Garage Days Revisited: 04/26/2004

My final article. Submitted (and actually published) as 5 Things: The Last Meal.

1. We’ll start off with drinks: a shot of idiotic randomness chased with a somewhat boyish naivety. As an appetizer, strips of sarcasm, battered with relevance and fried; served with a dipping sauce of honesty (100% pretense free). The main course will be an ill-informed, exorbitantly verbose and grandiose diatribe with blatantly obvious anti-BSC flavors, pan-seared and garnished with gratuitous innuendo included only to get a rise out of you (ingredients may vary depending on editing). Finally, dessert will be an abnormally terse goodbye, served tongue-in-cheek and cold.

Note: Nothing I’ve ever done has been 100% pretense-free.

2. At my wedding reception, I want the caterers to serve steak niblets with a lobster bisque to dip them in. I don’t exactly know what portion of steak constitutes a niblet, but it sounds good.

Two Notes: 1) I no longer eat steak and 2) I will die alone.

3. See what calling it “the caf” has gotten us? Someone apparently thinks that we as college students have an aversion to polysyllabic words. Thus, in that unknown entity’s infinite grace, they shortened the title of Birmingham-Southern’s annual spring festival of debauchery to SoCo. Our tongues no longer tied up with its archaic title, we are freer to drink the sweet nectar of alcohol that will always be such an integral part of the celebration. Thank you, powers-that-be.

It’s funny how fondly I remember Southern Comfort despite never once actually going under the tent to see a band.

4. I read an editorial in a recent edition of the Vanderbilt student newspaper on the subject of the sexual equivalent of winning the Music City Bowl, something that I can only faintly fathom even seeing in print in a BSC publication. In fact I’m not even going to say what the subject is to avoid my column being hacked to indiscernible pieces. Let’s just say that the article was truly gripping. And since we here on the hilltop are nothing if not progressive, liberated, and open to free discussion, we too need a monologue on certain taboo topics. To truly become “Southern Ivy,” we must follow the footsteps laid down by the institutions that have the national reputation that this school would like to have. And the first step that we need to make is an acknowledgement of the true nature of college life. The hallmark of today’s revered schools is an open-minded and expressive student body, not a cloistered community of status-driven automatons shoveling piles of stillborn ideas into the flames of mediocrity.

I read every student newspaper in the country hoping to find an article about handjobs. Thanks, Vandy.

I’m not half as good a writer as I thought I was back then. And math school has only made me worse.

“…cloistered community of status-driven automatons shoveling piles of stillborn ideas into the flames of mediocrity.”

That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever read. And that includes this.

5. This is it. The last scratch on the lid of the coffin by a man buried alive. I hope someone heard me.

My final impression is the same as my initial impression. I’m a tool.

Later, boners.