Mister Flannel McNewspaper

Who are you, Mister Flannel McNewspaper?

Your bald head shines under the weak spotlight. You’re enjoying the Stanford Daily, as we all should, with regularity. Like fiber in a diet. World events come alive when written by an undeclared sophomore. They do, they do. The crucial issues of the day, of the campus, of the quad. No bikes there and no GERs there. Tangled reverberations of choppy news on floppy paper! Of IHUM and Nobel! Polisci children will save the world in a hundred words! And the temptress Sudoku! Oh! If only I understood the cruel number game. Cross words! Weave your vocabulary!

Oh Flannel man with windshield glasses, you read the sports section! Footballs and running! Mascots! Not the bird, not the bird, but the color! There was a time when they were Indians, my friend, big chiefs on the plains. Tomahawk chop, they don’t mind, they make the money with lucky sevens. But someone did mind!

How did they learn to eat the acorns? The poison acorns! So much work. I wonder at it.

Oh! No! Mister Flannel McNewspaper! You leave, you left. You’re off to see the world. To Tressex! Or a Jamba delight! Turbo boosts in your banana berry smoothie. An extra boost for you, my friend. To Subway! Long bread and meats, and the smell with it! Subway sandwiches, the most consistent odor, around the world. Sandwich artists! Draw me a meal! Paint me a coke! Mr. Flannel, are you commissioning an artist? Pop art with pickles!

You are no student! No TA or prof! Are you an alum? A straggling alum? Leave! The good days, the old days, when you were young and covered in less flannel, when the golf karts had horses and the burros roamed free, when the net caught only fish, when Father Serra founded Old Union, when you saw them building of stucco and steel, are gone, and you with them, but in another five the tents will go up and the wine will pour again.