Since colleges are in the business of providing a service and making piles of money for that service, I am reminded of my recent Utica College experience and how it could have been better. Just like any business that is motivated by greed and huge profits, colleges have to ensure that the service they provide to consumers - in this case a college education – is worth the money students and their parents (not to mention the government) are going to shell out for a UC education. Utica College has done a lot in the last few years to enhance the quality of their learning experience: they have built new dorms, added a sky-lighted addition to their gym, constructed a new science building and criminal justice center, and added other improvements like a crunchy smoothie bar and a Starbucks bistro. They have also recruited hip and young new professors like Jason Denman, John Foreman and Gary Leising. These smart 30-something professors, along with all the other new and modern additions to the college campus, have gone a long way in hoisting UC out of the dowdy Dark Ages and placing it in the realm of present day coolness.

But UC still has room to improve, and - here’s the good part! - these improvements are mostly cheap aesthetic touch-ups or problems which can be solved with a little bit of student staff training.

1. From the main North to South walkways on campus, there is a view of two of West Utica’s biggest blights: the haunted old Lunatic Asylum and Donovan Middle School. Students do not need to be reminded of these vomit-inducing eyesores while they are attempting to learn things that will hopefully enable them leave Utica someday. And what is worse, from the football stadium and soccer fields, these monstrosities come into sharper focus hinting at the barren prospects which may await UC students after they graduate and attempt to navigate Utica’s employment wasteland. A view of New Hartford or Clinton would be more preferrable, and the hills of the Mohawk Valley look beautiful beyond the scarred landscape of West Utica, but unfortunately it is hard to ignore all that crap in the foreground no matter how hard one tries.

I suggest UC plant tall bushy trees to block the view of Donovan Middle School and the hollow Lunatic Asylum so that the college is enclosed in its own sweet stateliness. It is much easier for students and professors to ignore what lies beyond the college environment if they can’t see it. All that will be visible are the hills of the Mohawk Valley which cradle the thruway and train tracks, a comforting reminder of the region’s links to Civilization. Furthermore, I think high hedges or small trees should be planted along the row of West Utica houses which gird the college’s soccer and football fields. These neighborhoods offer a similar reminder as the yucky landmarks of the area’s blighted Rustiness which is not conducive to learning or money making. Therefore they need to be blocked out, for the sake of the residents who no doubt don’t want to see anything beautiful, and for the students who are paying good money not to be exposed to depressing, sick crap.

As for the fear of offending the West Utica community: don’t worry about them, they can’t even afford to pay attention let alone attend Utica College.

2. The athletic center at UC is a nice escape from the unhealthy and life-truncating atmosphere of Utica. It is pumped full of clean and dry artificial air which is much more easy on the throat and lungs than the air in Utica which is clogged full of deadly carcinogens, dank heat or biting cold, and asthma causing car exhaust (vehicles in the Mohawk Valley are not required to have catalytic converters, so they all smell like 1950’s gas guzzlers). It contains the latest in exercise machines, and students can work out in front of flat screen tv’s and watch ESPN footage of football games in Florida, a place they may end up moving to once they earn their ticket out of the Mohawk Valley. The gym complex also has hypnotic racquetball courts, an indoor swimming pool, basketball courts, dance rooms, underground locker rooms, offices and a physical therapy program.

But as a private institution, UC does not seem very concerned about preserving the integrity of their gym for their paying members. About as many non-UC students use the gym at any given time as paying UC students do. This went on while I was a student at Utica College and it still goes on today. As an undergraduate, I remember often having to compete for space and equipment with people who were not always as happy to share as somebody like me who was raised in an upper middle class family. It is always easy to spot the non-student members of the community too by their stench, rudeness and dirt-smeared clothing.

As a paying student who pumped thousands of dollars of my own money into Utica College, I was not happy to share my athletic facility with members of the community who just wanted a place to go during the day to escape their poverty and boredom. The elderly took up all the lanes in the swimming pool and urinated underwater so frequently that the pool was yellow and salty flavored. Lowlife perverted homosexuals could often be found in the locker rooms showering and grooming themselves endlessly or just sitting in the saunas waiting for a student to walk in. What is worse, campus security was useless. They were either oblivious to these things that went on, or they just didn’t care. The staff workers who were supposed to be checking student ID’s and gym membership cards weren’t doing their jobs either. They never so much as requested an ID or a membership card from somebody whose appearance would obviously raise a few flags. The seventy year old man was allowed to enter the swimming pool unhindered where he would subsequently urinate and cuss at any student who veered into his lane. The ghetto scum were allowed to check out basketballs which they would often steal. The minorities, resentful of the white power structure, would utilize the gym and sometimes verbally or physically assault white students (like telling the girls that they looked like bitches and skanks).

Adding injury to insult, I believe to this day that I was punished for trying to raise awareness to this problem on campus. After authoring a petition and collecting dozens of signatures a few years ago, I submitted my petition to the president of the college and demanded immediate action. What followed was a stepped up security presence at the gym. Staff started asking everybody for their student IDs or membership cards, and countless people were being turned away for not having them. This lasted a few weeks, and then I graduated. I felt good that I was able to contribute this change to the college before leaving; it was going to henceforth be my legacy.

