Memoirs of a College Freshman

or

Why People Get Lobotomies

    
By Brother Ragnarok




      College gets you going on some strange-ass hours.  Especially 
if your roommate is gone and you don’t have to get up for anything 
in the morning.  Since I had to work Saturday night, I was forced to 
stay in my dorm Saturday night and Sunday instead of being home like 
I usually am.  Therefore I went to bed at sometime approaching five 
a.m. after watching a little Red Dwarf, a couple episodes of Doctor 
Who, and Blood Dolls.  And then I didn’t get up until two in the 
afternoon Sunday.  I tend to be a bit nocturnal in nature anyway, 
and so it’s almost a quarter after midnight and I’m quite wide awake.  
So I was lying in bed staring at the lone glow-in-the-dark star on 
the ceiling left here by whoever had the room before me, and decided 
to put my restlessness to use.



      Now, all this may seem a bit irrelevant, but I am getting around 
to a story here, I promise.  What got this ball rolling was that 
I was staring at that star, which I’ve come to think of as my 
little beacon of light in an otherwise pretty damn dark place, 
and listening to American Head Charge’s War of Art, which was 
the first CD I bought after moving to college.  My mind just 
started wandering around to all the different things that have 
happened this last year, so I decided to get out of bed, turn 
the computer back on, and write a sort of year-in-review article.  
Except that like all the things I write, I can guarantee you I’ll 
be off in a different direction by the end.



      So, we’ll start at the beginning, 
I suppose.  For a 
few months in the first semester, Brother Fistula was my roommate.  
We moved in on opening day, our respective parental units unloaded 
all our crap, approximately 75% of which we didn’t need here, and 
left us to it.  That first night, or rather the first few, were an 
interesting experience.  The feeling was something like an amplified 
form of that feeling you get that first night staying in a strange 
hotel room.  Except imagine that every other room in that hotel is 
full of permanently drunken, rabid howler monkeys who have some 
kind of disorder that prevents them from being quiet at any time 
before three in the morning.  After discovering that blasting 
Strapping Young Lad at unnecessary volume levels will at least 
scare them into shutting off their god-awful rap music, they became 
a little easier to deal with.  I still wish them nothing but the 
torment of the damned, though.



      The horrors of being trapped 
in a giant sardine 
can with 1500 people who you regard as being on approximately
the same evolutionary level as flatworms was alleviated a bit
once we discovered there was a great used CD store and a Best 
Buy not a half-hour’s drive away in Waterloo.  This still 
wasn’t quite enough, however.  About halfway through the first
semester, Brother Fistula decided to leave college and pursue 
a life of not being somewhere he hated.  Wise man, and I 
wish I had followed him.
  



      For whatever idiot reason I gave myself, I stuck around.  
Having the room to myself for give or take two months was nice, but 
come winter break, the man done figured out I was essentially 
getting a two-for-one deal.  Not liking the idea that one of 
their students should be comfortable, they decided to find me 
a new roommate.  He called me one night to ask about the room, 
and he sounded like a real winner.  I believe his exact words 
when I told him I’d found someone else were “Fuck, I really 
wanted to stay on that floor, too.  One of my friends told 
me it was really cool.”  I’m sure I would have left his skinned 
and gutted corpse in the pond by the frolf course in Cedar 
Falls within a week of his moving in*.  Bollocks to the man, 
I knew a guy whom I’d met in the first week during orientation 
was being moved out of his room.  He seemed a genial chap, so 
taking a chance, I elected him as my new roommate before Mr. 
Peaked-In-High-School-Schlitz-Drinking-Rap-Loving-Date-Rapist 
could move in.  As the world turns, things worked out quite 
well.  I’ve introduced Andy to many wondrous things (Re-Animator, 
the fact that there are two movies that come before Army of 
Darkness, and suchlike), and he turned out to be a pretty damn 
groovy guy.



      As nice as that sounds, 
it’s really the only positive thing to come of this whole 
experience.  Well, perhaps besides suckering the college 
newspaper into giving me a movie review column.  The reviews 
are all, of course, genre-related and I’m sure very much 
unlike anything that’s been in this paper before.  While not 
quite as, shall we say, risqué as the reviews on this site, 
I’d imagine quite a few people are left in the dark.  We’ll 
probably publish those articles in here somewhere too, at 
some point in time.
  



