“Fueled by Filth and Fury: The Misery Machine That is Stony Brook”
By Mike Imprixis
Written Oct. 31, 2005

`But I don't want to go among mad people,' Alice remarked. `Oh, you can't help that,' said the Cat: `we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.' `How do you know I'm mad?' said Alice. `You must be,' said the Cat, `or you wouldn't have come here.' -from Chapter 6 of “Alice in Wonderland

Everyone knows SUNY- Stony Brook is a miserable place. I’ve read the message board countless times. I attended the school continuously between the fall of 1997 and the fall of 2004, with only a break from May 2002 until May of 2004 to go to Dowling for a year of grad school in my ill-fated attempt to become a high school English teacher. I came back to Stony Brook for graduate school for the same reason a felon just released from prison throws a brick through a store front window. The Walls call you back. The prison no longer has to surround you to trap you and hold you. It seeps inside you like the cold dampness of a humid day in the winter.

But what makes this place so special to cause this level of misery? There’s nothing on the surface that ranks this place as particularly evil. It’s a parcel of land on the North Shore of Long Island bounded by a few major roadways and a railroad station. The food sucks, the dorms are substandard, there’s nothing to do, all complaints I’ve heard at other schools I’ve attended. At the University of Maryland at College Park, there was plenty to do if you were of drinking age and in a fraternity, otherwise you were relegated to watching the Midnight Movie at the Hoff and hanging out in the dorms with the other displaced New Yorkers while the Maryland kids raced home to Aberdeen or to Silver Spring to see their high school buddies on the weekends. Since I attended that school when I was under 21 and not savvy enough to procure a fake ID and not sheepish enough to join a fraternity, I can say I pretty much suffered the same fates as those of you living in the dorms now.

It’s something in the air, like a dark fog. You know what I’m talking about. You feel the heaviness in your chest when you walk to Javits. You feel the dread as you walk under the scaffolding of the Physics Building, knowing that the scaffolding isn’t there to do anything but prevent random debris from falling down and clobbering you through your head. You came to college so your mind could see the light of day but not literally.

Maybe Administration is corporatized and desensitized and dehumanized, deaf and dumb to the plight of the individual student. But this is 21st Century America. You order by the numbers at McDonald’s and God help you if you want your burger rare. So there’s nothing new under the sun here. And yet you can’t deny that Stony Brook just has this effect of burrowing into your mind, unleashing depression and mocking you all the same. It isn’t an organized evil, one seeking power to further its ends. It’s more like a force of nature that does what it does to feed and suckle and shit and sleep, like a mudslide or a forest fire or a drunken fraternity party. No mind, just wanting.

As Sherlock Holmes once said, "It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." I therefore believe that the nature of this evil, this darkness, this tear in the fabric of reality that exposes this school to such blackness and nihilistic malaise must be more that just the ordinary ennui that has become part and parcel of life in the 21st Century. It’s more than stripping away an identity from a body and replacing it with a number and a box for that body to think inside of. It’s more than just a poor excuse of a university with a reputation that it rides on the same way Aerosmith rides on its early albums and releases shit now just to keep the name of the band out there.

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

If you don’t believe in the supernatural, in angels and pixie dust and demons or even in Fox Mulder’s Reticulians and the Black Oil Invasion in December of 2012, reading further will be a waste of your time. I first started to believe in a supernatural explanation because of Holmesian deduction; what other explanation could there be for this amplification of rage and depression if the rational reasons are all gone? One guy a few years ago shot himself in the Staller Pit late at night and no one found him until 10 am the next day. Why?

Even worse, I knew another guy who came here and, after leaving, eventually ran to catch an evening train by smacking head first into it from the outside. I know everyone has demons and blaming a place flies in the face of reason but could it be possible Stony Brook might be as sentient as the Overlook Hotel? Maybe Jack Torrence knows.

Then one day, I didn’t just know it was there. I felt it there. “Heeeeeeeeere’s Johnny” and all that jazz. It made me angry and bitter and opened a door to an Inner Rage I didn’t know I had. It touched my heart and it did not like it.

I still talk to many of my old associates from my time spent in the Commuter Student Association while at Stony Brook. Jim Driscoll, former two-time President, has become a good friend and business partner. We’ve discussed the nature of this evil and he dubbed it the Evil Power Source. Jim Driscoll, whom we affectionately called the Village Atheist, also could not come up for a rational explanation for this force except to say it was evil. His highly skeptical mind couldn’t come up with anything better and I was shocked because I was hoping I was wrong.

We conjectured it was housed in the basement of Physics. I thought it might be shaped like an obelisk, like on the Superfriends episode in which the Legion of Doom went to obtain the source of all evil from the center of the Earth. From subsequent studies, I can say it is neither in the Physics Building nor shaped like an obelisk (Like Solomon Grundy knows what evil is shaped like; he’s a frickin’ zombie!)

In subsequent articles, I intend to talk about a lot of things. Many will be based on Stony Brook lore. Some will be based on my experiences there, while others based on stories I picked up from various sources. You’ll hear about The Guy, a guy who wore a black trench coat and fedora and told me and others these stories in the CSA Office. You’ll hear about the Janitor, revealed to exist in an issue of the Stony Brook Press from last semester, a man obsessed with bringing the 60s protests of Kent State to life in the new millennium. There are places like the Spider Closet, the Hellmouth, the Bridge to Nowhere, the Bamboo Forest and the Clearing. And I’ll tell you about life on the Outside, after leaving this place, and how some adjusted back to normalcy and how some just couldn’t.

Demoralization is not my goal. The Evil Power Source itself is nothing more than immature evil, the kind that feeds off the good and the pure until its belly is full and sleeps again. When food is available, it goes looking and when it is not, it rests. It does no more work than it should to cause the chaos it does. That kind of subjugating evil expends energy. This Evil Power Source however is slothful by nature.

In some ways, it is our fault for we do not realize that it feeds off what we bring to it. The Evil Power Source amplifies our angst, our rage, our feelings of helplessness. It gives these dark feelings the power boost they need to grow so that more chaos may ensue and it may feed more. Whether dormant or actively hunting though, nothing is ever the same after being in the presence of anything that is evil.

There’s hope. There’s hope because once we see the demons inside us, we can learn to cope with them and the Evil Power Source does allow us to do that. Fine, the land is tainted in darkness and, by extension, we also are. Down the road, when you’re gone from Stony Brook and basking in the light of the Outside, it’ll be up to you to realize what has happened and what has infected you. Evil thrives in ignorance. Hopefully, now you know that even though the deck might be stacked against you, you can make a choice to not feed the Dark Power Source and allow it to just lie dormant. You can know what’s happening to you and learn to live and learn from Stony Brook. Humans are the only animals on God’s green Earth that can overcome both their environment and their genetics and adapt to do great things.

Now that you know what you’re up against, adapt. Unless you like the idea of being eaten alive like a guest at a Hannibal Lecter dinner party.

If you want to know more about the Nature of Evil, visit your local library.