But in the weeks after graduating when I continued to use the gym, people started scrutinizing me. Now that I was an alumnus, I was informed that I would have to purchase an expensive pass each semester to continue using the athletic center. Okay, no problem. I did that, but still people continued to scrutinize me. Sometimes I would forget my pass and be turned away. It didn’t matter that there were people in the gym who knew me and could vouch for me. Sometimes this helped, but oftentimes it didn’t. Meanwhile, the scum from the community started flooding back in unhindered. The octogenerarians returned to the swimming pool and turned it into their big, pissy public bath again. The homos returned and started peeking at everybody in the locker rooms. But meanwhile people continued to scrutinize me suspiciously. They made me feel like a deviant, a trespasser and a terrorist. I still had to renew my expensive gym membership each semester, while the other non-students got to do whatever they wanted without raising the slightest suspicion.

It was enough to make me want to rip up  my UC degree and demand my thousands of dollars back. I am certain that they were giving me a taste of my very own non-charitable and exclusive attitude which I espoused in my petition letter to the president. Fine, I thought, if they want to teach me a lesson about charity and sharing, let them do it in a less visceral and costly way. But for them to treat me like the wrongdoer, and to show favoritism to the non-students was just plain sickening. I suppose this is what they teach people at Notre Dame, Utica’s sorry excuse for a Catholic high school. They thought they were giving me my comeuppance, but all they were doing was spoon-feeding me Utica’s vile and perverted version of Catholicism – a unique and retarded form of Catholicism which shares almost nothing in common with traditional name brand Catholicism.

Don’t get me wrong! I believe in charity, only I believe in democratic charity as opposed to Catholic charity. If poor community members want to use UC’s gym, let them go through proper channels to do it. Let some agency such as Family Services write a grant to pay the semester-long membership fees for selected people in Cornhill. If people act up and start name-calling and stealing equipment, they should be suspended or terminated from using the gym services. There are rules in life, and if some staffer neglects their duty and service by allowing non-students to use the gym in order to win points with Saint Peter, then they are not being good stewards of the Earth. Furthermore, for the school to collectively punish me for not being a charitable Catholic is crazy. I suppose they would burn me at the stake if they could get away with it, so insanely backwards are their beliefs.

What the student staff workers who man the desks need to do is: Ask every person who is using the gym/racquetball courts/swimming pool/borrowing equipment, etc. for either a current student ID or a membership card. If somebody is a stranger and they cannot produce either, they should be turned away. There should be no, “Well, you can swim today but next time you must have your card.” No, because the next time they show up they’ll do something different with their hair or something to look different and they’ll get to workout for free again. Each student should be properly trained to follow these rules, and if they are not following these rules then they must be relieved from their positions. I know there can be a tendency to get lazy after a while and forget to check, or somebody might hate their job or whatever, but UC needs to remember that it is in the business of making money. And taking my money, for instance, to pay for the gym so that poor people from the community can use it for free is just plain wrong. UC did not ask for my permission to do this, and if my tuition money is paying the salaries of the student workers who are supposed to be checking people’s IDs and cards, I want to know that these people are doing their jobs and not letting people through because they want to go to heaven. If a student is neglecting their post for religious reasons, then UC is the wrong place for them. Last time I checked, Utica College is not a Catholic institution. If people want to be able to practice their religion freely, they can do it at one of the many Catholic colleges and institutions in America (like LaMoyne).

3. UC needs a shuttle service. If Hamilton College can have vans to taxi students around, so can Utica College. I know Hamilton students might be unfamiliar with the city of Utica and its surrounding areas, and for this they might need a taxi service. Furthermore, their college is located inconveniently on a hill where the buses rarely ever go. Okay, Hamilton needs a shuttle service.

But UC has several dorms, and even though many of the students who reside in these dorms might only live an hour or two from Utica, they aren’t exactly familiar with Utica’s streets in the same way that locals are. Also, Utica arguably  has some of the worst ghettos in the Western Hemisphere. For this reason alone, every college in the area would be amiss not to provide a complimentary shuttle service to their full and part-time students.

While volunteering in the community as a student at UC, it was my responsibility to find my own transportation to and from the locations where I would be giving something back. Often I was given poor directions (“just take Genesee St. and turn left here and it’s right across from the Dunkin Donuts”) and informed that I could take the bus (“yeah, the bus will drop you off, like, a block away”). I later remember thinking how, if a massacre like the one that occurred not too long ago in Binghamton had happened and my peers and I were caught in the middle, this would not reflect well on Utica College when it came to light that they don’t provide shuttle service for students to and from volunteer sites. Utica is a very foreign and unsafe city, all of us here at The Utican agree to this, and there are sections where we just won’t go without the assistance and protection of body armor and sidearms. Because we lack these things here at our world headquarters, there are streets in Utica which we have never driven on (let alone walked on). We take it for granted that people like us simply don’t venture down Court Street or stand on a corner whistling while waiting for a bus at the corner of James and Steuben Streets.

A college located in such nightmarish city needs to do more to protect its students, even if this protection is more of a gesture than anything else. Providing shuttle service to volunteer sites is merely a gesture that offers a false sense of safety. After all, once students are dropped off at volunteer sites anything can happen to them. But I would rather have this false assurance of protection instead of nothing at all. Being given crappy directions and told that I can take the bus makes me feel like an afterthought. I know the college wants to project an image of charitable benevolence to the larger community (this is part of their money making agenda), but they send students out into the local ghettos as if they are expendable pawns.

