A cockroach inspired me, in a drunken craze, to wash out Homecoming with a lyrical haze

Happy Halloween ghoulish readers. This was a long, strange week. I say strange because of what happened to me Wednesday night. I returned from harvest dinner at Barnard to East Campus to find a bowl of delicious Halloween candy in the lobby. With candy in hand, I went back to my room to write this column. When I sat down in my chair, I got light-headed and my vision got all hazy. What happened next is still a mystery to me, as I don’t know if it was a dream or not. This occurrence was so strange that I asked my girlfriend Emily to make sense of my insane ramblings, and this is what we got:

A heaviness settled upon my heart
As if I knew the game was lost from the start.
I stared at my keyboard and while my head
Filled with thoughts of the future and an impending dread,
And as my Columbia hopes fell to the floor
I heard a strange knocking at the door,
A rap and nothing more.

Recalling back it seems surreal
Masked by a haze of too much beer.
The October leaves were still floating to the ground
Trampled by the footsteps of the imposing crowd.
The stands erupted with every score
As the Lions’ lead grew to four,
Would it stay evermore?
The synthetic, sad, uncertain rustling
Of the blinds the wind had set a-bustling
Chilled me—though I stood repeating
It’s just my suitemate, late entreating,
Knocking hard upon my bedroom door.
Yes, just him knocking upon my door.
This it is and nothing more.

Then a knock so hard I stood
For a creature to make that knock could not be good.
To the knob I reached out my arm when it wriggled,
Wrestling from beneath my door it squiggled
Right to the econ book upon my floor.
A roach it was, sitting on the book upon my floor,
Pretty gross, that’s for sure.

This peculiar roach could not help beguiling
Me, the sad fan, into smiling.
I sat back down and my head did scratch,
Wondering to this roach what purpose to attach
And such mullings brought me back to the game’s final score,
And if CU again would win like before,
Quoth the roach, “Lions roar.”

It struck me as queer such a creature to hear
As a roach with the power of my thoughts to steer.
Though arbitrary and strange a purpose there maybe
For a roach to come like this and talk to me.
As if it knew my thoughts, again it was upon the floor
And scuttled back beneath my door
The last I heard, “Lions roar.”

This “encounter” was by far the craziest thing to ever happen, or not happen, to me. My initial reaction was to put on my shoes and head to the hospital, as I was probably going insane. I didn’t go to the nearest psychiatrist because I couldn’t help but think that maybe there was some significance behind the visit from the terrifying, mutant New York City cockroach. What I learned is what to make of Columbia’s upcoming matchup against Yale.

This may sound like the same old crap, but this next game against Yale is an important one. Up until now, the Lions have not handled important games well. The loss to Penn, for all intents and purposes, ended Columbia’s Ivy title hopes. The loss to Dartmouth appeared to be a return to the old ways for Columbia football and put it in the bottom half of the Ivy League standings. This pattern has to change against Yale because, as fellow columnist Lucas Shaw pointed out on Wednesday, Columbia needs to learn out how to win games. More specifically, the Lions, if they ever hope to be a real contender for the title, must figure out how to grind out wins in situations that aren’t completely in their favor. The first step in this learning process is the game against Yale. Finish the season strong, and show us, the Columbia fans, that the Lions don’t go out with a whimper but with a roar.