Don't Come Back
It’s Spring Carnival, meaning our campus is once again clogged with the shambling corpses of alumni who refuse to die with dignity. This is a group that includes you, probably, and if it doesn’t, it will. Every April, you ooze back onto campus in your quarter-zips, grinning like dim-witted Golden Retrievers recalling where they buried a bone during the Obama Administration. “Wow, they haven’t torn down Donner yet?” “I haven’t painted the Fence since SAE held it for two weeks in the freezing cold.” “I remember when Jim and I …” Shut the fuck up. No one cares.
We know you’re not coming back because you care about us students. You are coming back because your marriage is collapsing in a Bay Area suburb and the last time you felt a spark of something more was when you got blackout drunk at Carnival and fingered someone on Flagstaff. Okay, whatever. Good for you. You’ve had your turn, built your buggy, kissed your sweetheart at the Fence, and got all your sepia-toned memories. That’s sweet, I get it.
I’ll put it gently, to avoid causing you a heart attack (and because my publisher is glaring at me to tone it down): those days are gone. You’ll never get them back, no matter how hard you try. You cannot reconnect to the campus community by throwing your blood money at us.
We do not want your money or your tales of yore. We don’t want to hear about how ReadMe was run by AB or how the Natrat used to be the peak of comedy. We don’t give a flying fuck about how you used to make fun of the KGB, as if no one does anymore, or your shenanigans in the steam tunnels.
You will never absolve yourself of becoming the hollow, LinkedIn-poisoned ghoul you swore never to be. If, despite this warning, you still donate, we will spend your $50 printing your name under the headline “Local Alumni Still Masturbates to Memories of Booth” and leave copies where your family can find them. We would do this regardless of whether or not you donate if only we had the printing budget. You have been warned.