Blatantly Inappropriate
     By J. Wilder Konschak
     
     
     I'm not sure if you've been in the Dakin Quad recently, but I'm quite sure 
that you have failed to notice the newly paved walkway that cuts across it. It 
sections off sad, stranded little eggs of grass. That wasn't there last year. 
That was a fact. So was that. So is this: while you and I were doing summer 
things, Hampshire saw a footpath worn into the grass, and saw fit to lay 
blacktop over it. 
     Now you and I have to walk across the grass somewhere else.
     At home, my dogs did the same thing. They used to walk through the center 
of the backyard so often that they beat down a trail. My mother spent a whole 
summer putting bricks on that trail, so the next summer, the dogs made a path 
three feet to the left of it. The little bastards simply refused to walk on the 
bricks.
     "Stupid animals!"
     No, no, no, no-no. 
     Hampshire students aren't stupid. We just ... think outside the lines. 
We're eccentric geniuses. And, for that matter, so are my two miniature 
schnauzers. The same ones that bark at snow. They simply see a danger you and I 
are missing.
     And like them, we Hampshire students are institutionally, chronically 
inappropriate. Now, yes, perhaps I'm the only one who refuses to walk on the 
pavement. Perhaps it's only me, with my Cheyenne medicine bag, walking lines in 
the gravel. Afterall, the kid who lived in my room last year - he said I looked 
like a camp councilor. Maybe I'm just an inherent trailblazer. Maybe it's part 
of my genetics. Or maybe everyone here refuses to do things how they should, and 
I'm just one of the crowd.
     None of us have any room to criticize. When my dorm room still belonged to 
that kid, that kid who criticized me about camping, one of his friends pissed on 
his mattress. That pee-mattress later became mine. That was so very Hampshire of 
him. He forgot that peeing is for the bathroom; sleeping is for the mattress. He 
peed on my bed; he slept beside the toilet. We don't walk on pavement, we don't 
pee in bathrooms, we don't get grades in school, and here I am, reporting an 
actual campus event in the Omen. 
     "Extree! Extree! They Paved A New Little Path In Dakin Quad!"
     I have a class where students scream and curse at each other about 
Shakespeare. People aren't supposed to go ape shit about Shakespeare. People 
aren't supposed to bitch about petty problems in the middle of lit class. If 
people have something dumb to complain about, people are supposed to submit to 
the Omen. 
     "To everything, turn, turn, turn - there is a season, turn, turn, turn - 
and a time to every purpose under Heaven."
     It's blatantly inappropriate for me to sing in the middle of an article. 
But what do I care? It's entirely appropriate to read a peer's article from 
beginning to end - so no one on campus will lower themselves to doing that with 
this one. They'll be thinking outside the lines. Pioneering. Reading from the 
middle to the beginning, then skipping to the ending, then looking at the title, 
then scanning for words like "tit" and "penis," then flipping to find a Surly 
Boy cartoon. Why not? This place is experimenting.
     We will find a better way to read.
     We have certainly found a better way to drink. We get drunk, and then we 
talk about society and relationships. We get drunk, and we yell at each other 
about Shakespeare. We get drunk, wander out to a big tree, and swing on a swing. 
If we were traditional college kids, we might get drunk and fuck.
     Thank God! We know better. And maybe someday Hampshire will pave the walk 
out to the tree, and we'll have to find somewhere else to swing. Yes! I am! I am 
utterly thrilled by how utterly incompatible you and I are with the rest of the 
civilized world. 
     We are flukes.
     We are mutants. 
     We are freaks.
     We are Darwin's Kids...