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In This Issue

• Columbia Dry Humps for Gaia
• Springtime, Nipples Everywhere
• Lerner Daycare Creates Funny Smell
• Letters to the Editor(s)
• Meta-Clubs on Rampage
• Lion's Cock Viable Alternative to Human's
• God to Spend Summer in Boca
• Odwalla Bars Make Us Do Dirty, Dirty Things
• Naked and Loving It
• Has It Been Eight Years Already?
• Shades for a Bright Summer
• Emeritus: Greek for "Fat and Old"
• Horoscopes-A-Plenty
• A Salute to Business-Casual Racism
• THEY Watch
• Wacky Fun Whitey
• The Staff of 17.9
• Take Back the Night - Gone Wild!

Stephen Grant

Standing on Riverside Drive at 9:30 on a school night, wearing nothing but purple underwear and an old pair of Vans, in defiance of thousands of angry marching college girls (women... er... wymyn... or whatever), I told myself I was doing this because if I didn't, nobody else would, and damned if I was about to let that legion of man-hating bitches get their night back without a fight. But, looking back, it's clear that I started down that dark path sometime in the back half of my freshman year, in the early months of '99.

I had been spending a lot of time in my John Jay single, conducting a vital, tax-funded research study for the Department of Sanitation on how many weeks of paper towels, orange juice cartons, and The Village Voice could be crammed into a 13-ounce trash bin before I was absolutely forced to take it over to the garbage chute in the lounge. About mid-February, I discovered that the attractive girl who lived in the room above mine liked to make a whole lot of noise while having hot, crazy animal sex with a person who was clearly not me. I soon grew tired of being reminded of this, and took to aimlessly wandering the steam tunnels underneath campus on Thursday nights.

On one such expedition, I found myself lost deep within the unholy bowels of Mudd. My torch, which I admit had been fashioned rather hastily, had burnt down to my fingers, so I was forced to drop it, swear at it, and kick it into a nearby crate of gelignite that someone had carelessly left next to a leaking tank of hydrogen. I came to on a couch in an abandoned chemical engineering lab occupied by the 3-person staff of an underground newspaper. They offered me a Rolling Rock and a Marlboro. After I grafted Judith Shapiro's head onto the body of a Mortal Kombat character in Photoshop, they accepted me as one of their own.

Running a newspaper was rad. In those days, The Fed operated outside of the system, exposing injustice and stupidity wherever we could find it. Yeah, we played by our own rules, generating our own brand of unjust stupidity. But after a while we started running out of topics worth fuming about, and so, under a second generation of management, The Fed drifted away from hard-hitting gonzo journalism. Reality was just too limiting. We had to start making up more and more shit.

Which was fine. The quality of the paper has vastly improved over the last couple of years. But I do miss the nasty letters we used to get from people we had offended, particularly the queers and the Heebs. Of course, when you're really starved for negative attention, there's never a shortage of rabid feminists. So it was nothing more than nostalgia for the old Fed offensive spirit that led me to prance around a crowded public event in my girlfriend's panties. Or maybe I was just really bored.

Either way, I didn't get the reaction I was hoping for. No calls for castration, not even an uncomfortable stare. They loved it. The whos down in Whoville were actually digging my partial nudity. I suddenly felt kind of stupid, but there was no running away at that point without losing face. Maybe I should have been bare-assed naked and streaking, despite the heavy police presence. Or organized some kind of pro-pervert counter rally. Ah, well, I did what I could. I'm getting too old for this kind of tomfoolery, anyway.

Sadly, this article might well mark the end of my journalistic career. Given the present job market, I'll probably be following in the footsteps of every prior feditor I know, abandoning journalism for the equally lucrative but marginally less prestigious unemployment industry, living with girlfriend's parents or parent's girlfriends. I do take comfort in the knowledge that I'm leaving this paper in the hands of some amazingly talented kids, all full of energy and soon to be off the meal plan. Don't get me wrong, they're still jaded and cynical. But they're cynical in a youthful and energetic sort of way, as opposed to a burnt-out, paralyzed-by-abject-terror, run-through-every-commercially-available-antidepressant sort of way. And that gives me hope.

Thanks for reading. And if you're not reading, it's because you're stupid, ugly, and you suck. Plus, you smell like poo.