A few months ago, my friend Gabe told me someone was putting together a book made up of fake college essays. From the start I had a few problems with the idea. Like, who wants to read college essays written by people who are way too old to be writing them in the first place? And, wouldn’t trying to get your hands on some disastrously bad real ones be much funnier? Then I gave it some more thought and decided that the idea might have some comedic merit. Sort of in the way the Daily Show’s fake history school text did.
I never heard back from the people that I submitted the essay to, but here ’tis.
I CAN BE GREAT I’ve lived on Evergreen Avenue in Elm Bluff, New York my whole life. We have a little bit of everything on our street: families with young kids, families with kids my age (18), and old people with no kids. Growing up on Evergreen Avenue has not only taught me how to be a good person, but how to be a great person. The kind of person your University wants. One of our neighbors on Evergreen Avenue was an alcoholic. He did not have any children, thank the Lord, and his name was Dave. I will not divulge his last name, because no man, no matter how drunk and lousy, deserves to have his epitaph read like the ghastly tale I am about to unfold. Shortly after we moved onto Evergreen Avenue, I was six I think, I wandered across our side yard into Dave’s driveway. Dave was sitting in his garage soldering an old lamp back together (a hobby of his), wearing nothing but a filthy white undershirt and a pair of boxer-short underpants, out of which a sliver of his scrotum was visible. Almost immediately after meeting Dave, I realized that he drank too much, as in a full bottle of Black Velvet Canadian whisky a day too much. Over my coming pre- and post-puberty years, Dave would slowly transform from the cool but creepy neighbor, whose balls were always hanging out, into a frightening, unpredictable drunk. My sophomore year, I was helping my mom unload the Costco from the Navigator when Dave came stumbling out of his house toward us. Usually, Dave would just stagger around and slur at my mom that she had a sweet behind or that her breasts were looking particularly juicy that day. Unfortunately for my mother and I, Dave had something else in store. Dave had recently learned that the young, indigent girl whom he had charitably been helping through college was actually using the tuition money for a sex change operation. He couldn’t bear the disappointment. Dave lost it. He stopped fixing lamps, quit wearing underwear all together, and got clinically depressed. The coroner said that the day Dave came over into our driveway naked, and started screaming, “God is a God of fuck. I am fucking your souls” with a turkey baster filled with corn syrup and Clorox hanging out of his ass, he was probably high on a speedball cocktail of whiskey, anti-psychotics, and morning after pills (a rare, but nearly impossible to kick addiction). What I witnessed that day in our driveway on Evergreen Avenue taught me a lot about life. You never know what kind of curveball you’re going to get. That’s why you need a good foundation. The kind of solid, wholesome good people foundation that places like Evergreen Avenue and your University provide. Afterall, I don’t want to end up dead from a massive heart attack in a driveway with a turkey baster up my ass in front of my teenage neighbor and his mother. I can be great.
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I remember having a college professor like this, so I guess a good education is still no guarantee…
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