Why should anybody give their money to an institution which cares so little for its consumers? People give their money to Big Tobacco and McDonald’s, but these death dealers are more or less transparent about the products they sell and the consequences of excessively consuming these products. Higher Education tries to prop itself up with fancy notions and ideals, it promises big rewards, a lifetime of comfort, a key which can unlock any door. But look at the facts concerning the Mohawk Valley: the economy has been churning along in Great Depression mode for as long as people can remember, the average entry level job pays hardly more than minimum wage (and offers even less in the way of benefits), and the trickle of people out of the area seeking a better life for themselves and their children has left the social atmosphere as dead and vacant as the empty storefronts and shuttered streets that haunt the city.

How is an expensive Utica College degree going to be an asset in this type of environment? How will it benefit me to give thousands of dollars to UC when I won’t even be able to get a job that will allow me to eat, wear clothes, drive a car and have a roof over my head after I graduate? What is the good in being able to break into intellectual discussions on various topics when the average Joe in Utica is so mentally sluggish that it takes him all day to change a tire? Unless my expensive Utica College degree was preparing  me for a wonderful life outside of Utica (like, say, in Albany or Burlington, VT), I got duped by some pretty gimmicky false advertising.

And I’m sure similar cases can be made all across America. Like, for instance, if you live in Jerome, Arizona, a dust bowl of a town in the middle of nowhere, a place consisting of a few ramshakle Western-movie style houses that stick out of the hills of Jerome like tombstones, and you think having a college degree from the nearest college will make all the difference in your life, only to discover that once you complete the degree requirements and get handed your scroll, you are still stuck in Jerome, you are smarter, but still stuck in your little cul de sac of a town, with no way of getting a job that will provide all the benchmarks of success, and no way of working your way out of that little hell hole either, you are just stuck there, more miserable than you were before because now you are smart and high-minded, and you were promised a tract home house and an office park job in Phoneix, and now you want nothing less than this, and if someone offers you a job at the local town hall for $10 an hour you spit at it, and curse the fools for being an ignorant bunch of hicks, $10 per hour is for people with associates degrees, you say, and I have a BS degree in engineering, what kind of an insult is this?

Colleges will go on preaching the same old bull shit no matter what: i.e., a college degree is a key that can unlock any door; people with college degrees make 30-40K per year while people with high school diplomas flip burgers for a living; a college education will make you as smart as Einstein; a college degree will enable you to live to be 80 years old unlike the high school dropouts who die at the age of 43; Et cetera, Et cetera. Some colleges have a right to preach this high-minded rhetoric, but most don’t. What gets me is that colleges preach this message regardless of the situations surrounding the actual physical location of the college. If a college in East St. Louis promises wealth, intelligence, happiness and sophistication, one needs to stop and think, “Wait, I’m going to go to college in East St. Louis, but then what the hell am I going to do once I graduate and I have to go out into the East St. Louis community?” Asking a question as simple as this will make a person realize if, say, an investment in Utica College is worth it or not. If one pays $20K per year for a UC education, will they even be able to get a job making at least $20K per year after graduating (because if I’m paying big money for my college education, I expect high earning results when I go out into the workforce). If one is going to apply to business school in a certain city, it might not be a bad idea to do a little research about that city’s local economy. For instance, what type of industries does it have and what is the salary of the average worker? This will give you some insight into what type of real world experience the business school faculty has and how that experience (or lack thereof) might shape the curriculum. Ideally, New York City is the best place to get an MBA as all the world centers of banking and finance are located in New York. But if you are planning on earning your MBA from, say, Colgate University, a competitive school located in the tiny hick village of Hamilton, NY, you might receive an education that is more notional and which lacks the real world experiences to back it up (unless, of course, you have internships in Manhattan). I’m not saying there is anything particularly wrong with a notional education, but you might want to consider whether you think you could learn more from professors who simply read a lot, or professors who not only read, but who are actively involved with various people and institutions in America’s largest business mecca. It is one thing to look at hills and cows on your way to and from class as you think about ticker tapes and economies and global markets, and it is another to look at futuristic towers of financial giants piercing the sky.

That being said, I think Utica College could potentially have a fairly reputable MSW program if it tried, and the planners at UC might want to consider incorporating and trying to achieve a big name Social Work school before they go ahead with tacking on a law school program to the college’s gamut of advanced degrees. Any big name anything associated with a college gets passed on to the rest of the institution and boosts overall ratings, which generates money for the school. Anyone can spend 5 minutes in Utica and instantly realize that it is a hurting city which could never have too many social workers. In fact, the same can be said for all of upstate NY. What if Utica College could be the Social Work capital of Central New York? What if it could be ranked in US News & World Report as having one of the top 10 best social work schools? This is the way that colleges and universities need to go. They need to stop being closed institutional microcosms and pay more attention to their respective communities. By being in touch with their local communities, colleges need to offer sensible services that line up with the needs and realities of these communities. They should stop making universal claims about success, wealth, happiness and yada yada yada. These things are taken for granted by any aspiring college student. Moreover, higher tuition equals a desire for higher earning power. If a city cannot provide students with the lucrative jobs they desire, then colleges should sponsor recruiting events which host employers from nearby cities which have those lucrative jobs. Finally, colleges should make sure to provide students with internships in bigger cities so they actually have a chance of being hired and landing the job that is going to pay them the bigger salary they crave once they graduate. It does not benefit an institution of higher learning to act embarrassed about the lagging economy of the city it is located in and falsely promise recent grads that the rewarding careers they seek are out there when they’re not.

