2005-04-19 - 1:38 p.m.

Dawn at Texas State

7:30 on a Tuesday morning. It's dawn on campus. The birds are twitterpated. They chitter-chirp at one another as I walk up the hill class. The bus let me off at the old stop- the one it hasn't stopped at in 6 months- so I feel as if everything has been put back in place. All is right in the world as I walk behind a dorm. There I see stray cats pawing at the bare dirt. In that same dirt some mischevious marijana sproutlings were mowed down two years ago. No one knows how they got there or by who, but it remains local legend. I continue walking uphill. Everywhere on campus is uphill. I have been going to this university for 3 years and have walked up millions of hills, but never down one. It's like a sick funhouse where you magically keep going up, up, up. Anyway, as I round the corner where one of the hills levels off before the next one begins I get a view of the sunrise. It's so pink... illuminating the equally pink Kappa Sigma letters. The letters were apparently stolen in the night by a rival frat and have been spray painted the rosy color of dawn. Upon closer inspection one sees that they also have writing on them. The grafitti proclaims such eternal truths as "K-Sig is FAGS!" and "I fucked you're girlfriend!" Accompanied by a few doodles of penises and a depiction of what appears to be two men engaged in coitus. The drawings are clearly the product of an unschooled hand and as such have the folky quaintness of a Grandma Moses landscape. I pause to admire the frat's handiwork where it now hangs- chained to the school's pride and joy. That would be... aw, hell, why even describe this thing? It's twenty feet tall and looks like this:

Yeah, I know, it doesn't look that stupid in the picture, but trust me- when you're right up next to the popping veins and throbbing testicles of those giant stallions... *shudder*. Anyway, the frat had done a good job. The Kappa Sigma letters are chained and double bolted to the "sculpture." The head maintenence man- a tiny, aged Latino- looks up at the letters with grim determination in his eyes.

"I'm gonna need the BIG bolt cutters for this." he thinks.

I smile at him and continue on my way. It's another beautiful and hopelessly average day here at Texas State. Of course, since most of the students spend more time with Halo 2 and MySpace (add me as a friend! I'm 'Emmature'! Seriously!) than they do on campus many of them don't know that they're students at Texas State. Two years ago we had a name change, but if you ask half of us where we go to school we'll tell you "Southwest Texas." Good ol' SWT. Or, as the *cough* intellectuals at The University of Texas (who are no angels themselves) still like to call it: Southwasteland. Ah, yes... they can change the name but they can't change the reputation. That was part of why the school wanted a new name. It was tired of what SWT meant. Of course, Texas State means the same thing as SWT (translation for non-Texans: the only place where young people drink more than UT). I would like to say at this point though that it is NOT true that we were voted top party school in last year's Playboy click HERE to see why, but we obviously have a rep.

So yes, dear friends, welcome to the Animal House.

The last thing I wrote before this thing. The next thing I wrote after this.