A Cruel Joke Is Still a Joke

“Everything is plainly put, and everything is as it seems. There is nothing to be found here. It is vacuous.”

Jan 29, 2026

THE NEW CRITIC

Nadav Asal is a 21-year-old writer at the University of Connecticut where he studies Film and Video Production. He writes at Hummingbird Outlaw.

Memories of landmarks I’d passed years before on the drive thump against my chest like the rhythm of the road. Of all the pitiful things in this world, the past is the worst of them. I say, “Oh I remember this,” and then renege on that a minute later. I am frightened by every new bend in the road. Every hill I climb holds a promise that the campus will materialize before me. Every relief from that climb matches itself with an exhalation. I drove anxious, guessing, then exhaling for the last thirty minutes of the drive. Then I could not guess anymore. I hit the bridge next to the ramen shop and then the gas station, the diner, the record store where I burned the hundred-dollar bill my mother gave me strictly for emergencies. I hit the pizza shop on the road that led to the Wawa, within it a double pretzel and an Arnold Palmer. I drive through campus and hold myself steady. I feel I could rock out of that driver’s seat and through the car window, back through time onto the steps of the campus church. I promised myself I would not.

I pull into the driveway of an address I do not recognize. Standing outside the front door, I fiddle with my phone, hand over hand, and wonder if I should text or knock. Before I can make up my mind, Emmett runs around the corner and yells, “Wrong house, wrong house!” We sprint into each other’s embrace. It’s the tightest I’ve hugged someone in a long time.

We’ve not seen each other in four years. A hundred or so words sent over text, a handful of phone calls; we’ve kept each other alive somehow, and now we’re back here in the flesh. I’ve just returned. He never left.

Terry sits on his bed when I walk into the dorm that he and Emmett share. The idea that I could be unhappy that he didn’t come down to greet me with Emmett vanishes when I see his smile. He’s always been soft in his actions, softer in his words. He looks the same, older but the same.

One night, four years ago, I went to bed at 2 a.m. telling Terry to get some sleep and awoke at 8 a.m. to find him hunched over his computer playing Wizard101 in the same pose he had been in when I fell asleep. Four years later, I ask if his sleep schedule is any better. He says it’s improved, and Emmett agrees. On the floor of their cramped double is an axolotl tank. The school had fifty axolotls to give away after they shut down their research program. They’ve been shutting a lot of things down. Emmett tells me he feels like he’s on the last plane out of Vietnam. If his will be the last, mine was the first.

They fill in the gaps of my four-year absence; the school is in a financial tailspin, sending all of their money into the void. Part of that void is spent supporting a D3 hundred-and-forty-seven-person football team. The social scene is like a morgue, and it’s been that way since their sophomore year. Every piece of information I hear from them as I listen from atop Terry’s bed feels suspended from reality. The words are diaphanous, raking over me with names I know and places I’ve been, but all, even when a niggling remembrance hits, fade away as quickly as they arrive. I don’t need to know these names because I will never see these faces again. As they talk, I realize that my friends do not see each other all that often anymore. It’s not for any specific reason, there was no great falling out, they’re all still friends; they just don’t see each other. We saw each other daily during that first semester. That’s no longer the case. I realize I am assembling all of them into the same room for the first and last time since I left the school four years ago.

Forty minutes after they say they’re on their way Dean and Alice arrive. Alice took shelter in Terry and Dean and I’s room that first semester because her roommate was insane and would watch her change and steal her alcohol; she switched to a single in the basement halfway through the semester.

Sam is the last to show up. She gives me a great big hug and tells me she’s miserable, a good-natured lilt in her voice. A year ago, her house burnt down because of an electrical fire, and this year it flooded, the sprinkler system doing double its due diligence. Emmett pulls me out of the room after Sam tells me this to show the exposed wiring in the hallway. Biblical signs.

On a Friday night we go for a walk, it is dead silent. We do not see a soul.