UC is guilty of this practice, and when I look around me I don’t see any lucrative jobs, all I see are jobs at the ARC, UCP and APAC which barely pay more than minimum wage. The local job market is crap, the pay is crap, the benefits are crap, and the work is crap. When I was part of the microcosm of UC, I couldn’t see much further than my own college environment and the high-minded notions and ideals I projected onto it. It was a beautiful world to say the least, but I have come to realize that the environment surrounding UC is anything but beautiful. It is a wasteland of poverty, death, drugs, disease and depression. And in describing this I am mostly describing Utica, but New Hartford, with all its high hedges, McMansions and cruising foreign sedans, is the fakest of fake towns in all of the fakeville places in fakeworld. Judging by the template pattern the developers of the suburb followed (which is no doubt based on the layout of actual rich places like Riverdale, NY and Lakeforest, WI), one would expect it to be a town full of loafer wearing Ralph Lauren models who didn’t work but spent their days getting their pubises waxed and training their Pomeranians to speak. It is a damn shame that I bought into the supposed sophistication and coolness of New Hartford once, and it is even sadder that some people will spend their whole lives in that town never knowing what an actual rich person looks like or talks like. But still, there is only room in New Hartford’s ranks for a few UC grads each year, and most of these people will come by their jobs thanks to the help of family connections. This means the other several hundred of us must find work elsewhere, and the prospects are not good in Utica, and just about as bad in the small towns that dot the space between Utica and Syracuse and Utica and Albany.

It is not good to say the least, and this Recession is only making matters worse. I don’t know where to go from here, or what to do to get myself unstuck and back on the ball again. I want to feel the way I did when I was an undergrad at UC. I want to be able to look at the world and make it my own reality instead of seeing it for the way it really is. I guess one could say that I’ve lost my peace of mind, and I don’t know how I’m going to get it back. UC afforded me a peace of mind that let me sleep at night, but I have been without that calm contentedness for a while now, and the further I get from it the less precious and valuable it once seemed. This is because my studies at Utica College were enjoyable and intellectually challenging in a way that no job I’ve either had or read about in the area since graduating can even come close to fulfilling or satisfying.

I guess the answer lies outside of Utica. The only way I could ever feel happy in the Mohawk Valley is by remaining a student forever, but the whole purpose of college is to prepare you for life. Unfortunately, life has proved ellusive for me, but I constantly see its glow and hear its call on the horizon.

The Bilge Bum (guess which one of us he is?) was walking around today with his ear to the ground trying to get a sense of the local word on the street. He was in the shops and schools and trash lots sniffing out a flavor that distills the current state of affairs in Handshake City. For whatever reason – maybe it’s because of this Recession or maybe it’s because winter is right around the corner (again!) – local people seem to think that the Mohawk Valley has never been worse than it is right now. There is an almost palpable restlessness in the air, especially when you step into a room full of 20 and 30-somethings who, for the most part, look educated, eager and are otherwise normal and average seeming. Considering these people for a moment, there is a communicated feeling of hopelessness from them that life will never get better here, but that the quality of things will only continue to nosedive. This feeling is as thick and acrid as sulphuric factory smoke and it stings your eyes with tears. Utica has always been a city of dearth buoyed by a few things which make it seem, more or less, like a city that can still bring you a sense of hope and joy. But now those things are gone – or the magic in them is at least –  and people don’t want to sit around here any longer watching the years slip through their fingers like falling-out hair.

Or the 20 and 30-something smart and eager people don’t want to at least.

And these people are important because they make up the Utica-Rome area. Because what is the area without them? What is it? You know. You don’t want to admit what it is because you know that – without a few professionals to provide a sense of white-collarness – your city is just a place full of dependents and vagabonds, ex-cons and dummies with difficult to pronounce last names who can’t tell their asses from a hole in the ground. Utica, this great former textile factory town, like a section of Detroit or Cleveland shoveled up and puked haplessly back out in a valley that turns into a frozen tundra every year, one hour from the nearest semblance of a city (Syracuse) and almost twice as far from Albany, far enough away from the big cities (New York, Boston, Toronto) to be considered ungovernable Indian territory, and far enough away from Syracuse to be considered on it’s own, completely fucked (if Hamilton students only knew half the things about this bacteria-ridden shit hole that festers below their pristine college on the hill, they would transfer to Cornell which is a similar pristine college located atop a city that isn’t nearly half as fucked up as Utica and its surrounding slums), oh great Utica, how ironic your name, Caeser would never invade you or seek to incorporate you, there’d be no Catos to defend you, no Joseph Addisons to immortalize you with their pens, you could never be the backdrop of freedom and life pursuing ideals, you are not even worthy of starring as the setting for the Sabotage video, in fact, all pop-culture attempts to define or satirize you are deflected by the very lowbrow-ness of everything that is Utica, Goodfellas comes close, but you are not Goodfellas Utica, Queens is Goodfellas, or Brooklyn is Goodfellas, or Malverne, NY is, and even Leonia, New Jersey is, but not you Utica, and the fictional Ray character from the sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond might live in a house that could be any house in South Utica, but don’t think for a minute that your pace of life, Utica, is anything like the pace of life depicted in that sitcom, afterall, the Ray in that show is a writer for The New York Newsday or something, a real, big city newspaper, the kind of newspaper that wipes its ass with papers like Utica’s Observer Dispatch (or Obituary Dispatch, or Overdose Dispatch, or whatever the hell it’s called), Ray is the kind of sportswriter who would laugh at Utica journalism, he’s a real Italian, the kind of Italian who’s been to Rome and Venice and who knows his mom’s secret spaghetti and meatballs recipe by heart which he wouldn’t share with anyone because then he’d have to kill them, and I bet he and his wife could whip up some real Italian meals to die for, and they’ve probably never heard of tomato pie, and if they ever had it they probably wouldn’t even recognize it as Italian . . . . but I digress.

