The infestation

Has something been bugging you lately? I’m sure you’ve noticed them around campus by now; there’s way more of them this year than ever before. You probably thought they were innocuous at first: just small, green, slow-moving annoyances that could never amount to anything. No, I’m not talking about the school’s recent deluge of p-froshes…. This column is about the treachery of the inchworm.

Ripped straight from the eighth circle of hell, these mini-demons (scientific name: Disgustus hideinyourhaira) can even seem cute the first time you see them. “Aww, look at the little guy squeejin’ his way along that leafypoo!” your retarded girlfriend might say. But she’s wrong—dead wrong. Those little f***ers are 100 percent evil. Dump her and find a girl who doesn’t fall for such cheap ploys or require a helmet.

I’ve been teaching the inchworms to do my bidding for ages, but it’s only this year that they’ve come out in full force. Now you’re probably thinking, “Devil, why bother training a million tiny soldiers of micro-evil when you can just drop a couple more Konys in Africa or Lehman brothers on Wall Street? Spawn a new Saddam and call it a day, dude.” But trust me, I know what I’m doing. The big guy in the sky isn’t the only one who works in mysterious ways, and that’s the magic of real evil: You never see it coming.

All great evil plots start small—hardly noticeable—then grow from there. Inchworms wouldn’t be half as big a problem today if the U.S. had switched to the metric system back in the ’70s, reducing the ruler’s base unit to a centimeter. But much like the federal deficit or women’s continued insistence on participating in politics, this nuisance has grown from a tiny issue into a big problem.

My worms were drawn to The Chronicle advertising department’s delicious mountains of wasted paper, so they set up their headquarters in the West Union building back in the fall. Then, in true evil genius fashion, they first tested their power on nearby vulnerable minority groups. With tons of worming, plenty of inching and a bit of biting paperwork, the territorial little buggers ran the LGBT and Mary Lou Williams centers out of their homes.

Inspired by their success, my inchworms moved on to divide and conquer bigger targets. This winter, before most people even noticed them, my army rocked the sacred bonding rituals of fraternities. They ate up all the kid-sized super-hero costumes. They laid larvae in the motors of buzzers purchased to give euro-trash haircuts to sheepish freshmen searching for a common identity. The worms chewed through everything, down to the smallest jigsaw pieces, preventing pledges from even doing puzzles together.

As these ubiquitous inchworms crawled over everything in their domain, they made it harder and harder to relax or even breath at this school. As a result, students now flee from our infested campus to enjoy themselves, even if that means dealing with more dangerous creatures out in the city, like poisonous spiders and Durhamites. There’s a small chance you’ll be robbed or killed, but at least out there you can have a drink in peace without worrying if one of those pests is creeping on your Solo cup.

The administration’s been trying to tell us that inchworms might make Duke a better place. “Sure they might be annoying now, but wait until everyone’s had time to adjust to them and they transform into beautiful bright butterflies. Then they’ll attract families choosing between here and the Ivies!” Did all the bike shops in Durham close or something? Because there are way too many retards walking around this school without their helmets. Inchworms never become butterflies. They just get bigger and s*** all over everything. Then, if they ever do metamorphasize, it’s not into butterflies—it’s into moths. They become dull nocturnal moths that get in your hair and swarm around any bright lights, dimming whatever semblance of fun remains on this campus at night.