“I am a sick man…I am a spiteful man. An unattractive man. I think that my

liver hurts.”

-Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground

While most of my fellow UMass scholars were cavorting about the happy burghs of Olde Amherst and Northamptowne, I spent the weekend cloistered in my third-floor bedroom behind frat row (yes, I AM that naked guy in the window) with the Riverside Shakespeare, my rubber plant Stinky and a copy of Machiavelli’s The Prince. With little to distract me from my studies aside from the lure of Internet porn, my coffee machine and a tank of nitrous oxide, I often found my mind wandering. What resulted was a series of semi-maniacal bouts of free association (the type often resulting from long periods spent in a sensory deprivation chamber or a Food Science lecture), which led to a collection of loosely related theories on the “world” of UMass, as well as some general observations on human nature. You’ll find that these garbled pieces of mish-mash and gobbledy-gook are more than a little influenced by the aforementioned text…Here goes nothing…

…Late Saturday night, the beautiful and virtuous young women of the sororities in my neighborhood joined together in song. Apparently their communal sing-a-long had something to do with “drinking at The Pub” and “getting ass,” at least as far as I could make out from the slurred lyrics. Along with the singing, there was also a display of lights and festive balloons in front of their house/bordello/barracks. It was at that time I realized that my past criticisms of “Greeks” might have been unjust. In the time-honored tradition of the cult of Bacchus, these young women were performing life-affirming rituals of excess; rituals of song, drink, communal beautification and, ostensibly, wild, uninhibited fornication. Perhaps it was the last item on the list that really got me excited, being the monastic scholar that I am, but for whatever reason, I was greatly inspired by this life-affirming display of ecstatic celebration. It was as if the sorority house had transformed into a giant pleasure center, a massive musical clitoris if you will. Perhaps not as intellectually stimulating as a STPEC coffee hour, but definitely stimulating in another sense.

…The Prince got me thinking (after I had stuffed rolls of toilet paper in my ears to silence the Sirens’ song from across the street)…If I were to lead a bloody coup against the UMass administration, recruiting from the plethora of campus political wackos (Unite my Maoist brothers and sisters!) and drug-addicted S.O.M flunksters desperate to keep Dad from finding out about their sub-2 G.P.As, how long would I be able to maintain power? According to Machiavelli, the secret to maintaining power over a newly conquered principality is to make sure your subjects return to a way of life equally or more beneficial to them as the one they lived before you conquered them. Machiavelli, skeptical of human nature, believes that men are essentially selfish, and as long as their own means of living are not taken from them, their property left intact and their women untouched, they will happily embrace a new ruler. Therefore, my first act as Emperor of UMass would be to use the campus security vans to distribute free cases of cheap American beer, cheeseburgers, video-game consoles, boxes of novelty condoms and copies of Road Trip to all my subjects.

Furthermore, grades would henceforth be based upon gallons of “Jungle Juice” and number of “bingers” consumed per semester hour. (I bet the administration and his crew won’t be sleeping so well after they read this!) So as not to appear too softhearted, (as Machiavelli says a ruler mustn’t) my next act would be to establish a colony at Amherst College where disobedient and undesirable subjects could be exiled. My final triumph would be the sack of Hampshire College, after which there would be a ritual cleansing and shaving of my newest subjects as a means of expediting their assimilation into UMassanian culture. Then they would be forced to publicly denounce Jerry Garcia and Amber Waves or taste the cold steel of my death-engines. My reign would culminate in a massive festival of excess: roasted goats and swans, rides in dangerously over-inflated airships filled with nitrogen, rivers of whiskey and Mikes Hard Lemonade, a unicorn hunt, cock-fighting, games of chance, carnival rides, a freak-show, swimming in the campus pond, a live performance by the Village People, elephant races, gigantic phallic bonfires and a mass orgy led by the UMass athletic mascots. At the height of this festival, the skies over the library would part and I (along with a harem of lusty Smith College field-hockey players) would ascend directly into heaven as did Melchizedek, high priest of Salem.

…Well that’s enough for today. Even a diseased mind needs rest and “Temptation Island” will be on soon. I never really got around to ole’ Willie Shakespeare, but I guess I have to leave something for next time. Send gifts of tribute to the Collegian office in the form of scratch tickets, pre-war Bulgarian pornography, Gold-Bond, Slim Jims, Wild Turkey, Xtra-Strength Pepto-Bismol and what you feel represents your best personal work in the field of conceptual taxidermy. Just remember before you send me that mail bomb, that I, like our newly elected president have been “mis-underestimated my whole life.” Go, Minutemen, Fight! (Materials used in article were overheard, divinely inspired, hallucinated, and told to me by the ghost of a 2500 year old Carthaginian whore by way of my neighbor’s dog.)

Manolis Boulukos is a UMass student.