So the Bilge Bum collected his data and returned to our world headquarters and thought it would be best to do a post quoting everyday people on the street. The relevance of this, he said, has to do with the fact that so many of the quotations he collected were negative, and this points to a larger trend spreading across Utica and its surrounding suburbs and towns today. In fact, the quotations he came by either directly or indirectly were so negative that, after transcribing them, the Bilge Bum tried to hang himself in his basement, but we stopped him, so he settled for taking a coat hanger, pressing it to a red hot stove, and burned himself with it instead. At least that wasn’t as tragic as the fire that killed 4 people the other night, but it did involve hot things and seared flesh, and since Utica is a city plagued by arson, we do have to condemn any such play (either safe or dangerous) with anything fire-causing. The Bilge Bum is now in the psychiatric unit at one of the local hospitals recovering, and we are just glad that he is safe and hopefully he will come home soon and be comfortable and normal again, but we also worry about his long-term prospects, because the Bilge Bum (as he would now like to henceforth be called) is very wobbly and immature, and because we provide for him here at The Utican he is happy, but if we were to move away and take The Utican with us and have it become, say, the Charolotte Whiner, or the Houston Crapper or Leaving Las Vegas or something, I fear for the Bilge Bum, because he is vulnerable and he needs our support, but at the same time I don’t know if he can make it in a bigger city where he would have to do more than write scatological blog posts about the city which he loves to hate, or which he just hates, or just…I don’t know.

But, anyway, here is the Utica word on the street.

“I feel more and more like a joke each day that I spend in this hell hole. My preferred moving date expired long ago. Now I’m just sitting around rotting and turning into a piece of moldy cheese like all the other Yooticans. I guess we can thank Bush/Obama for this Recession which is keeping us stuck here (Bush created the Recession, and Obama promised change but he is hardly helping). I have been applying for jobs far, far away from Utica with no luck. It’s a joke. I may as well sell a kidney or wait for a relative to die. I could probably get a job if I moved to a city that I want to work in, but that is very risky. Anyway, I’m starting to consider my other options besides the get-a-job-then-move plan. I’m thinking about asking family for help which is something I never wanted to consider before since I’m so independent.”

- TIM CLOCK

 “I guess you know you haven’t lived in Utica too long when you are still able to tell that all the mature women look like taxidermied corpses who talk with scary Darth Vadar smokers voices.”

- BRIAN MORAVIAN

“The reason I’m moving is because Utica’s stuck at the end of an evolutionary cul-de-sac with idiots at the helm.”

- MEGAN COX

“There is nothing to do here on the weekends but go Wal-Mart hopping and watch the humanoid sloths fill up their motorized carts with as much edible shit as their food stamps can afford. And what makes all this lack of fun even more of an insult is that, even while having an expensive college degree and working 50 hours per week, I can’t even afford half the food these blobs of flesh get for free.”

- KATHERINE DRAKE CAMBLA

“All the jobs left, then the people left a little while later, the buildings, roads and parks fell into disrepair, people became hollow and nasty, miserable-ness was the new norm, violence rises and falls in waves, people are violent when they have the energy to be violent, but mostly they don’t have the energy for nothing, the immigrants came and we shook our heads with disbelief wondering how they would survive, good luck, we thought, don’t forget how to grow potatoes in the forest, our city is gaunt and pale, diseased and crazy, malnourished and illiterate…well, at least I have my family, all of them, several generations of them, but I can’t afford to love them anymore, and they can’t afford to love me back, we just stare across the street at each other, not recognizing one another, all the old familiarness gone, the kids – our progeny – like strangers, and we like strangers to them, not caring, none of us, all of us, the old flames gone, the candle snuffed out, one day closer to the End.”

- ANONYMOUS (SCRAWLED ON A BATHROOM WALL)

“If I’m still here next year…kill me!”

