Climate Change: The Old Rays are an Illusion
NCF NEVER HAS BEEN NOR NEVER WILL BE THE “SAME” AS IT EVER WAS
by: Qake Cooley
New College’s climate is changing. The cold, as if we have never experienced it before, is changing us all from the inside out. And we don’t even realize it! I know this because I have talked to those who came before and they insist, as all of those who have come before in all our school’s 51 years of climate! Change! Cold! Climate cold changing us! Us changing! Somehow Bad!
You can see us changing, you can watch the change: see it in the trees blowing; watch the banyan’s leaves fall. Watch it change in the tide that leaves a film on the concrete, the film and stench of high tide — as if low and high tide were not the two faces of a dancing sea!
But the cold? This climate is more than trees and tide: this climate is sun, rain, and wind — our climate is changing, darn the sunrainwind to Heck!
Wherever one looks, especially if cans of Busch or talk of the Old Days are involved, people say the Sun is retreating. To think the Sun a runaway? — ah! We have no institutional memory and our Sun has left us! Whatever happened to the Old Rays, those that warmed Our Drug-Addled Refuge and Savior, the Almighty Pergola, invulnerable to any valid Criticism? The Sun that grew the veggies that sizzled in Big Eric’s saucepan?
I have looked too long at the sun, and I am blind to see beyond it, blind to see it in revolution — that tranquil beast of celestial fire knows everything about us and our traditions! Without the sun and its Old Rays, we are lost! I care nothing about its revolution, nothing about the fact that we will revolve around it, forever changing its position amongst the stars! Lost, I say! And cold!
And the rain. The deluge that refuses to stop, getting larger in size every year; every fall more rain! As if the rain does not bring new growth, new ideas, new personalities — no! The rain is bad, like Turnips on Tuesday instead of a Drunken Funk — damn my sunburned eyes!
I cannot see similarities in anything!
Bathe in the raindrops, I say. Bathe in their naïve wonder and excitement that they have finally landed on a windshield where they may begin the greatest race of their lives! How lucky we are that they have landed on OUR windshield, of all the possible vehicles.
Damn your unseeing and embittered eyes!
Remember how not long ago that you were a fresh raindrop, newly formed in this place, readying yourself for the race against Time and the Gravity of Being — and if you are a new raindrop, fear not, for the race has already begun. All you can do is dance, with all the rest of the beauteous precipitation that blows across this dash.
(Gotta bundle up. Do you refuse to bundle up? Are you bringing more cold upon yourself and all of those around you? Why don’t you want to be a cool jacket-wearer (CJW)? As if the desire to provide warmth to all through sheer convection — yes! bundling yourself in that MC Hammer windbreaker or that cubist sweatshirt CAN, in fact, improve the condition of ALL. Even if you think all the forum is one circular dance of “I’m better at being warm than you/You don’t even realize how cold you are,” you are wrong. And if you think that resisting a compassionate warmth will ever work, you will find yourself shivering, silencing all those who wish to help you bundle up. So bundle up! Don’t call yourself a CJW if you don’t want to — just wear a fucking jacket! Stop making us freeze at the expense of your ignorance!)
Yet worst of all, and I expect no contention here, is the wind. The fearsome, ugly wind that rears its head in those HCL buildings, asking you to wear shoes on its impeccable carpet. The wind birthed of suburban rabbit warrens and Master’s Degrees in Education, the wind that blows through our rooms, our private spaces that we SIGN OUR LIVES AWAY FOR— darn the wind that rips open our doors, points guns at our heads, and sends us to jail for undertaking the Great Pursuit of Self-Exploration! Darn the wind that exploits our community members, darn the permanent records —
I beseech thee, True Blue sky, darn to Heck the DONGoblin who runs this place and brings his foul, gruesome wind upon our heads, his false words and fraudulent accusations! Quick, Don, prove yourself to the world and the state and every one of your falsified hopes for our future! Prove to the world how lucrative your position, how ineffective your actions, how swift your malice and forked your tongue; how cruel your game!
Gosh darn the cold. All the way to Heck so it can freeze the smirk of our appointed Goblin’s face. I am cold. Cold and tired. Tired of the sun that hides behind the clouds, pretending that we are anything more than the BEST that we have ever been; tired of our howling at the rain that falls, always, as if we could ever stop it, as if we could ever need anything other than the NEW; and I am tired of the wind that says one thing and acts another, the furtive wind that silences us and fills our lungs and minds with toxic mandates! Embarrasses our core with lukewarm suggestions: Boot Camp and LLCs!
To Heck with lukewarm suggestions, and to Heck with the Weather Channel: our howling, howling, howling HOLY HOLY HOLY HOWLING into the frigid air should give us all reason enough to bundle up. To bundle up, look at the inevitable, enormous, ever-changing, life-changing cold, and laugh in its face!
