A Sad Comment from an Old Roommate

You hear about people that aren't meant to go to school. To be truthful, I have occasionally been willing to degrade myself to the level of forming opinions, and I've even been known to go around with jockeys and sages, wearing a burlap sack on my head and declaiming against the democratization of the university. I'm in a purer frame of mind right now, and will set my homilies aside for the sake of this account. In the course of my pre-tertiary education I did actually meet such a person, someone who Shouldn't Have Been There. I shared a dorm room with him. To make matters uniquely difficult, we found ourselves at a Christian Institution, a Bible College. They are commonly known facts that Christians eat babies, poison wells, and scheme the demise of civilizations. I myself am a confirmed Christian and I eat my baby chops with crushed butterflies on top, drizzled with a delicious naive sauce. Even if this were either here or there, don't unstick your eyebrows for me, I'm just being cute. But I don't think anyone could wink at this deeper crime of the religionists: that they make people feel awkward. My roommate -- let's call him Denver -- felt awkward. To me. Maybe it wasn't God or Godders that made him do it, but as I understand it, God doesn't mind taking the blame for things.

Denver was a dweeb or a nerd, I'm not sure which. Actually, he was probably more of a dork. (In Ontario they say 'goof'.) This was back in the heyday of the internet, when something like thirty percent of sites not devoted to porn were devoted to the Simpsons. Denver used to sit cross-legged in bed all day posting snappy little comments to obscure message boards. Sometimes he would come down to the cafeteria to eat pizza, and once I saw him lifting weights. He had some friends with whom he would enact fantasy role-playing games in the comfortable security of the dorm room. Once I found them pretending to drink beer from large steins. But I don't hold Denver in disdain, even if he was one of the laziest people I have ever met. Laziness is probably one of those confusing Buddhist virtues. Beyond having good taste in cinema and a wry wit, he was mostly an alright guy who never had to take responsibility for himself before, and he Shouldn't Have Been There anyway. Denver was a rural type person. He seemed to be particularly involved with his family, often returning from weekends home with several apple pies and a strain around his face.

This is the moment that I wanted to share with you: once Denver asked me suddenly, out of the blue, "Do you care whether the toilet paper rolls down on the side closest to the wall or away from the wall?" "No," I replied, "I don't think I do care." "Me neither," he said defiantly, "I don't care at all." He didn't say anything else, he just fell silent with a rebellious gleam in his eyes.

To this day, one of the saddest, most pent-up things anyone has ever said to me. Denver didn't return to school after Christmas. I came back to find all his stuff gone and a note on the bed that said, "I'm not coming back, but I didn't fail." After that, I had a room to myself.