Emcee: And finally our last speaker for the day will be Mr. Jonathan Matthews, the two-time Nobel laureate and self-described (reading evenly from paper) “private dick who gets all the chicks.” Mr. Matthews will be speaking about the college experience.
(The speaker approaches the podium weaving alarmingly, clutching a bottle of tequila in one hand and a cluster of beer-stained napkins with lipstick scrawled over them. As he arranges the napkins on the podium he proceeds to swig the tequila before starting)
Matthews: (nervously) I just flew into town and boy are my arms tired! Because I spent the whole plane trip jerking off! (silence) Ahem, well, uh, it seems like only four years ago that I entered these halls of learning for the first time, eager to get my learn on amongst you, my competitors in everything from grades to housing to that drunk chick who was totally into me the other night before some douche smooth-talked his way past me.
Looking at all of you, I can’t help but reflect upon what got me to where I am today: Spite. Pure, simple, unadulterated spite. Of all the other emotionally underdeveloped, career-oriented sub-humans at this school, I was the most single-mindedly obsessed with clawing my way to the top of the grading pile. Now I can look upon you and know that, qualitatively, you are all inferior to me.
But if I’m able to impress you with one piece of knowledge tonight, it’s that college is a game. Not a fun game like Monopoly, but a depressing and cynical game like Hungry Hungry Hippos. A game where you are forced to aggressively and noisily compete for small white marbles of knowledge and opportunity against the opposing hippos of complacency by repeatedly slamming down on the plastic handle of your self esteem.
I can remember nights of depraved intellectual gluttony as I gorged on knowledge, shoveling fistfuls of critical social theory into my gaping maw until my face was an analytical mess of ethnographic methodology and comparative political discourse. Ravenously forcing wisdom down my throat like a fat kid gorging on ice cream and pie, just eating and reading and crying because my parents never loved me as the gravy running down my face mingled with the fragments of functionalism plastered to my face with tears and I collapsed in a heap of sobbing heap of food and scholarship and desperate loneliness. But I digress. Oh, how I digress.
Someone recently suggested I tell a personal story of adversity overcome in order to flesh out this speech. At first I couldn’t remember why that seemed familiar to me, but then I remembered that ‘adversity overcome’ was written on the urinal cake I pissed on the other day.
It’s true that most of the learning in college happens outside the classroom. It’s learning things like how hot-boxing a police car is never a good idea, no matter how deeply the cop seems to be sleeping. Or that KC Masterpiece Barbecue Sauce is not an appropriate substitute for KY Jelly, even if it does taste better. And knowing that when that cop wakes up and finds you high as hell in his cruiser, slathering barbeque sauce in his ear and awkwardly positioning yourself he’s going to be pissed as hell, so you better have your gun drawn already.
It’s little life lessons like these that make college a journey and not a destination, a clich? and not a well thought out graduation speech.
These hard-partying days are truly the best days of our lives. We can all remember waking up on those days, hung-over and not remembering much of the night before. But at least on those occasions when you wake up in that state and find a beautiful, naked woman in your bed-no matter how hungover you are-you at least have some indication that you did something right the night before. But if you wake up and, instead of a beautiful woman in bed with you, there’s a dead clown on the floor with a pool cue through his heart, that’s a pretty clear indication that you did something wrong.
But as I stand here before you, naked beneath this robe, without a job or any promising future prospects, I can’t help but notice that this degree does not come with a money-back guarantee. So it would seem that had I spent the last four years jacking off instead of killing myself for this diploma, the net effect would have been about the same, except that I would have at least gotten some exercise.
(Matthews stops speaking and proceeds to stare into his hands for a full ten minutes before concluding.)
Amen. Alright, get out of here.
(The speaker takes one last gulp from the tequila bottle and, after killing it, hurls it into the crowd where it shatters. Amid the panicked shrieks and crunching of glass, he calmly moonwalks backward into a coffin lined with purple velvet held upright by two gorillas wearing roller skates. The door slams closed and the gorillas activate their jet packs, carrying the coffin into the sky above until they’re no more than a tiny speck, which then explodes into an enormous pyrotechnic American flag.)
