This is it: the final Release of the year, and the last one with your ugly, balding editor. It’s been a fun run, but like all things, it must end sometime. As I move on from Binghamton and into my parents’ house, I look back on my time here with a strange fondness. It hasn’t all been good. No, in fact, very little has been good. Come to think of it, college has mostly been a long series of defeats and humiliations.

Am I right? Well, I don’t know. Let’s look back now in the pages of Release in a feature I’d like to call “Four Years In Binghamton.”

Freshman Year

After 18 years of living at home in my own room, with not a care as to who might walk in on me completely naked with a bottle of Jergens in my hand, it was a tough adjustment to start living in a confined space with another person. It was two people in a room, one of them addicted to porn. Now multiply that by a whopping 1.5, and that’s where I was: in a forced triple in the stinky basement of Onondaga, College-in-the-Woods’ premiere shit-pit.

One of the kids I was living with, Andy, was a shifty-eyed creep who liked to carve his name into farm animals with his switchblade. He never spoke, save the few times he wanted to borrow my sewing kit so he could push needles under his fingernails. The pain gave him sick pleasure.

As if that wasn’t cause for me to sleep with one eye open, there was the other wayward soul that was crammed into our living space. His name was virtually unpronounceable. He was this gigantic, muscular Indian with far too many bottles of Nair in his closet. Not only that, but he would leave the room for weeks at a time. His weeping parents would call up looking for him, saying they would call the police if he didn’t come back, and I would lie and say I had just seen him. I didn’t like having to do that, but I knew the kid was off somewhere smuggling drugs into the country, so there was no need to get the police involved.

So with those two characters as my roommates, it was hard to get a moment alone. All I wanted to do was spend some quality time with my copy of “Rimjobbing Oyster Women from Alpha Centauri” without any loony assholes from Dutchess County waiting to write his initials on my shaft.

I set out to find the spots on campus most well-suited to the relief of certain male urges. It took a lot of guts, and bucket loads of nuts, but I managed to find three spots I could escape to when the images of those oyster women in my brain were too much to handle. Here they are, in ascending order.

3 – Basement of the University Union. What better place to spend some alone time than in those connecting hallways that join the New and Old Unions? There are so many of them, and people usually only take the route near the post office. There’s a whole labyrinth down there, containing BTV and the back of the bowling alley where nobody goes unless a pin gets stuck. When it’s time to fix your own ball return, give the Union basement a try. It beats Late Nite.

2 – The Nature Preserve. I know what you’re going to say. “But what about the ticks, the salamanders and all those crazy hillbilly mountain folk? Won’t they shoot me on site?” Only if you travel deep enough, Billy. Relax though, venturing into the Nature Preserve is great therapy. You’ll feel like Davy Crockett, wearing your ’coon-skin cap, wrestling bears and conquering your manhood. No more will the doldrums of college life bother you: you’ve become a part of Gaia, the Earth Mother. She will nurture you, and if you’re lucky, she might even take her top off. She’s a MILF, no doubt about it. Whack away, young pioneer.

1 – Casedesus Hall, Fine Arts Building. This place works wonders. Most of the time, this place is empty. However, my experiences are from a time when this auditorium was well populated. It was during Music 101, with the incomparable Alice Mitchell. She would be up front with her short stature and big glasses, pounding away on the piano, and I would be all the way in the back, pounding away on my organ. Everyone was too concerned with Gregorian chants and operas to notice me practicing the flute. Seriously, if you can get into this class, your roommate problems will be solved. You’ll look forward to class everyday, and while your grades may slip faster than your grip, who cares! Just pass/fail it, classes are lame anyway.

Yeah, that’s pretty much all I learned freshman year. I think there was something about history, but who knows. What’s my major, again?