Posted 7:50 PM by Gene

On my first post here (have I been flailing away at this for sixty days?) I mentioned I've written a never-to-be-published satire -- of my college youth (I didn't mention). Yesterday I got the alumni magazine (from a nominally-church-related small college in a mid-Atlantic state), and boy if the old alma mater's still satirical. Too humble when I attended, the college now not only has a very swelled head (an advanced case of usnewsitis, brought on by over-arching presidents) but an edifice complex; it's replaced a perfectly fine cafeteria with a vastly-expanded multi-building student center with 22 restaurants (partly to justify naming one of the buildings for a whoopdedoo newspaper mogul), and it's spending $12 million rebuilding the science complex because otherwise it would look like (to quote a turn of phrase from me) "a bad day in Legoland."

The graduates are just as trying. In its next-to-most-recent rag the school boasted of four recent alums at ESPN. While one (an Emmy winner!!!!!!!!!!) seemed perfectly normal and decent (even posed within the R.U.R. plant at Bristol), two others looked like the kind of cranially-underdeveloped male who spends his whole life playing fantasy baseball, and the fourth looked like a stand-in for John Belushi on the set of Animal House. I suspect I wasn't the only one who noticed.

We know how college has evolved into Club Med for the young (not my line), so it has to have been a very long time since someone at my old alma mater actually learned something. I managed, despite the painful lack of a mentor or a truly close friend. Midst the flashing lights and the creature comforts I'm not sure how others can.