BY FLETCHER WORTMANN

In print | Published September 4, 2008

Every year I return here and inevitably, inexplicably, there are teenagers here.

This confuses me, because everyone else tries to escape Swarthmore at the first available opportunity. Prospective students attend a class, sleep on a floor covered in sweaty undergarments and encrusted pizza fluids, and move on. Sophomores and juniors study abroad and engage in the intense study of subjects like ‘European sexually-transmitted diseases’ and ‘heavy foreign beer as a breakfast food.’

But I cannot understand why freshman would come here in the first place. And every year, they come. It’s baffling. It’s like living on a duck pond next to a freeway. Every spring, the parent ducks fly to the pond and another generation of adorable ducklings is born. They toddle about and squawk endearingly and you shout at them: “Get out of here, you miserable sons of bitches! There’re cars and pollution and probably ozone depletion and you know those stupid plastic things you find around sixpacks of soda? Those are everywhere here. People drive up with giant plastic bags of them and just dump the damn things into the pond. No, I have no idea why. Maybe they just love to watch baby ducks suffocate.” But the next morning you wake up and the highway is covered with tiny patches of fluffy gore. And then it happens again, like clockwork, every year. You could set your watch by that first indignant, splattering quack, sounding out and then suddenly cut short by a roaring tractor-trailer.

Needless to say, there are people here who love to suffocate baby ducks, and, as I’m sure you suspect by virtue of your rigorous SAT preparations, I am using a metaphor here. At Swarthmore, you see, the crushed suffocating baby ducks are you. I am morally and financially obligated to prepare you for the trials ahead; the Phoenix is paying me an average of three dollars and fifty-seven cents per column and I would not want to see their generous stipend ill-spent (this is a lie, actually, as I intend to spend their stipend in the illest way possible, on large quantities of inexpensive alcohol or possibly on a Beastie Boys album).

But I beg of you, don’t think of me as an advisor – think of me instead as that crotchety old man with one eye, sitting on a tombstone outside of the old MacTorso place in a bad horror film. “Aint anyone stayed there since the Muffin Man killins back in dickety-eight,” I say, smiling and showing three meticulously sharpened teeth, “when a number of supple young people much like yourselves were brutally disemboweled a hundred years ago tonight. You know why they called him the Muffin Man? ‘Cause he only ate the tops.” “You should not have come to this place,” I add ominously, and lightning flashes, and some sort of carrion-feeding bird probably hacks up a bit of fieldmouse off in the distance. But it’s too late, isn’t it? You’re already here. You’re already staying in the abandoned shack with the shambling undead and the mutant inbred yokels and the six-hundred page readings on the history of the religious affiliations of Kamchatkan peat-bog workers due Friday.

Metaphorically, of course.

Still, I would like to leave you with something inspiring. I don’t know how many of you are familiar with the recent film The Dark Knight, based on the finest sequential arts. Now in his sixty-ninth year of fighting crime, the titular Batman faces his most formidable challenge yet with the reappearance of his oldest foe, a limping Cirque-de-Solei expatriate wearing whiteface and brandishing pencils with deadly nihilist accuracy. The murder-clown is facing down the Batman’s girlfriend, portrayed by my high-school sweetheart and fiancé Maggie Gylenhall. The clown-fellow invents a story to justify his bold sartorial choices, and then asks the defining question of the film: “why so serious?”

Understand. This is Gotham City. This is where every punch and explosion is punctuated by explosions of bright cardboard and onomatopoeia. Where Academy Award-winning actresses dress up in bestial dominatrix outfits and lick themselves for some reason. Where it has been determined that the most compassionate and effective way of caring for the mentally ill is to lock them in Jack Skellington’s summer house and then plunge syringes of condensed liquid terror into their veins. Where the penguins wear rocket-packs, and where bulletproof body-armor is made from the finest latex and is gloriously be-nippled.

Surely, if the residents of such a terrifying burg can maintain their optimism, and more importantly their sense of humor, then so can we. This greasy clown-zombie is an inspiration to us all, a modern Candide, relying on his wit and his zest for life in these darkest of times. I pledge to you, my readers, that I will use my editorial position to follow his grimy, staggering example.

And look now! The city is burning! The explosives are rigged to the ferrys and the rocket-penguins fly like shooting stars! Laugh with me. Share a drink and watch me make this pencil disappear, as if by magic! And please, my friends, permit me to ask one last time:

Why so serious?

Fletcher is a senior. You can reach him at fwortma1@swarthmore.edu.

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