Firestone, Then the World

Prologue:

Friends, it brings me great pain to blow open yet another under-reported campus scandal. Once again, the real world has been making its sneaky attempts to infiltrate our joyous fantasy land. Last year it was the water crisis — now, it's the elections.

After watching Marine One helicopters perform the airborne equivalent of synchronized swimming three feet from my window in Scully, it became apparent to me that reality was not going to leave me alone. President Clinton did not personally harass me, but his intentions were quite clear. Dogs, Public Safety and a psychologically scarring rejection from the seating lottery system were all part of a concerted effort to make me accept the existence of an external reality. Well, they tricked me once with that whole Internet thing, but I quickly realized that if you play the Websites backwards at half speed they reveal their hidden coding mechanism.

Then I see that Ralph Nader '55 is also planning to descend on us like some justice-mongering mendicant. All my efforts to keep the world at a distance have failed. My gentle yet firm letters to world leaders asking them to exclude me from their activities, or at least stop making so much noise, have gone completely unheeded. My pleas to major news corporations were met with scorn. My ultimatum to the seasonal Canadian Geese who sometimes occupy campus was made into a paper airplane and thrown at me.

Frankly, I feel trapped. My traditional responses to this feeling were stymied, as I thoughtlessly left my bazooka at home, and nobody is on tap on Monday nights. Stuck in the middle of the magnificent collapse of my carefully pruned world-view, I fled into the deepest, darkest hole I could find: Firestone.

Dramatic Reenactment of My Previous Column:

Careful, attentive readers — actually, I guess there's only one of you — may remember that I learned to read in my last column. Since that time, I have progressed to the point where I can use the stairs in Firestone practically unaided. In an exciting new development, I have recently started learning how to write. As you can see, the process is a slow one. Mastering the number keys proved quite a challenge, but I soon expect to move on to the first row of letters. Humanitarians may wish to consider a tax-deductible donation to the Ed Finn Education Fund — please, cash only. But alas, gentle peruser, we are straying from the topic at hand.

The Middle Part:

The depths of C-Floor gave a moment of respite, and I immediately set out on the journey to the only source of information I trusted anymore — the Reference Librarian Oracle. Sybil was on duty, and she obligingly wrote down her prophecy on recycled library cards. Unfortunately, her prophecy was written in Dewey Decimal, a language I have not yet learned to translate.

Undeterred, I decided to go ahead and do battle against the forces of reality anyway. Strategic consultations revealed the forces of reality are varied and overwhelmingly powerful. On to Plan B: Try to pretend the problem isn't there. This dream-world approach worked for a while, but it is difficult to talk the Secret Service into playing make-believe with you. So I was forced to adopt Plan C, a devious machination so intricate and cunning that it requires a whole separate paragraph to explain. Tragically, because of space and dissimulation constraints, I am forced to skip the plan and proceed directly to the dramatic conclusion of this epic.

Epilogue (Abridged):

. . . defeating the combined forces of Iraq and Scandinavia, liberating the Shroud of Turin and triumphantly completing the Prospect 11, our hero brought the real world to its knees and made it promise never to bother him at Princeton ever again. Not ever. And especially not for the Olympics.