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Journal Vocabulary, Glossary, and Cast of Characters
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Alison B.: The blond-haired tenant of the apartment next to Bo and Luke's apartment. I don't know if she has a major, but I know she likes church history and doesn't like math. She wants to go to law school.
Beardo: a Metaphysics 341 classmate. Bearded. Has really long fingernails. Suspected Goth tendencies.
Blount Undergraduate Initiative: A group of kids who were suckered into joining an on-campus organization designed to give them a "small college education at a big college" or something like that. That's what they ostensibly set out to do, I suppose. What they really do is give a bunch of kids a lot of stuff that they don't deserve and can't appreciate (like, for instance, David Chalmers) and in addition force them to read a bunch of stuff that won't really help them all that much (like, for instance, The Color Purple or The Confessions of Saint Augustine). Also, many of the professors associated with the Initiative reportedly frequently argue over picky academic matters. Home of the Honey-Dick.
Bo and Luke: Megan and Alison's neighbors. They are often drunk and loud. They wear baseball caps and flannel shirts. Slice it how you will.
Cole: a good friend of mine, and a fellow bastard. He is the guitarist of the band Goeblynz, which will no doubt be rocking your ass in a location near you at a time in the near future. From Cole I may have learned (or at least solidified the point) that if you reward evil with good, evil will not depart from your door. Cole is a philosophy and economics major, and seemingly has a really good grasp of Hobbes and at least an impressive passing familiarity with Hume. He lays out points so efficiently it at once pisses me off and kicks the asshole out of my body. Now and then he gets depressed. Oh yeah, he had some sort of religious experience in the summer of 2000 when he saw the Peter Jackson movie Heavenly Creatures and he made all of us watch it. Now he's obsessed with it, which is, well, something. I once went 18-21 against him in Ping-Pong. He won. The fucker.
Crimson White, The: The University of Alabama newspaper. It's crap.
Derrida, Jacques: ghastly.
English Class: The thing you have to sign up for if you want to continue to have time to read the things that people wrote that had no function whatsoever except to showcase their writing skills. In order to properly write an English paper you have to ignore an entirely plausible line of reasoning in order to be able to take a position, or decide to forward a nutty political agenda, or be a complete drooling Faulknerian man-child. The production of several English papers is requisite for every English class that one takes. Requisite production of typically substanceless English papers coupled with requisite lectures on poems, which lectures the student usually doesn't agree with, makes the entire English class business a regrettable affair. And yet I can't stay away.
German: the language of Hitler. And Goethe. And Tucholsky. I wanted to learn it because I wanted to learn another language because I thought if I learned another lanugage, I would be able to think thoughts I'd not had access to before. It didn't exactly work out that way and I can only read German with great difficulty. God, I hope they don't find out.
Hestevold: a philosophy professor. Me and him go back. He is, like, super-nice. He puts his hands up in front of him like a traffic cop and says things like "So far so good," or "Fair enough," while teaching. This gives delight so great that delight is not the word.
Honey-Dick: Tom Hayes. He was the ringleader of the subversive and flagitious Bee Hive. He wears glasses and looks like a turtle. Recently, at a party thrown by Molly, he seemed uneasy in my presence. [oracular and recondite etymology of "Honey-Dick": Tom Hayes came into the Mallet drawing room inviting Malleteers to the Bee Hive, an event to be hosted in the drawing room of Parker-Adams Hall, then-home of the miscreant and unhealthy Blount Undergraduate Initiative. When mildly harassed by Cole as to who was running this Bee Hive, Hayes named himself. When asked "Where's the honey?" Hayes incoherently stammered for a few seconds and at last managed, while pointing at his crotch, "The honey... cause my dick... cause I'm the host!" Needless to say, this (as well as tales of this) has given the precious gift of laughter to untold flocks of people. God bless him, and his nectar-dripping fleshwand!]
Josh: The perfect Malleteer. He's Catholic, for one, and has the perfect fiancee, for two, and studies classics, for three, and doesn't concern himself with Mallet politics, and I'm going to stop counting now. Once Bad Andy tried to convince Josh that being a Catholic was foolish, which is like telling Alan Greenspan that the economy is stupid and he should just, like, give it up.