- DAN KEELER

I’ve often been thinking lately about what kind of person Utica would be if he/she/it could manifest him/her/it-self into human flesh form. Like, for instance, would Utica be a clingy girlfriend who needs you more than you need her? Would she always stare at you trying to read and predict your thoughts? If she sensed that you were straying, either mentally or physically, would she try to keep you close to her at all costs? Like, would she go to great lengths to give you the best sex she was capable of giving once a week, and cook you lavish dinners, and give you gifts, and take you on little short trips to the country? And if you scoffed at these things and still wanted to leave, would she fail to get offended like a non-robotic human would, and just keep continuing to pile on the goodies until you finally gave up and realized that you needed her, you could never leave her, the two of you were one flesh and could never be twain, etc.

And if Utica is this girl…is she doing all of this out of love? Or dependency? Because if she is doing it out of love that is one thing, but if she acts this way out of dependency then – as the more responsible one in the relationship - you know there is an expiration date on your relationship.

And let’s say Utica is this girl, and sometimes she flips the tables and makes you feel like the dependent one, even if this feeling of helplessness is as vague a sensation as trying to remember a nonsensical dream from three nights ago (and lasts just as long too). But anyway, she’ll pull back her giving and tell you to go away. Fine! If you don’t want me, she’ll say, just leave! Just like anybody who is mired in a relationship like this would do, you instinctively stop. I’m not going to go anywhere, you think. I need a place to sleep tonight and all of my stuff is in this house and I would rather not pay for a smelly hotel room. I’ll figure things out in the morning. But for a second you realize what being in a relationship with this person means, that in some ways it is simbioitc even though your partner makes you feel like a Greco-Roman God who tames the sea and controls the rising and setting of the sun.

But she has other tricks to keep you on a leash as well. Like, she’ll act domineering and possessive. She’ll have a subtle way of manipulating your emotions to bring you down to her level, to make you feel as imperfect and dependent as she is. Sometimes you’ll catch yourself actually wanting to be her friend, actually wanting acceptance from this little shrew, only to stop yourself. But this girl, this sycophant, this fawning vessel of empty platitudes, has her own reasons for needing you and clinging to you, and what those reasons are you’ll never know – either because you don’t care to know, or because your intellect is so much higher than her’s that you could never understand what she thinks. So it is only and always through manipulation that she is able to get the upper hand, to make you feel a ray of hope that she can offer you something, provide something, some kind of life or happiness or escape from boredom or whatever.

But the longer all of this goes on, the dimmer things continue to look. You know better than her that your final goodbye is approaching. But as far as goodbyes go, your parting ways will be rather anti-climactic. You might just say “see ya” and never look back as you go your separate ways. But in your mind you will be thinking of the Biblical story of the destruction of Sodom and Gamorrah, when Lot and his wife were instructed by God not to look back lest they turn into a pillar of salt. God did not want them to witness what he was doing to the land and the people, because perhaps He felt a sense of godlike guilt from his actions. So it will be a dramatic walking away (for you at least), one fraught with heavy emotion, metaphor and mostly bad memories.

A few years ago when I worked at the ARC, there was a lady that attended the day program that all of a sudden approached me and asked if I would be her boyfriend. I was completely taken aback because 1. I had never seen this woman before and I didn’t know her, and 2. I don’t have easy answers for out-of-the-blue blunt questions like this. I want to believe that she had lived a hard life of rejection and dearth and she had nothing to lose by making herself look so foolish and vulnerable. On the other hand, even in her tactless world of slowness (she was retarded) I expected her to at least have a rudimentary respect for boundaries – i.e., you just don’t go up to young guys and ask them if they want to date you (she was probably in her fifties). I felt trapped because she didn’t really leave me any quick way to let her down easy. She asked me quite succinctly if I wanted to be her boyfriend stating that I was “attractive” and suggesting that we might be compatible (this latter suggestion was offered when I protested, “But we don’t know each other!”). What was even more weird was that she wanted her answer by “tomorrow,” as if we were in elementary school. She probably thought I was going to go home and think long and hard about her proposition, when in fact I watched a porn movie and then fell asleep.

This strange experience would probably have to rank as one of the top 10 weirdest things that has ever happened to me before. My brother has a list like this which involves things such as being bitten on a subway in Boston (a similar run-in with a mentally ill/retarded person), but I don’t think he has ever been asked straight-up by a dumpy, older woman if he would like to be her “boyfriend.” It just goes to show that my brother and I lead very different lives, but the intercoastal thread that unites us might be one of bizarre occurrences.

I don’t know if this woman, my would-be girlfriend, would represent Utica incarnate or not. I like to think everybody’s experience with Utica is unique, that no two people could create a fleshy version of Utica that would look exactly the same, would have all the same contours and curves and vocal inflections. Despite all the things people can agree on when discussing Utica, there is a limit to how much of a consensus can be reached. Utica is essentially what one makes of it.

But rather than creating some Frankensteinian monster out of the most relavant bits and pieces of Utica, all we have to do is look around us to see the city incarnate. Utica manifests itself in each of us, in the faces of everybody. Utica is in the hollow eyes of an elderly widow, and it is in the walrussy mustache of the mailman who brings you your daily mail. Utica is the man who douses your fires, Utica is Tony who bakes your pies, Utica is the pit bull who plays with thee kid. One does not have to go to great lengths to conceive of Utica, because Utica is right here all around us. It doesn’t get any more convenient than that!

