My final bidding

Here it is, my doting public. This very piece of work you’re now reading is the last installment of what has become a cross-cultural, grass-roots fixture in the lives of many Mustangs.

It was with bright eyes and a bushy tail that I strolled into Boaz Hall some four years ago. Filled with a lusty desire for knowledge and a hearty appetite for fun, I galloped through that first year filled with vigor and vinegar. I planned on majoring in business. That plan, as you may have surmised, did not last long.

Many people claim that a book has changed their life. For me, that book might have been my accounting textbook. If anything sucks the marrow out of life with more tenacity than accounting, I know not of it. Numbers are amazing, powerful things. However, as I soon learned, it is difficult to tell jokes using integers and derivatives.

So I became a weekly columnist. Our relationship is an odd one, folks. I write things down, you read them, and occasionally you respond to me. Sometimes I make you laugh (rarely). Other times I make you angry (from time to time). But mainly, as it were, I call you such names as my magpies, my children, little ones and my doting public. Solipsism is fun.

Many of you, those whom I know on a personal level, ask me to write about this or that, and I never do. So it goes. However, I hope that deep down you have enjoyed my columns as much as I enjoyed writing them. Because, after all, I write these for you. Whoever is reading this right now, I’ve done it all for you.

Well, kids, I hope you had fun while I lasted. For roughly a year and a half I’ve been spouting out something that resembles humor. In that same amount of time I’ve become the sarcastic, suspecting lad you read today. We’ve grown together (sniffle).

But four years was plenty for me. Heck, I wish it wasn’t. College, that best-time-in-your-life, has ended for yours truly.

Because of some drastic oversight by the SMU management, I am not the valedictorian. It’s a shame, that, because I would love to make a speech to my graduating counterparts. Alas, I am left to make here that speech to you all.

So here it is, my last few perils of wisdom. Though we are the care-free youth toward whom advertising and television is guided, we still have a few responsibilities. Take, for example, our constitutional right to vote. Not enough of us take advantage of this right.

Some of us chose to imbibe alcohol on our weekends. Some drive while inebriated. This decision, kiddies, is ridiculously insane. Take a cab, call SMU Rides, walk.

Go to class and make your parents proud. Use protection. Read more books. If I could think of any more cliches, I would spout them out to you. Always remember, though, that cliches are cliches because they are true.

That’s about all from me. As my proverbial horse ambles off into the sunset, I can’t think of a single wisecrack or pun to fill your lives with more glee. Nevertheless, I hope that your lives will be marked by happiness and merriment.

In this, my final paragraph of college commentary, I want to express how much I’ll miss you. Fear not, my pups, as one day you will find my words somewhere. Then you can chuckle, thinking how much you either hated or loved me back at college. So, in closing, I will leave you with the words of Percy Bysshe Shelley. I hope to see you all where “all things seem only one / In the universal Sun.”