J.R.: My roommate. He's from Tennessee and is going to earn about seventeen-thousand dollars per year working in sports journalism. He's not my former roommate, who was Catmaster, which is something. He brought a nice bullfight poster and tasteful green curtains to keep the sun from assraping your eyes at six in the morning when it comes through the east-facing windows like a soapy burrito through your colon. Talks on the phone all the time to some high school chick (which chick I contend must be, like, 700 pounds, since she's got all this time to talk on the phone. But, admittedly, I can't confirm this. (Mainly because no one has ever seen her (probably because she is 700 pounds and fears the light of day, since light helps reveal girth)).) J.R. makes the Sucking Sound of Closure, which is a very wet salivary inhale through the corners of the mouth, whenever he subconsciously wishes to indicate either "I am finished laughing" or "I have said my piece".
Law: Something nebulous with which you flog the world in order to make it work right. The thing to which one is driven partially out of distrust, partially out of respect for decency, partially out of concern for innocence, and mainly out of desire that the past not repeat itself and so that so far as one's arm reaches, there will be justice and fair play.
Lord Fancypants: one of the classmates in Metaphysics 341. Though not as nefarious as Smedley, he is thought to be at least as irritating. Sharon doesn't like him at all.
Mallet Assembly, The: home. It's a men's honors dorm. It's not very honorable. But it beats the tits off living in Housing.
"Marxist": Any philosopher who uses ridiculous tactics in argument, or asks questions about an argument that detract focus from the matter at hand. Smedley is a ~.
Megan B.: The red-haired tenant of the apartment near Bo and Luke. She is a voice major and studies German. She is probably better at speaking and writing German than I am. She, a Lutheran, once defended me, an atheist, against the theological attacks of Steve Colella, the short. That impressed me very deeply.
Molly: Like, angelic. She's American-Irish and freckled and very cute and bright, which is saying something. If the world crushes Molly, the future can only be referred to with violent similes and the measure of progress can be only how much suffering I bring into the world.
Nails: Nails is a junior (I think). He took off half a year after spending half a year doing nothing but playing computer games. Sometimes he is a bastard, other times he is not at all a bastard. Of late, he hasn't been around much since he and Kyle Pfister and other people do nothing now but play Diablo II (doing which, apparently, can be like, totally fucking profitable, which strikes me dumb in wonderment).
Philosophy: The pleasant daytime activity. I got interested in it after realizing that English wasn't delivering the goods the way I thought it might have done. Now the part of philosophy that interests me most is logic, which is unfortunate since I have such a poor background in math. Many of the philosophy students at the University of Alabama are Marxist fucknuts.
Poobie: An old Malleteer. He's like twenty-four or something. It's incredible that his blood still circulates, let alone stays in his penis long enough for him to maintain an erection. He likes Heinlein as well, which is great, because all of us who may be fascists and like Heinlein gotta stick together. Even if some of our bodies are so old and decrepit that they themselves don't remain cohesive.
Postmodernism: Something for which I have only the loosest of definitions despite my sanguine vigilance in pursuit of its essence. A term used by "Marxist" philosophers to mean "what I think". I've been trying to crack this nut for about a year, and to the best of my understanding, Postmodernism is a so-called method of inquiry that attempts to show that beneath every text lies a fundamental contradiction that proves the ultimate subjectivity of all experience. Half the time I read something Postmodern, I'm like Bullshit and the other half, I'm like, duh.
Smedley: one of the Metaphysics 341 classmates. Nefarious. He has a goatee and some wire-rimmed glasses and looks as if he wishes to look as if he harbors dangerous and subversive ideas. He likes to make comments in class that neither address the issue nor amuse me. Cole has begun keeping a list of his Smedleyisms. Let me iterate: nefarious.
Zac Dover: The hero of the journal. It's me. Chad Woodard came up with a charicatured impersonation of me which was just him yelling "Fuck my shit! I'm Zac Dover!" so from that I conclude that I must be pretty vulgar. Cole has written of me to my delight that I am willing to hurt those who have inflicted injustice on the undeserving, so from that I must conclude that I am the Scourge of God. I am not very funny, and I'm not very dilligent, and I only recently began to attend class regularly. I'm not at all happy about having had to go to high school, and I would erase those years from my life if I could. I think I appear much more cruel than I intend, which is okay with me since it probably filters out a lot of people I'd rather not interact with. I'm going to end sentences with prepositions whenever I damn well feel like it, so get used to it, ya hump!
