The

Yggdrasil

Archive

A Note from Magellan~

Gatsby, Canis Major and RatBuddha signed a one year (Sept 1 - August 31) lease for the house on Ash Street that we called Yggdrasil. I assume they all planned on living there through the summer.  But after Gatsby was expelled in April he an envelope with left his share of the remaining rent due and disappeared.  Canis approached me in May and sub-leased his share, so I lived there with RatBuddha until mid-August when he took off.  Some say he went back to his parents' house.  Some say that he suffered a nervous breakdown and was institutionalized.  Wildest rumors say either that he joined a seminary and is now a Jesuit priest or that he moved to Illinois and became a case study for someone's Ph.D. dissertation.  This rumor probably started because the college counselor, Regina Peltier, resigned after that year and returned to Northern Illinois University to seek her doctorate.  Some rumors say she was paying RatBuddha and others that they were dating (though I really don't think she's his type and to the best of my knowledge they only spoke that one time).  We know Canis Major ended up in film school in Texas two years later, but then took a job producing local talk shows for a National Public Radio affiliate and I don't think he finished his MFA.  No one's heard squat from Gatsby.

The point is, all three of Yggdrasil's original inhabitants vacated without much prior warning.  I pretty much got stuck with cleaning the place out before the lease ran up, sorting through the junk, tossing what was worthless and taking what was salvageable over to the place Vlad, Pi and I were renting the next year.  Sigma Phi Nothing was of course disbanded by this time.  But we took things like the Godzilla and the Wop bucket and tried to keep an underground fraternity going.  We were stigmatized though.  Sororities wouldn't mix with us.  Without college recognition we weren't allowed to participate in Homecoming and Winter Carnivore.  So we faded from existence.

Some of the stuff in this archive is important  in telling our tale, I think.  It proves we were here.  If you read between the lines you might be able to invent a story that tells what happened that year of Yggdrasil.  I find myself doing it.  I was there, but I still don't really know what went wrong.  We were just college kids doing college kid stuff.