Reading Sucks; Smoke Some Crack Instead

Just like every other child in America, I was duped into believing that reading would actually make my life better. All that time I spent reading I could have been playing video games or covering my knees with my T-shirt, collecting farts. Anything would have been better than the colossal waste of time I spent behind a book. It wasn't until I came to UNC to receive my higher education that the reality of the situation slapped me in the face.

Attending a liberal arts school taught me that most of what we perceive as reality isn't really reality. I learned this through terms like "assimilation" and "globalization" and a bunch of other big words that escape my mind. Most things that appear good for us are actually very bad for us.

Except for drinking. This appears good for us, and it is. The majority of good things, however, come from progress, and progress is the work of the devil. Let me explain.

Take, for example, agriculture. Prior to the inception of this evil, people ate nuts and berries and killed stuff with their hands and pointy sticks.

Then we started producing more food than we needed, and soon after we had slavery and property disputes. And look where it's gotten to from there: we bust our butts in school to prepare for a long, painstaking "career" of working for The Man. I think I learned this in Anth 10.

This same type of thing happened with reading. One cave person was chilling out in the cave with another cave person when the first cave person wanted the second cave person to pass the remote control. Naturally the second cave person acted like he didn't know what the first cave person meant by the hand signals. The first cave person yelled angrily, "If you don't give me the remote control, I'm going to kick you in the nards."

Still wanting to keep the remote, the second cave person pretended to be deaf. Finally, the first cave person drew a sequence of scenes depicting the first cave person stabbing the second cave person in the leg, stealing his FUBU pullover and then the final straw -- taking his Bud Light. The first cave person got the message and gave the second cave person the remote.

This symbolic form of written language quickly transformed into alphabet-based written language that we know today. This invention was immediately followed by the first editions of CosmoGIRL! and Penthouse Forum. In fact, you can find articles on "How to Make that Special Guy Jealous with a Firmer Butt" scrawled in caveman gibberish on a cave wall in southern France.

This all seemed well and good at the time, but look at the results. Today I find myself faced with the daunting task of writing a 12-page single-spaced paper in one night. Reading, just like most other forms of "progress," has actually accelerated mankind's demise.

I realize that many of you out there object to this argument. You say you enjoy reading for fun. Let me just remind you that there are other "fun" activities in life, such as smoking crack or eating entire cartons of ice cream in one sitting.

But fun doesn't make these activities beneficial for everyone in the long term, and I contend that the same applies to reading. Reading is a sickness that adds undue stress to all of our lives. Without reading, we would have no book reports to write or tax forms to complete; we would have no parking tickets to tear up or instruction manuals to curse. Life would be simple, as it was meant to be.

In the immortal words that John Lennon always meant to say:

Imagine there's no reading
I wonder if you can
No quizzes or term papers
Life without a plan
Imagine all the people
Watching television instead
You might say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope some day we all have cable
And the world can live as one.

Ben Dickens would like to thank everyone who has written him with comments this semester. He also thanks anyone who has helped him put his sloppy thoughts on paper. He can be reached at bdickens@email.unc.edu for the next six months, after which he can be found living out of the back of his car at the Harris Teeter parking lot on N.C. 54.