Desolation is too abstract. UD realizes this. UD realizes that outside of this blog you are never going to encounter a list of America’s most and least desolate universities. You will find Best Dorms, Worst Faculty – that sort of thing. But desolation… an atmosphere of sorrow and lostness… an air of wreckage and ruination…
After covering CMU for years (here are her CMU posts), and taking into account the latest news story out of that campus, UD has concluded that nowhere else among this country’s many colleges and universities are you going to find the intensity of drunken depressed spiritlessness that you will at CMU.
I mean, what part of this account of a CMU environmental studies professor who shot at two vacuum cleaner salesmen is not desolate and desolating? It’s pretty sad to contemplate being traveling vacuum salesmen making cold calls. It’s also sad to contemplate their ringing the bell at a home inhabited by an inebriated (the professor’s five charges include possession of a firearm while under the influence) professor waiting to empty his shotgun into whoever appears on his property.
This story is Desolate Meets Desolate, and the outcome of their meeting displays the seriocomic Surreal America theme of every Thomas Pynchon novel you’ve ever read. Booze, gunplay, farce, desperate escapes in trucks crammed with vacuum cleaners… This is CMU.
June 11th, 2014 at 11:06AM
Man, I wonder what he would have done if they had been Jehovah’s Witnesses…..
June 11th, 2014 at 11:41AM
UD has clearly never encountered a Kirby salesperson. No jury that had would ever convict.
June 11th, 2014 at 12:31PM
blancacasa: LOL! No – you’re right. I haven’t encountered one.
June 11th, 2014 at 12:33PM
charlie: LOL.