi-literate attention-seekers who feel the need to put pen to paper when a joke told in the Food Court goes over a little too well? I? An adult among children? A published writer? Who has had two music reviews published in a small press magazine of some note? I? Who made a home in New York City, developed a drug habit and endured a troubled love affair, all in the space of one year? Could I resign myself to this?
But, finally, after much thought, I supposed that I could. I would, in fact, periodically unchain my genius, as if it were a simple parlor trick, in the pages of The Dartmouth to speak a few words before the huddled lemmings of the campus.
In fact, I must have gotten pretty excited about the idea, because in my haste to write, I knocked over the disposable plastic cup I'd been using as an ashtray. Some of the dark, oozing tobacco water from the bottom of the cup spilled onto the carpet of my apartment, creating a new stain. It was very disgusting, and I don't recommend that it should happen to any of you. I'd use an ashtray, but I simply cannot find a single store in Hanover that sells them. I suppose I shall have to steal one from the Hanover Inn.
I write this now on a small pad purchased with cash from Topside, of all places. The reason for this is that every outlet in my apartment, save for one in the kitchen, only has slots for two prongs, while the plug of my Macintosh computer is three-pronged. My father has assured me that an adapter will be simple to procure and that I'll be word-processing in no time. I would go get the adapter now, but it is after dark, and I am not at all certain, and am in fact very doubtful, that the headlights in my rented Geo Metro work.
Not that the adapter should help much. I must tell you that my computer has a very dirty mind and likes nothing better at the end of a long day than a good screwing. She looks hot tonight and she knows it, the strumpet. We shall see who plugs in whom tomorrow!
Hmm ... Perhaps it's time for my little blue pills again. I seem to have digressed considerably. I can only say that the future is surrounded by an impenetrable green haze. I have once more made myself the slave to Dartmouth's destiny. And I'll only have succeeded at year's end if I have, instead, made it the slave to mine.
