People always seem to think that when you’re writing a sugary documentation of how your college years incurred, a detailed manuscript of the day-to-day regime of those (hopefully only) four years of higher learning, where freedom actually becomes tangible, that you need to include some sappy lyric of how these were the “best years of our everyday lives.” And maybe that is so, because if you see any recount of these aforementioned years, they always include an ending parable that seems vaguely similar to the abstract above.

Well, I don’t necessarily believe this to be so. There shouldn’t ever be any cap on the reality of those moments or a final epilogue to those ramblings and scribblings because for the remainder of everyone’s lives, they will be pensive towards the idea that these years were either the best they could be or that they could’ve been oh so much better. I don’t believe in capping anything off since these years are meant to be one thing finite: a launch pad to the rest of your life and an equation for which to grind the everyday problems following these events through. Think about it. If someone out there actually said that college was four years and the education you learned from those years is the one that you will most remember and the one that you will use forever, then they were either disparaging over the fact that their equation was incomplete or they were hoping to delude themselves into thinking that it couldn’t have been better. College is simply this: an anachronism. It is displacing an individual into a new habitat, foreign, unbridled, and vaguely euphoric. It’s a massive trip brought on by a potent Thai-stick or a double- doused square. It’s contaminated and unrefined to produce a random effect of ups and downs, but ultimately, something not to dwell on but to forge anew. Certainly, not in the form of the same trip encore, it is something to recreate with the odds and ends provided at other different foreign and unbridled stages of our lives. And if we aren’t provided these odds and ends, we must create them as well.

If you have ever taken part in a college group, beit an extracurricular tribe, an intramural activity, a fraternity, sorority, organization, recognized or unrecognized, a pack above or below ground, a fellowship, religious or atheist, a résumé padding, an open bar, a BYOB, a brotherly testament, a daytrip, a road-trip, an acid-trip, a walk along the knife on the road less or more taken, a fuel-up, a mixer, a prom, an anti-prom, a protest, an initiation, a hazing, a pleding, a running, a nomination, an ox-roast, a flea-roast, a nonsensical map- dart voyaging, a peaceful assembly, a belligerent congregation, an unscholarly passport, stamped with a nihilistic, hedonistic visa, bathed in booze, bootstraps happily pulled down and too caked in sticky reminisces of parties of yore, crying until it’s funny, laughing until it hurts, pissing, puking, praying, and pleading that she or he will finally see you, while he or she does likewise, AND in absolute secretly hoping that that night, under a haze of stars and black-lights, disco balls, and strobes, will and would never ever come to an end…

…then I assure you, it won’t. Why questions the martyrs that have seen the starched collars, lined-up seams, and inky paisley nooses? And how can you be so sure in your last and final hours, as they encroach only to slip quite delicately in the unguarded door where the kegs don’t echo and the stamps don’t stick. Don’t patronize the wonder that has created this great and grave establishment and jab that the hierarchy created long before your footsteps ever graced the steps of a pre-frosh collection or a first-year dorm. The honest sincerely that I hold bible is the knowledge that the condition at which this truth doesn’t exist is carved only on the underside of the desk in the back of your mortal classroom. You hold that, as a human condition, and owe it to only one person to ensure the legion continues to march. Be it corporate ties or suspenders of pre-designated perfect placement rates, scribed by those who push not of the generation from which you were nee, but the one prior, or prior’s prior, to beckon that this institution and all others becoming from the first, continue to thrive, and for a different reason, prolong the events that we’ve cherished, treasured, and revered as the greatest times of our lives.

So the condition continues to exist. It exists because it has to exist. Without a fallacy to the truth, a counterexample, one can’t wonder. And if the wonder is gone, there is no force to test the theorum. And if the theorum is never tested, than those sickly pagans of this neo-satyr world, laced with senioritis, a string of bad or good one-night-stands, a fair share of alleys adorned with regurgitation and headhunters of a different brotherhood, a hung-over final, an unquenchable lust, a rage of hormones and a penalty ensued, an endorphin galley built on a narcotic gallery, and list of numbers and places to ever hold sacred, as oftentimes quoted verbally or not that these are my articles to be sheathed only in my Pandora’s box and relinquished and wielded on weekends and breaks, that those sickly pagans will never leave the hovel of pizza boxes, carpet stains, bed-stains, memory stains, and blood stains to journey out in hopes of making those lists longer, the alleys more plentiful, the hatred and lust rejuvenated, and the kinship folded over again as if it were the product of the most skilled Damascus Swordsmith.

I never bothered to question this covenant further because the precious time at which I’d ponder these mysteries would be wasted and that which is it’s rightful owner, the magnanimous infections of events in our everyday lives would be cured too soon and the throbbing and pulsing will steady and dwindle prior to the time which they were to burn the brightest. But at arms-length the question still remained if these thoughts are unbroken by myself or others in the quest for truth and ecstasy, to find a loophole, crag, or cigarette burn in the law, mount, or fabric of our creed. So if others, in fathom or furlong, are joined in this pursuit, then at 4:00am on a bad headache and an unquestionably strong espresso, it is not for naught that I push this morality and stress the allegories of mine and peers to provide, at least, a semi-solid foundation for your faiths and mine enough to strut upon.

This should never be used as a substitute for the real thing and with all online maps and point to point protocols, one must serve themselves a reality check to ensure that this fiber still holds strong. Don’t ever take this ballyhoo to heart without first test. And if test means kicking your feet at the deep-end’s lapping, wading with the proverbial sharks, or diving in head first into the murky opaque waters that ebb and flow in everyday occurrences, make your movement, because the water’s not warm and the lifeguard is indefinitely off-duty.