We can’t send the semester off into the cold because the cold caught up with the semester.

And people are sleepy all the time – just take notice of the couches in the Rathskeller and across the way from it at Jazzman’s. Every sofa is occupied by a person with tired eyes.

Has reality caught up with the dream too fast?

“What dream?” you may ask.

The American, Martin Luther King’s, all of our parents,’ wishing for us something better than they had.

The dreams came up short, finished last. Our eyes were ripped open by the harsh light too fast.

Bailed out and recessed, making the walk to class, the student body is depressed. And activism is a thing of the past.

Some crazy guy with microphones in holsters ran amok when the semester began, shouting rhetoric and stopping students to ask what they think about the world-at-large and America’s scars.

He disappeared. He must have given up, trying, yet failing, to pick their intellectual brains of muck.

The world is on drugs. Maybe that’s the problem?

Prescriptions, street, nicotine and caffeine – it’s a dizzying array of ups and downs. And in the moment, it feels great, but please do mind to prepare for the crash.

The world is on drugs. Maybe that’s the solution?

Legalize, and end the war that only imprisons and enslaves the poor.

Free religion and free the gays because, just like the crackheads, they are both enslaved.

Somehow the Bible has chained both parties.

For the religious, their thoughts are crippled by doctrine, whereby passages are plucked from the Bible and used to refute other humans’ ways of life.

For the gays, secularism is the lie whipping them day to day.

God dammit, let them be married and enjoy the tax breaks and health benefits and true meaning of the word gay, voters.

Ah, Election Day. It came and went, like a tidal wave.

The waters are choppy for moms and dads, baby boomers bobbing in the sea of red-lined graphs.

The Dow, NASDAQ and S & P are pulling their retirements down with the undertow of flooded markets and desires for, as Tyler Durden would say, “Shit you don’t need.”

Necessity, a word no longer understood in the era of G3.

Self-gratification, the only principle understood by this reality-TV-infested, masturbating society.

Conspiracy, like who killed J.F.K, Malcolm X, and all those people in the Twin Towers that day?

And Jay-Z – he was the voice of politics when he released “Reasonable Doubt” back in ’96. That is why he was recruited to help Obama win the ticket.

That album spoke truths, unlike all these pundits and speculators trying to predict the future of the world in columns and on YouTube. These people are nothing but glorified assumers, shooting the arrow then drawing the target around it.

Why didn’t any of these speculators predict people would die on Black Friday? Most notably an innocent Wal-Mart employee, trampled to death by rabid consumers.

Oh, that’s right – they predicted that retail sales would be atrocious, horrendous, worse than ever.

The shoppers who were at the front of that stampede, their children will have blood on their toys. Not real blood, but blood in a Macbeth sense. No matter how many times they wrap the gifts, the blood will be present.

And we’ll all leave Kent soon to enjoy the holidays away from this place. Sadly, some people will probably try to forget these months spent away.

From home, life is easier. It’s not so hard to stay awake.

But don’t forget the things seen, heard and lived on this campus from day to day.

Reflect and lament, so spring semester will bring the crazies, megaphones, sidewalk chalk drawings, activists and passionate, in-your-face students back to Kent.

Darren D’Atorio is a senior magazine journalism major and a columnist for the Daily Kent Stater. Contact him at [email protected].