Christopher DeLuca

Hello and welcome to this week’s column, the topic of which is grass. No, I don’t mean marijuana, but regular garden-variety grass (I still don’t mean marijuana). It’s the stuff we sit on, run on, and swim on (I’m looking at you land shark). It gives your dad something to care about besides football. It’s the perfect place to spread blankets for a picnic with the whole family, or spread legs for a picnic preferably without the whole family (this preference varies depending upon which side of the mason Dixon line you’re on). It provides vast open spaces of soft lush greenery, which we are told to keep off of by little yellow signs. It gives us a place to ponder the meaning of golf: top Freudian psychologists agree that it is the result of pent-up masochistic sexual tension, which manifests itself in extreme phallic aggression towards the testicles. It is pure unadulterated life rooted to the soil, selflessly preventing erosion. If humanity made first contact with life from another planet, doubtless our first question would be,

“Do you have grass where you come from?”

After a bit of somatic confusion about marijuana they would doubtlessly reply,

“Yes we do, and we love it!”

You could say that grass binds the galaxy together.

Why all the fuss over grass? Why bother talking about it if it will always be with us, right? Wrong. A worldwide crisis in grass in happening even as I write these words, a crisis so large that it can no longer be ignored. I am of course referring to the fact that much of the world’s grass is turning brown.

“Oh silly Stupid Guy,” you may say. “Grass always turns brown.”

Wrong again. Usually in Hempstead at this time of year the grass has been so frostbitten that it couldn’t even think about turning brown. Or perhaps I’m thinking of Siberia at any time of year. Regardless, big changes are happening to grass, which means they are happening to you too. The root reason (pun definitely intended) of these changes is global warming, the hit movie phenomena that has both viewers and critics raving (mad). True Fact: Roger Ebert now gives thumbs ups from the cockpit of a hypersonic rocket ship. He has it pointed at what he hopes is a distant grassy planet, but it’s probably just his wife.

Global warming is a serious issue as it is literally toasting our grass. If global warming continues at its current rate, we could well lose grass entirely, the universe’s most precious commodity. If our grass dies, what will hold our world together? Not only will countless millions of acres of land wash into the sea, but also your dad, stripped of his front lawn (no grass) and his football (no grass) may just have break down and start caring about your mom.

Now I’m not an investigative journalist or an environmental scientist, but I can only assume that Hofstra is directly responsible for global warming. I don’t see any solar panels on our acres of roof space, and certainly no grass planting program, just another Unispan that no one uses. From this shocking evidence alone I believe a prosecutor could easily convict Hofstra’s administration of heat crimes.

So what can you as a concerned citizen and student do in the face of such a disaster? Well for starters you could sprinkle grass seeds in President Rabinowitz’s underwear and stop paying tuition, and then go from there. Let us band together as one campus, one nation, one people, and save our grass. If we don’t do it, who will? Aliens? Yeah right, I hear they have a huge land shark problem.

I remember my roommates really loving this one, so I put it up as a good one in my memory, but man is this all over the place. Social commentary from a nineteen year old? Check. Cringy sex jokes? Check. Really long sentences? My God check. And who couldn’t get excited for the thirty year old at the time Land Shark reference? Indelible.

I watched the New York City pride parade yesterday, and got a few nice shots of celebration and joy. A great day. 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️

🌈🌈🌈

Over the long weekend I had the pleasure of visiting Sarah Lawrence College, an all around better school than Hofstra. Why, you may foolishly ask? Because they offer a seminar called “Lube It Up”, that’s why. Who doesn’t want to be a part of that? The only thing at Hofstra that comes close to being that slick is your local Dude-Guy’s hair, which is decidedly less appealing, especially in the current context.

However, this week’s column is not about Sarah Lawrence. Sure they have a beautiful campus, progressive classes, and a six-dollar buffet with everything from waffles you make yourself to real eggs, but what I really want to talk about is how I got there. Yes folks, I’m talking about the Long Island Railroad.

Everyone who goes to Hofstra has been on it, and if you haven’t there is a good chance you don’t go to New York City often, in which case you should stop being such a huge townie. But I digress. I don’t care what you do; your experience on the LIRR is always going to involve adventure. And by adventure I mean black holes of logic. Here’s how a typical LIRR riding day goes.

You’re all set to go, but for some reason you don’t have a ride (i.e. your car is in the shop, your roommate is away, and the cab is fifty dollars), so you take the blue beetle. After the pain in your ass subsides from being bounced two and a half feet in the air after every bump for twenty minutes, you quickly realize that you have to pee for much the same reason. So you waddle to the bathroom only to find that it’s closed after 1pm. Also, the train you were trying to catch departed five minutes ago, meaning you’ll have to wait almost an hour for the next one. For some reason, Hofstra decided it was in the best interest of their students to time the buses so that you always miss the train. So, squeezing your thighs and feeling like the victim of some elaborate Rabinowitzian conspiracy, you sit down to wait.

What happens in the time between when you sit down and when you get on the train largely depends on whether you’re in Minneola or Hempstead station. In these modern days, Hofstra is nice enough to send the blue beetle to Minneola. Nobody knows when, but if you’re lucky enough to stumble upon that magical time frame, you will doubtless spend your waiting period admiring the day, the people, and the surprising lack of chewing gum on the floor. If, however, you end up at Hempstead, not only will you wonder at the surprising amount of chewing gum on the floor, you will also see something weird. My first time at Hempstead station, I watched a full-grown man floss his teeth with his ticket for well over five minutes.

Finally you get on the train, and by this time you really have to pee. You sniff yourself after you sit at the window of a three-seater and no one sits next to you, then proceed to fall asleep. Later, you are invariably woken up by the automated stop announcer screaming, “Holis!” The auto announcer hates Holis, and every time he has to say it the fact just makes him angry. You can hear it in his voice. Holis must have done something awful to the auto announcer. I’d do an investigative report, but it’s probably some dirty Long Island Railroad secret and I’d end up getting whacked by the mob…come on pseudonym, protect me!

So anyway, you finally get off the train and rush to the public restroom in Penn Station. The stench is so overwhelming that it seems that of the thousands of people who use it daily, none of them hit the toilet, and so ends your odyssey. That is, until you have to come back.

Yet the Long Island Railroad needs our love, just like anything else. We need to care for it, nourish it, and push it on its way. Just a little something extra to make those wheels turn, to loosen those pumps, and to maybe make the auto announcer say a nice word or two about Holis. When you come right down to it, all the LIRR needs is a little lube.

Woof, I really loved run on sentences. Sounds like I was really stretching to find something to be pissed about. I had plenty of things, but I wasn’t touching the real stuff. “Rabinowitzian” is a reference to then Hofstra president Stuart Rabinowitz. The execution needs work, but I still like the concept of the “Holis” joke. The dude really does yell that stop and no others.