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In This Issue

• Jesus Spams
• Lifelong Lepers Supported
• A Porn Star Is Born
• Letters to the Editor
• My God Is Pissed
• An Interview with Daniel Radcliffe
• You Know, I Just Don’t Care About Floor Spirit
• Start Your Own Religion, in Four Easy Steps
• Flogging the Bishop
• Ask Professor Pete
• News Briefs
• Horoscopes: Like listening to a very senile Ben Franklin
• Drive-By Circumcision
• Columbia Student Is Next Plato, Columbia Student Claims
• Sin Big, Sin Real Big
• Top Ten Things That Make the Baby Jesus Cry
• CU’s Admissions vs. St. Peter’s
• Now Playing in Selected Cities
• God By Way of Drugs
• Jesus Saves A Buck
• Available at all Gentleman’s Daugerrotype Parlors
• CC Student Sees Shit While Shrooming
• THEY Watch
• The Staff of 17.5

When Jonathan (CC'02) consumed Psilocybe Mushrooms (or "shrooms") for the first time, alone in his dorm room with a book of Van Gogh's paintings (having assumed that the genius' oeuvres, when viewed under the influence of this famed substance, would bring to the surface Jon's own wild post-Impressionistic images, thus relieving him of his imaginary repressed traumas, which centered principally around his sister in a black bed, swirling underneath a hazy red glow, and enclosed by the wooden curves of a frame fit for a Van Gogh), he turned the pages as he waited for the fits and spurts of his stomach to give way to the Great Madman's journey into the world I have tried to describe in the parenthesis above, only to discover that nothing, nothing whatsoever, had changed, neither in his mind's eye nor in any aspect of the room, no spinning nor churning nor phantasmagoric burning around or inside him, just the creak of Van Gogh's spine, just the paper's edge against a finger, just this insipid excitement, this sense that now, now, from a sheet of painted, twisting lilies, a face might emerge and say, "Indeed, sir, welcome to this magic place, where faces emerge from paintings and merge with your soul," just this sense and the sense of having that sense, and on and on, pang after pang, page after page, in a single boring moment that had promised him timelessness and, at this moment, forced him to his feet, out the door, down the hall (past a glaring spectator who wondered at his pallor, at his pupils), into the bathroom, and over the toilet, where he proceeded to heave the digested green mushrooms and some red fleshy specks that reminded him of his liver into the water, deep, deep into the water, into the sewer, into the ocean, and out into infinity, while he stumbled (the way a drunk stumbles, who wishes everyone to know that he's drunk) out of the bathroom, down the stairs, and into the light: finally a glow! an orange glow-then back behind the cloud, and out again!-on his arms, on his chest, on his beating stomach, on his nethermost regions, a glow warm like warm water, and glowing warmer to the tips of his mind until he shook it from his aura with a cold and crushing convulsion, because, he reminded himself soberly, ecstasy was not enlightenment, pleasure was not profound, and he had a mission to find what really should have been, but certainly was not, buried somewhere in Van Gogh's soil, a mission to find what his sister and a black bed and a hazy red glow- not orange, he said to himself, not orange, but red!-had in common besides assuming this mantle of magnificence in his imagination, besides their shared bastard origin in his mental laboratory, besides the fact that they made no sense, will make no sense, should make no sense; yes, Jonathan, a senior here at Columbia University, stood on College Walk, under the influence of psychedelic mushrooms, pondering the meaning of meaning, and the meaninglessness of the question, his hands in his pockets, swaying at the thought that thinking is, after all, a rather mindless process, especially here, especially here on College Walk, he thought, where students like him go through the motions of going through the motions, and think themselves clever for having thought up such a phrase as that, while he had a mission to... to... to at the very least climb the steps, climb those awful, looming steps, so up the steps went Jon, and he sat there watching himself watch himself, and, watching that, felt the red glow at long last surround him, invade him, a black bed beneath him, rising him up to the site of an incredible bronze bulge, Athena's divine knees, her bronze hair, her bronze crown, his sister's dead and gray eyes there to welcome him to this magical place, a heaven on earth or an earth in heaven, a place beyond the depths of my talent to describe, where Providence smiles down on the learned and would raise us up, as She did Jon, if only we had the courage to close our books and seek our wisdom in shrooms.