BY: KATIE AND STEPH

Tired of the same old salmonella served at the local “mom n’ pop” junk joints which they try to pass off as food? You know, strange foods with made-up names like the Holy Connoli, which basically looks and tastes like a turd wrapped in a wet paper towel. Or the Burrito Blue, which looks like a horses throbbing penis and is about as tasty as a 3-day old dead guy’s large intestine. Tired of the Civil War era diarrhea these culinary disasters cause, and then not being able to complain about the crap food because everybody in the town around you was born without taste buds, and they all just take it for granted that brown water comes out of their anuses every time they sit on the toilet?

Well, if you feel the same way that I do,  you need to try a new type of dining experience. It is called dumpster dining. No, not dumpster diving…dumpster dining. That is right! If you’re accustomed to eating crap, why not just bypass the places that serve crap passed off as edible food, and just get your crap straight from the source. There are plenty of dumpsters around that emit smells which could just as easily come from any Oriental hash house or wop slop eatery in the area. So why not stop in and try it out. Yum…my stomach is growling already!

First you will need to select your dining party. A dining party is an association of close friends or business associates with whom you have chosen to dine for the evening. For the optimal dining experience, you want to keep things professional but well-balanced. For instance, don’t invite all males because your formal dining occasion could quickly turn into a frat or bachelor party (and vice versa for females). You want to have an approximately even number of males and females ranging in ages from young to old. It is always preferable to have at least one person in their twenties and one person who is 60-ish or 70-ish, as this sets the stage for the spectrum of ages and level of sophistication you are aiming for. With this vast span of generations, the overall level of maturity for your little party should hover somewhere at the 40-something age range. But since this is dumpster dining, we can tweak the rules a little bit. It is okay to invite a 12 year old and an 80 year old, and when the night is over it is best to let these two wander off together so that grandpa can have his way with the youngster.

Besides grandpa and the 12 year old, we need to invite 5-7 other guests. Since balance is the key, we must remember to select other diners who come from a range of different backgrounds. It is always good to have a high-ranking person in your group, such as a celebrity or a familiar pillar of the community. In this case, let’s let our high-ranking person be a politician who is running for governor of an economically polarized and depressed state. Make sure to let the aspiring politico know that he should wear a pin-striped suit and his finest Brut cologne to your little get-together. He should also be advised not to wear too much pommade in his hair as this will attract flies to your dining atmosphere, and you don’t want any flies stealing your delicious food now do you?

Next we should invite some other people. I’ve decided to invite a fat cat since fat cats are always jovial when they are in the presence of food. Secondly, I’m going to invite my pharmacist Otis Eddy. Otis Eddy is not my druggist’s real name, that is just the name people in the alley know him by. Otis Eddy won’t tell us his real name because he’s mysterious in that kind of way. You see, Otis is a progressive pharmacist who sells magical rocks instead of pills. I haven’t figured out what the magic little white rocks do yet - whether I’m supposed to rub them on where it’s hurting or what – but he assures me they have ancient healing powers dating all the way back to the early 80’s. Lastly, I’m going to invite a common, everyday, run-of-the-mill kind of person. A female actually…this lady:

You are free to invite whomever you want from your circle of friends to your first dining occasion, but I just thought I would show you some examples of what types of friends I would invite. When considering how the conversation will flow, you need to especially keep in mind how well your guests are at things like banter, spontaneity, and breaking balls. It is always good to have a good ball buster at your party, because a party is not a party unless somebody’s balls are getting broken.

Okay, now that we’ve gotten our guest-list out of the way, let’s move on to discussing dining locations. In the world of dumpster dining it’s all about location, location, location. The ideal location for a nice dumpster spot to dine at is behind an old pre-war building that reeks of asbestos, black mold and bum piss. Boarded up and fire-gutted buildings do not necessarily have to be avoided, but since most of these buildings don’t have dumpsters behind them, we will just avoid these edifices in this little how-to lesson. Let’s select an apartment building made out of brick, one that is shaped like an H. Before we know this is the right place to dine at, we first have to check the tagging. Tagging is graffiti, and oftentimes gangs will mark their territory with tagging. We must know which gang’s territory our meal will occur in, and once that is established we must notify each of the guests to see if it will be any problem with them. If, say, the West Side Bedbugs have a hit out on our politician, we will have to make other arrangements. Or if our distinguished female guest has licensing agreements with the Crips, it could be a conflict of interest to dine in the Blood’s territory. Some gangs might also charge a small fee to rent either their public or private property for the night. So it would benefit us to ask around the ‘hood in advance so that we are not later tracked down at home and beaten with a baseball bat for trespassing.

Once we have selected our pre-war brick building shaped like an H, and eliminated the possibility of being hassled for being somewhere we aren’t welcome, we can begin to dig in to the dumpster buffet. Dumpster dining is nice because it is always buffet style. There is no confusing foreign-language menu to read, no long wait for your food, and no tempting bread bowl which you always invariably end up filling up on thus having no appetite when your meal finally arrives. The diners can just scurry up to the dumpster and fight for the freshest scraps of food closest to the top of the heaping piles of garbage.