      Anyway, I’m getting off 
track here.  Back to my point.  College will ruin your fucking 
life.  All that crap everyone gives you about being with 
learned, like-minded people is complete bullshit.  You don’t 
get rid of those morons you hated in high-school, you just 
upgrade them.  Now they’re ALLOWED to drink all night and be 
idiots.  Your only hope is that they’ll all die of alcohol 
poisoning before the first semester is over.  As far as I can 
tell, no one’s dead yet.  I’m still trying to figure out how to 
exterminate an entire building full of people in one fell swoop 
without being discovered.  I swear out of 1500 goddamn people 
I’ve found approximately 10 that I like.



      Brother Ferox is still here to keep me somewhat sane, but 
I’m afraid it takes more than that.  With the exception of one 
person and my beloved VCR, I’ve left everything and everyone I 
care about at home.  Sure, I’m only an hour’s drive away and I 
go home every weekend.  Writing that makes it not sound too bad.  
You’d think everything would be fine, wouldn’t you?  While I 
wouldn’t actually go through with it, I have occasionally thought 
that there wasn’t much point in keeping up with this crap.
  



      Y’see, the thing that really 
bugs me is, only seeing my friends once or twice a week just 
ain’t enough.  I’m one of those people who takes years to make 
close friends.  I can talk to just about anyone, but to be really 
close takes a long time.  And I miss all the little things with 
my core group of friends.  Being able to go shopping (CD’s and 
movies for all those who thought that sounded femmy) and frolfing 
all as a group after getting out of classes, hanging out every 
day, seeing people who look like celebrities in fast food places 
and building our ridiculously large inventory of inside jokes, 
being able to just cruise over to Malorie’s house if I feel 
particularly lonely for her instead of having to e-mail her.  Not 
that this doesn’t ever happen, it’s just not as often as it used 
to be.  You may be a bit lost by now, and I’m sure I haven’t been 
as eloquent in describing these feelings as I should be to really 
get the point across, but it’s a bit hard to explain.  Those of you 
who have been there will know exactly what I’m talking about.



      To sum it all up, I’m just desperately looking forward to 
summer.  I can’t wait for all this shit to be over, if only for 
a few months.  It’s not that I’m worried about losing contact 
with my friends.  People that close don’t just drift apart after 
eight months of strained communication.  It’s not that I’m worried 
about growing apart from Malorie.  We’re far too much in love 
(I know, I know, you’re all whispering to each other “Brother Ragnarok 
just got sappy, he’s losing it.”  Bite me) for that.  It just sucks.  
It’ll be good to be home.  Hell, even writing this made me feel better.
  



      Whenever I start thinking about this, however long it makes me 
depressed, it all eventually comes around full circle to one 
point:  Things will be fine.  I’m never going to lose the 
ones I’m close to.  Just because college sucks ass, it ain’t 
the end of the world.  If nothing else, I have to keep writing 
stuff for this website to keep you drooling masses (of the 
four people who regularly read it) entertained.  There are bigger 
and better things out there.  Long after I’ve said “Fuck you” to 
Wartburg College and gone out into the world to write for Fangoria 
and make movies and music and all that other shit I have all planned 
to do, we’ll still be talking about how goddamn huge Robert Z’Dar’s 
face is and how much we hate Michael Pataki.  And although a lot 
of the things we talk about together will seem silly and trivial 
to others, behind it all we know it means “You and me, we’re in 
this together now.  None of them can stop us now.  We will make 
it through somehow.”



      Jesus, that was a roller coaster of an article, wasn’t it?  
There’s a very good chance I need some medication for that.












      *  There’s a frolf course in Cedar Falls, about twenty minutes 
from college.  On the back 9 holes, there’s a pond that’s the 
most ideal place I have ever seen for dumping bodies where 
they’ll decompose quickly and quietly and no one will ever find 
them.  Oh, the possibilities.


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