Generation Magazine

By Josh Q. Newman

We just left the Generation office. Our goal: to find interesting things and write about them. Weird things go down when most students are slumbering in their dorms or sheltered away at home. It was an attempt at investigative/in-depth/gonzo journalism. Whatever you want to call it. I felt like Hunter S. Thompson when he ventured into the heart of the American dream, except that I wasn’t stoned—or at least incredibly stoned. “Let’s go,” one of us said. So we were off.

We slammed into something within one minute of our departure. Elves. Or smurfs. Or wizards. Wizards, I think. Two grown students dressed in dungeons-and-dragons garb passed us on route from Lockwood to the Student Union. One of them was riding a scooter. They were probably members of some sort of sadistic cabal whose objective is to reckon everything good into the depths of hell. That, or they were geeks playing late-night games.

A few snickers later, we made our way to the hallway that meanders through the second floor of Lockwood. Four young guys in bright yellow flap jackets were playing cards in the break room next to the Cybrary. I chuckled because I thought that they were associates of the people that we’d just passed, only to find out that they were part of the Anti-Rape Task Force. Jesus, I thought. That really exists?

Aligning the walls of the Baldy cafeteria were small, irreverent posters for SBA presidential candidate Frank Ewing. Superman, Steve Jobs, and Sarah Palin apparently want you to vote for him.

We decided to explore the rest of Baldy. What we found was… anticlimactic. There were about five guys in a room on the first floor in the middle of a jovial, lackluster discussion about what they found on the Internet. They were in shorts, hoodies and T-shirts. Casual. One of them was drinking from a gallon-bottle of Coke. “Yeah, did you see that girl?” one said as we passed by. The rest is history.

We headed down to the basement. I heard weird things about the basement—things about cages and dungeons and prisons. They’re probably just jokes, but we were eager to find out. The walls of the first basement were lined with dull green lockers—many of them unused—and paintings made by or for children. The day-care center was closed. We walked for a bit, and nothing happened until we opened the large, stoic doors that led to the “second” basement.

Inside the boiler room, as the custodians would call it, were giant white-painted walls that seemed impenetrable. The hallway was lit by incandescent light bulbs from above. The aura it gave was not comforting. It was like out of a Stanley Kubrick movie. The hallway led to the cages that I had heard about—dark, mesh-wired cages that held boxes, supplies, toys, boilers, water-tanks, tools—anything apparently. We stayed for a minute or two until we decided to leave, lest some horrific monster leaped out of the darkness to tear into our flesh, which we were certain was going to happen if we had stayed.

We went back to the first basement. We went at a leisurely pace. We had the whole night. Surely something interesting was going to happen.

We passed one of the computer rooms on our way to the elevators. I slowly stuck my head through one of the doors. A surplus of computers, many of them old and dusty and relics. Designs on paper, little models like out of the “Star Wars” studios. I was about to enter the room when I noticed the man to my right—a professor-looking type—working on a desktop. He asked me if I needed help. I didn’t.

We quickly escaped to the Lockwood basement. In it were students, insomniacs some, catching up on some no doubt urgent studying. Through the glass windows, we felt like we were in a fish tank and felt sorry for those who weren’t cool enough to spend their Thursday night night-stalking UB.

On our way to Baldy, we saw a couple of girls hanging out in the hallway, peering into the night without the slightest notion that we were there. One of them looked through the window, amazed. “Look at the wind,” she said. “This would be a perfect hallway for a music video.” What music video, I’m sure I don’t know.

We got a bit bored as we headed toward Norton. Where were the cults, the streakers, the pranksters, the filmmakers, that guy with the guitar, the goats, the egged walls, the pornographers, the ghosts, the creepy dude with the hoodie, the druggies, the hipsters, the hippies, the mimes, the punks, the poets, the time-machines? Where were things we could squeeze a thousand-word story out of? No, sorry to disappoint, but there was none of that that night. Or at least during the weekdays before midnight.

Capen. In the ground level we saw more people studying their brains out, probably so that they could party their brains out the next night. On the first floor, the same. The silent study area was full. Twenty people or so. On the second floor, there was nothing. A few girls laughing. Then on the third floor we found the solar lounge: a green, futuristic hub with computers imbedded in the wall and glass-encased study areas. I sat there for a while collecting my notes when I overheard someone arguing with someone who seems to be his mother. “No, I’m studying,” he said. “I told you that I am. I’m going over American politics right now and I’ll get to American pluralism tomorrow. Jesus Christ.”

Then he hung up. “Bitch,” he said. “I love you.” No doubt from some stupid YouTube video or Internet fad—if they are different.

Our last stop was NSC. On our way, we saw a woman in her twenties sleeping on a chair. She wore a green jacket, a dirty yellow hoodie, a bandana, and had a bag. She looked interesting and I wanted to talk to her but it seemed as though she enjoyed her chair sleep. We moved on.

At NSC, a step team was practicing their awesome dance moves, totally oblivious to the class going on right across from them. A few students in the halls. It was, overall, eerily dull.

That was it. We went back to the Generation office, and besides the creepy blue light emitting from one of the brown and vanilla buildings we didn’t even know the name of, nothing happened. It was a jolly good night. Just not for us.

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