(Backtracking a bit, if you have more than 7 guests it is best to select an apartment building that has two or more dumpsters. Many of the larger apartment high rises will have multiple dumpsters lined up in a back alley, but you won’t need this much food unless you are going dumpster dining for the occasion of a wedding, a memorial service or a graduation party. If you have 8-20 guests, a 5-10 story apartment building will do as these buildings usually have 2-3 dumpsters.)

Once everybody grabs handfuls of mush and spreads them across something flat like the top of a cardboard box (because you want to separate out any glass that might be in your food) the eating part of the dining experience can commence. Eating usually takes 5-10 minutes depending on whether people throw up or not. If there is a lot of vomiting, 2nd and 3rd trips to the dumpster will be necessary. As the organizer of this whole thing, you don’t want people going to bed on an empty stomach. If one of your guests nods off after puking, you might ask him or her if they had enough food. If they say they’re not hungry, you might offer them a beverage. “Would you like some of this water in this soda bottle with no label, it’s flavored with a cigarette somebody put out in it?” You don’t want your guests falling asleep because it might mean you’re a bad host. But sometimes passed out diners is a good thing. If somebody is passed out, it could mean that they are having the time of their life, in which case it is a compliment to you the host. If somebody should nod off or become otherwise unresponsive, remember to check for a needle in their arm or a bottle of cheap wine which they may keep hidden in their jacket. It is always important for people to share, and not sharing with the host is straight up rude.

I could go on and write a whole primer on dumpster dining, but that would kill the spontaneity. The trick to always having a good dumpster outing is to just relax and be creative. The conversation should flow over the food like music, you and the guests should be allowed to be youselves, and everybody should feel like they are having a good time. If I tell you what to do and how to do it, you will probably make flash cards and act like a programmed robot all evening. This may be a formal occasion, but that doesn’t mean you have to go about it with your butt cheeks clenched together the whole time.

If you think this dumpster dining phenomenon I just explained is offensive and ridiculous, you need to understand my perspective. Everybody wants to be extravagant and surrounded by beauty all of the time, when the “beauty” people crave is really just garbage. Go to the mom n’ pop places and stuff your face with their tomato covered testicles if you want some authentic rubbish cuisine. Or get herded into the Wal-Marts like sheep so they can feed you feces before cutting your head off. The most precious things people have they eventually throw away. What is better than partaking of other people’s treasures after they have been discarded?

I’m sure any politico in this state will tell you the same.

Rhyming verse might have potential.

THE LONGEST WINTER

Before we see the buds of Spring
We must face the longest Winter,
friend, you and me.
As we age so too do we become sage,
and everything is only a turn of the page.
Each new day a white canvas,
a sail unfurled as we embark on our journey,
a foreign land to canvass.
Life is the work of seeking out what gives us joy
with the wonder always of a little boy.
But before lines can gird the eye,
a rocky path ahead I do descry.
The Winter of our lives
where each man must go alone,
without the wisdom of God, love or wives.
With only his conscience as a guide.
Lest he walk the road that is wide.

Then again, it might not.

THE END OF THE WORLD

Some believe the world will end in a huge
Alien War
I choose to believe it will end in Love
Those aliens may be pretty smart
but can an alien wear a hat or a glove?
Can an alien sing a song to make
ears melt and hearts swoon?
Can an alien effuse its soul in art eclectic
or eat ice cream with a spoon?

True, aliens may come one day to end planet
Earth
but when they get here they will find only dearth
For we will have killed ourselves with Love
Loving with words, fists and things
hard/soft
Love upside down, and sideways backward
Love so tart like an apple
The paradox is absurd

Love, Love, Love! = BOOM! We’re all dead!

Love, Love, Love! = The Beginning and the End.

Yeah, I think not.

Songs could be cool…if you like Pantera type of music

X

He ripped you from yourself
showed you the world
taught you how to play
then left you nailed. to. your. cross+
HATE!…it’s what you feel when you’re alone
NO DEBATE!…can appease the One lying
on His throne
Hard is life
Welcome to the world
He who is Last will always be. he. that.
SERVES!
He left his mark
He left his mark on you
He left his mark
now He’ll see you thru
He left his mark
His mark on you
He left his mark….

[repeat 'till fade out]

Yeah, music is just…I don’t know? Anyway, back to rhyming verse. If it’s done right it can have the desired effect, but it still ends up sounding ancient and formulaic.

MANIFEST DESTINY

Like ancient tomes,
dusty and old

Our destinies are written
from birth ’till we’re old.

Thoughts sprout wings
and from our mouths take flight.

We may claim ownership of them,
but we are only thieves in the night.

Our actions are stolen from the garden
of the Creator,

He is the source of everything,
our life’s narrator.

To try and outwit destiny is a life futile rather than bold.
We think we have freewill until destiny manifests

itself when we are hoary and old.
And when our lives are being told

we’d like to raise our hands and say,
“I didn’t plan it that way.”

If it’s done wrong you get something that sounds like Halmark or even worse.

STONE FREE

I set a stone free,
free from my hand.
It flew over a wall
and landed in a foreign land.

The stone flew high,
high into the sky.
When it came down
it landed like a pie in someone’s eye.

I freed a stone from my palm,
it ripped thru the night,
it hit a star away real far
and stole the heaven’s light.

A million spangles in the sky,
one by one to crash them all.
To shower down on sea and land,
by freeing a stone from my hand.