We play pool in the common room. Four years has gotten the common room a brand new pool table and new cues. I lose all but one game of pool, too busy listening to my friends talk, trying to remember the rhythms of conversation, trying to lull myself back into the unfamiliar patterns. Come to think of it, they were probably doing the same. All their voices ring with notes of desperation, of exhaustion. I ask them about it. They tell me they should have transferred, and I tell them nothing seems to happen, and when it does it seems it’s forgotten by anything that could change it. They tell me the film club I founded disbanded under the administration’s repression and lack of interest in running the club. I tell them that at my new school I’m running a club that doesn’t exist because of that administrative pressure; to get anything done we’ve ducked out of the university’s purview. They sigh, glum. Everyone’s ready to leave, to get the hell out of the sinking ship I felt such an obligation to swim out to for one final visit.

I feel unspooled and uncouth. We walk around till I feel faint and say I need to go to bed. It is midnight. I have forgotten my contact lens solution and lens holders. Alice tells me her roommate may have some solution, and someone else suggests using bottle caps as lens holders which feels like a cruel trick from 5-Minute Crafts that I’m desperate enough to try.

Sitting on Alice’s floor, she begins to talk about how much she hates Taylor Swift as she rummages through her roommate’s toiletries. Her roommate will be back any second. The roommate arrives and tells me I look different. I say, “Four years.” She nods. Then the girl down the hall saunters in, and Alice finally asks her roommate where she keeps her contact lens solution, and the roommate says, “Alice, I don’t wear contacts. I never have.” Alice is flabbergasted, and I burst into laughter because I’ve just waited 30 minutes for something that does not exist. I fall asleep on a big blow-up mattress next to the axolotl tank.

We eat our breakfast in the school’s only dining hall. Then coffee. As we walk across the campus, back to Terry and Emmett’s dorm, we see a roving band of guerrilla golfers hitting the ball through the trees and the bramble. Terry says it’s got to be like bocce ball. We had seen them on our way to breakfast, and now, two hours later, we see them still. They shake hands. I assume they must be finished for the day.

Four years is not a long time. Within half a year the people I call my friends will be graduating. They have no plans of returning. When I ask what they intend to do after college, they all tell me they’re looking at going back to school. No one wants to enter the workforce. Universities are failing institutions. They delivered classical education before the war, then the GI Bill turned them into job training, and now academic interests are corporate interests. An endowment, a measure of academic prestige and not just monetary prestige. Upward mobility has stagnated, and now the already rich, wealthy, and young ask why no one else is creating anything of note, when the poor simply cannot afford to. Where it was once commonplace to find a job and buy a home after graduation, now the median age of people buying homes is 59. A house; the benchmark of upward mobility, of having a place to grow and foster a community, is now exclusively reserved for the people who already have those very things.1

One of my friends confides that he’s only going to graduate school because he hopes by the time he’s out the recession will be over. The university I’ve transferred to in Connecticut has become a feeder school for the companies that fund them. Of students’ top fifteen employers, almost all are based in Connecticut. All receive state funding for employing state students, kickbacks for job training that these companies don’t need to pay for. Many of them are in healthcare insurance, far more are in weapons manufacturing.2 Majors slowly narrow as funding for sports widens; the stadiums are renovated while academic buildings are left to crumble. AI is pushed as a kind of non sequitur, a conclusion already decided upon. Most students are eager to use it (86% of university students report regularly using AI in their studies), and most universities are even more eager to push it.3 Universities are encouraging a completionist attitude to their students’ schoolwork which those students are more than happy to oblige.

Universities are still places to think and learn, but with each passing semester it becomes clear that the way these institutions want their students to think and learn has grown narrower. Fascistic goons mingle around, passing out pamphlets on the sin of abortion, yelling into their megaphones about the sin of homosexuality, while student organizers and protestors who speak through the same megaphone on genocide are written up in court for disrupting campus life. A year-and-a-half since the encampments, and despite overwhelming support in the form of mass student mobilization, nothing has changed.

The Powell Memorandum, a read that is as informative as it is chilling, explains most of this, detailing how the Chamber of Commerce must fund an academic right to combat the extreme leftists on campus who keep on protesting and getting things changed.4 They spell it out plainly: “The ultimate responsibility for intellectual integrity on the campus must remain on the administrations and faculties of our colleges and universities.” Written in 1971, it’s easy to read it and see how universities have been intentionally atomized, intentionally nucleated, till the people who control the universities can profit off them. The Powell Memorandum is the reason why, in my comparative economics class, we compare Keynesianism to Capitalism and not Capitalism to something that is not also capitalism.

