Nikes. What you’re gonna need is Nikes. You’re gonna want to go to your nearest footwear store and buy a pair of elite running shoes, you know the ones, the ones with names like ‘Tsunami Escaper Poseidon Fucker 2000’ and ‘Energy Legs Trail Exploder’ and laces that will never come undone, never. Get to the store when it opens – most stores open at 9 a.m. Get there at 8:30 a.m. If you have a 9 a.m. lecture, skip it, and dump the unit because no one deserves to have a Monday morning lecture at 9 a.m. Don’t even sit down to eat breakfast, eat it in your car or on your bike or on foot or on your Segway (looking at you, UWA Segway girl), before or after you get your elite running shoes, whatever, doesn’t matter. But you are really gonna need breakfast. Don’t even think of skipping it. Cram some fried eggs and three sausages in a bun and slam it down, maybe sluice it with a Choc Chill too. Grab some raspberries or if your boss still hasn’t given you your paycheck, and you don’t have enough money for $7/punnet raspberries, have an orange instead. But just get a good helping of food in you. ‘Cause dude, campaign week starts tomorrow dude, and you’re going to need all the wholesomeness you can get, wholesome memes will only get you so far dude they’ll only get you so far.
Nikes. These are going to be needed for running from the infestation of people on campus until September 22 dressed mostly in green and red, but there’ll also be some flecks of yellow [fuck, sorry ISL about the yellow square on Friday] and bits of pink in there too. Do not approach these people. Do not let these people approach you. Why? Because these are not individuals, these are not autonomous individual students, but entities in a power-hungry hive cabal who have spent every waking hour of every day of many many months up until Monday, September 12 plotting the most connivingly genius plot to hunt you down and take your votes souls. I’ve been around. I’ve made it through five hunting seasons. FIVE. Not many can say that, but I can say it because it’s true. So take it from me, these people are worse than flesh-eating zombies. Just look at their profile pictures, and you’ll know I’m not wrong. You think you know it all because you saw Rec when you were 13? You don’t know shit.
So just hold five a moment. Sit down. Fold them hands over that lap. Listen.
Areas to avoid, hereafter referred to as ‘Pamphlet Extreme Rabid Infestation Locations’ (PERILs) are Reid Library underpass and Oak Lawn. You can find byways by skirting the ponds, taking not-often-trod staircases, plucking out your eyeballs and yo-yoing them to whatever lecture you’re supposed to be sitting in on. Beware of the ‘roving booth’ – a horrific monster bred in the most perverse depths of campaign wombs, the Uruk-hai of elections, which slides coyly through unfathomable shadows like a deepwater beast, nostrils flaring, scenting, always scenting, for young fresher blood. If you see a gutter in the pathway, slide into it and wriggle yourself towards your destination so as to be discreet. Carry some shrubbery on you at all times should you need to quickly disguise yourself as part of the botanical landscape. If the roving booth takes you, you are lost.
Okay, great. Good. We’re getting somewhere. But see it’s not just physical terrain you gotta be fretting yourself into manic insomnia tonight over. No, you gotta know how to defend yourself in the terrifying tracts of cyberspace too. Foucault 2.0 dude! Foucault 2.0!! Best way to do this is by just going ahead and not liking the new Facebook pages for STAR, with its kind of ‘exhausted moss’ colour scheme, and Launch, with its logo of a cutesy red rocket ship without a pilot oh my f**king god who the f**k is steering this thing there is no lil’ face, no lil’ person, no lil’ leader looking out the lil’ peephole window oh god are we empty vessels floating through a void of vast nothingness into an eternity of dying suns yes.
So maybe Launch are after the Nihilist meme subscriber vote, idk. A vastly under-appreciated demographic: I endorse this if it is so.
But if you by chance happen to accidentally like the Launch page, then you’re probably okay. Why? Because Launch admins are blocking people who post rap lyrics in the comments or would like to know more about the ‘Guild of Student Undergraduates’ that Launch Prez Candidate Wei mentions in her ~just dropped~ video (with campaign promises like better clubs, yada yada, smaller classes, yada yada, cross-the-board online lectures, yada yada yada but hey! What’s this? Online voting? That’s a newbie nugget there). And I mean that’s pretty alienating, that’s pretty silencing, that’s pretty controlling and suppressive but hey. At least these now individuals can consider themselves more protected than before from the Scourge of Guild Elections 2017. Besides, it seems to be just disgusting ex-STAR hacks so far who have been banished, so look – fairo.
No Facebook page yet for Left Action, or ISL. They are coming though. Take care.
Finally, as a last, for Pete’s sake, for Pete Derbyshire’s sake, DO NOT visit the new websites of the two major parties, do not do it, I’m pleading with you now, it’s not worth it, think of yourself, you have to put yourself first in these times, do it for your children, your children’s children, for god’s sake, don’t- … Oh.
Words by Kate Prendergast
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