“If Jesus came back and saw what was going on in his name, he’d never stop throwing up.” — “Hannah and Her Sisters” (1986)
A little blasphemous, a little extreme, very dark and maybe a little bit true. Or completely true, at least in spirit, as I judged when I heard this for the first time. Meet circa-2004 Aaron R. Pellowski ’15, a moody adolescent equipped with a decidedly anti-other-people disposition and an ego so bloated it almost burped. I became demonically obsessed with the theory that any person even remotely in touch with the world should be petrified with disgust. I pursued this notion all the way up through college — I ended up graduating magna cum laude from the Delaware Advance Institute of Post-Unreality Studies, with a double major in philosophy and social aesthetics. I wrote my senior honors thesis on Iggy Azalea.
Zip forward to late 2010. I was awarded a quarter-million dollar grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to undertake an avant-garde project of exploratory pessimism, posing as undergraduate at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire for three years. I was boldly prepared to submerge myself in a college-sized pool of freshly post-adolescent, entitled, brainiac sewage, ready to take it up to the eyes without closing them, my mouth or my mind. Even if that sensory nakedness provoked nausea of Christlike proportions, I would endure it with great fortitude. I thought I was brave. I thought I could make it out the other end an unchanged man. I was ignorant of the true magnitude of the risk of rubbing shoulders with you people.
And I’m happy to report my investigation has been rewarded with great success — that is, if I’m allowed to use some really perverted definitions of “happy,” “reward” and “success.” I’ve found a lot here that stinks worse than the south end of a moose in heat. You are all terrifically nuts. Each one of you, a minimum 10 percent bonkers basket-case. All your ideas of fun are institutional clowning. Your dreams and ambitions are refabricated fears, traumatically inseminated in you by your parents. Your friendships are as shallow as beer stains.
If I was a mildly bitter person prior to subjecting myself to this absurdist long-term experiment in performance art, then oh baby, there is no human word for what I am now. The damage to my world view is probably a permanent infection, like I’ve been made into some unholy monster of spitefulness. Under the full moon I experience an itching urge to sprout green fur and set up camp in a trash can. Don’t get me wrong, Dartmouth isn’t the sole culprit. It’s the whole world — in my eyes, humankind seems a swarm of chattering infants with bloating diapers, soaked to the brim in narcissistic turpitude. There was a time in my childhood when I wished I could live forever, but I can barely remember it. I look around at you people and think “I am glad that I will be dead before this lunatic nightmare becomes irreversible.”
But it’s not yet irreversible, and that’s key. If I really believed nothing could be done, I would hijack a Budweiser truck, drive it into the woods and never come home. But there’s a flicker of hope, and it needs a special type of kindling. I’m a bad person, you’re a bad person and the world is a bad place. A lot of ink has been poured into explosive prose calling out the individual choices and vague, oppressive structures that make the world hellish and gross. But we don’t take it the extra step. That is, I don’t just want to rub my peers’ face in their own excrement — I want them to do what Jesus would do. I want them to vomit, and then to heal.
Now, vomiting claims an eerily centralized role in Dartmouth’s culture, or at least one of its circus’s subsections. Andrew Lohse’s extra-foul comparison of his fraternity brother’s vomit trickling down his body to amniotic fluid has received a lot of attention, some of it no doubt colored with a guilty empathy. We have this quasi-patriotic cheer, “Boot and rally!” that encourages a friend to eject the voluminous quantities of alcohol he’s imbibed so that he or she may party on, unhindered and unhinged. But there’s an apt metaphor here. Wait for it.
All literal vomit aside, it’s been my observation that Dartmouth kids, whether they be of the “work-hard-play-harder,” or the “work-hard-work-harder” or the “party-hard-party-harder” breed, push themselves habitually to the brink of gastronomic volcanism, right up to the eye-watering, the lip-curl and the tell-tale wet burp... and then they pause just long enough to tamp down the nasty and march ahead. This isn’t healthy. You come here to be a superhero, but you will not admit any moment of misery. Yet the misery has a meaning, and it’s a meaning that would make us better people if we dealt with it and did not deny it. It is better to look at yourself and your fellow human beings and feel crushing shame at your defects. In this suffering there is honesty, and in honesty there is a path to relief and then to real happiness. To survive at Dartmouth, to survive in the world, it is not enough to merely endure. You must boot and rally.
