Finals at my university library, during which the smaller students, shrouded in pashmina, hulk in the corners of stairwells on the phone: “Mom-I-wanna-make-you-proud-but-I-can’t-do-it-anymore-I’m-dying,” calling their boyfriends and girlfriends saying, “I-know-you’re-in-Vermont-or-at-NYU-digging-into-your-own-hell-but-I-could-really-use-you-right-now.” In which knuckles rub eyes drip lashes upon pages that crinkle and make the girl to your right jump halfway out of her little chair because she too was just about to sleep, or, was just nodding off to some comforting, blanketlike thoughts of suicide, until you woke her up with your salacious page-turning. With your salamandrine handwriting leaking little notes all over everything, arrows slicing through facts about Ulysses that you just realized, upon a closer reading, were fiction and little six-and-a-half-point stars near certain econ terms that AREREALLYIMPORTANT. Meanwhile all of the gutsier crowd hover over the tampon disposal boxes in the bathrooms, snorting powdery pink constellations of Adderall, because they need to.

If Hunter S. Thompson had ever been to this library during the last week of the semester, he would’ve have revised all of his previously recorded thoughts about what it’s like to be in the depths of an ether binge. He would have thought maybe that he had exaggerated a little about the drug, if he saw the summation of all that is unholy, unnatural and impure manifested in the besweatpanted bodies of these attractive, ambitious young adults. One does expect, when one sees, for example, a pretty young Indian girl dangling from a noose she crafted out of her computer’s power cord and rigged between two stacks on the third floor, that one is in a surreal otherworld that could not possibly cost $50,000 to live in. One might, additionally, consider an unequivocal change of location, when one attempts to Shanghai a free outlet only to find that what one thought was an innocent sophomore sleeping beside it is really a Ritalin-fueled feral animal with all of its teeth filed to points and an irascible thirst for blood. Skeptics of this lifestyle have a point –– how can something so evolved as college result in this most absolute and complete degradation of human refinement?

The irony only increases when you realize you’re rightinthegoddamnmiddleofit. Watching the kid across from you try to splinter some form of insight about quantum physics from his ex-girlfriend-from-high-school’s Facebook profile, the photos of which he has cycled through three, no, four times, watching the coffee-smugglers steal clandestine contraband sips from the insides of their backpacks, watching the sorority table over there causing a whole whispery ruckus because Jessica’s computer is dying but Allie doesn’t want to share her charger even though Emma leant hers to Jess yesterday when this exact same fucking thing happened because Jess’s charger doesn’t fit into her tote bag –– you wonder what you look like. You wonder if the last few hammering bars of Tool’s “Forty Six & 2,” which you’ve been listening to without explanation on repeat for the past two weeks, are audible outside your headphones and if they’re going to be the lastgoddamnstraw for that guy quivering over Sylvia Plath at the next table over from yours. Is he going to hear that, and then will all of the dendrites of the nerves inside him spark the homicidal lust that has been lounging latent inside him since the very first day of class, when he first read that syllabus and when he first began dreading that final? Will he scale the table on all fours, wielding a Pilot Precise V4, a burning crucifix and pure, unbridled adrenaline, and arrive at your desk space to end you in the most neck-snapping of ways? Sodomy?

You’ve got to be on top of your game here. You’ve got to shake your little shoulders out and put your hood on or take it off and f’ing deal with this horrifying pastiche that is playing out before you, or else you’ll go down with it. So you shove a sandwich down your throat, while minding –– though not obsessively –– the maroon-blazered library employees meandering through the stacks, who hate sandwiches, and you wash it all down with a Red Bull which you’ve always thought tasted too much like gummy bear blood to be academically stimulating. In the inopportune silence between “Prison Sex” and “Sober,” you hear a brainmelting shriek from the cement stairwell not far from your table. Was she laughing or sobbing? Leaving or entering? Anthropology or engineering? And was she now splayed on one of the landings, comatose, being stepped over by the Ugg boots and Nike Dunks of those students too busy to stop and help? Doesn’t matter, you tell yourself, as the tachycardia takes hold. You’ve just spent the past four hours writing something that wasn’t assigned and that won’t be graded, and now it’s 11:00 p.m. on the goddamn dot, and you’ve got to make some serious headway on exiting the library for a cigarette.

• Coffee Break