A cruel joke is still a joke, and I still laugh because when one in three job listings are never actually hiring, what else can one do?5 These are problems for more colleges than just schools with 2,000 students. University operations were formally operations of communal governance. The students and the professors used to have enough weight to swing the hammer of policy on the nails as they saw fit.

At various points, “This is what you missed out on” finds itself in sardonic tones inside my friends mouths, and every time they are pointing to mediocrity. On Saturday I go to a party that starts at 10 p.m. and plays Semisonic’s “Closing Time” at 11:30. I have not missed much of anything. I get the sense that the only thing that has happened since I left has been a whole lot of noise and a whole lot of course correction. My friends used to drink till delirious, till they were so crazed they locked themselves in the basement and threatened to kill whoever came in. But they don’t do shots anymore. They don’t smoke till they can’t hear what’s being said to them. They’ve weaned off cigarettes onto vapes, or moved from vapes onto cigarettes. I only attended for one semester, so everyone is a vague form. Even the people I knew so well then are foreign to me now; they have lived lives I have had no part in. I watch from the sidelines running my own race. I’ve seen the same patterns in Connecticut: the lack of community, or lack of pride in the university for anything more than its sports team. Every professor I’ve talked to about the subject said Covid changed things, but the way I see it, Covid just let the semi-sapients who were responsible for pushing the Powell Memorandum decades after Powell’s death solidify a system that works education into profit.

On Sunday morning, I text the girl who I wasn’t friends with when I was on campus because she drew a portrait of me and swore it wasn’t a portrait of me when pressed about it. I text her because we’re friends now. I text her because, when between boyfriends, she’d drunk text me and ask me to visit.

We set out on a walk, and she tells me she’s changed her major from Studio Art to Art History because it means the jobs in the field of curation that she wants to work in will be the faintest glimmer more attainable. We follow two turkeys as they scamper around the campus. She’s spent four years on the East Coast and never seen turkeys before. She asks if I will drive her to Target, so she can do some shopping. I am only half-listening while I drive. I am making myself busy with comparing the Pennsylvania that I ran from to the Connecticut that I ran to. It is in size that they differ and not in character. I am a fan of neither of their rural areas, though this speaks more of me than of them. To reach the Target, we pass half a dozen strip malls with empty parking lots. I wonder if all those stores make ends meet, how often someone goes into a Mickey’s Supply Station when there’s an Ace Hardware just down the road. A joke about shoplifting makes her worried, and she begins to nervously flick her eyes at the checkout monitor that shows the video feed of the customer. Staring at the top of her head, the surveillance state in action. We leave, and she tries to get me to go on a short hike with her, but I just drive her home. I walk her to her house and shrug as she closes the door.

I do not want to be here. I am being gnawed at every second I spend here. It is not a violent gnaw, there are no marks on me; it is a buffeting wind that does not hammer but holds. I can feel myself trying to think thoughts that have no business being thought. More than strange, the experience is anti-hallucinatory. Everything is plainly put, and everything is as it seems. There is nothing to be found here. It is vacuous.

The pond that is the past will remain as disturbed as I left it. Its only impression on hindsight is vanity. Its only imprint on the future is mistaking the past for pride and not what it really is: a pendulum that does not swing. Its invalidity is a varicose reminder that what is for naught is what has already been done and that what is possible is perennial. I should not idolize, I should not love the past more than I love the future. I believe I will create the world I believe in. Returning showed me that what I’d lived through was neither profound or important. Instead what I felt was a resounding, hollow echo that told me what I had left behind would remain there in perpetuity. My old college will remain like a wart on my back that though benign, remains ugly: a reminder of the days that the past hoarded in its anxious, clutching claws.

I decide to leave after seeing her. It’s a decision that feels like it was made for me before I even make it. I leave as innocuously as I arrived, with the same tight hug and the same, “I love you.” Oftentimes I find myself harmless.

I send a farewell text as I walk to my car. A final call to say goodbye. Only one person responds. The rest are sleeping. It is two in the afternoon. I do not mind. I say goodbye to the one who responds. I finish my coffee. I say goodbye to the room that smells like an aquarium and goodbye to the axolotl in the tank. I get in the car and I drive. Oh well. J.D. Salinger also dropped out after one semester.