CHAPEL HILL, NC–Luxuriating in a loose-fitting white shirt and sandals in a dim, hazy corner of the Chi Psi lodge, student body president candidate Andrew Powell told a small gathering of invited press that his visions for the future of UNC are “stronger and more real” than ever before. Powell credited his invigorated imagination to recent visitations with Gary Waterfall, a Huichol medicine man based in Carrboro.
“The only way to lead this university into the 21st century is with a bold, fearless vision, and that’s exactly what I offer as a candidate for student body president,” said Powell, his eyes fixed on a distant horizon. “The colors are bolder than mere photons. How can one fear without edges?”
Powell’s campaign managers said that, after the excitement of narrowly making a run-off election with Emilio Vicente last Tuesday, their candidate experienced a period of deep mental and emotional fatigue. Feeling disoriented and losing confidence in his ideas, Powell came on a desperate and sleepless night to the fold-down doorstep of Gary Waterfall’s Winnebago, where the 54 year-old indigenous healer lives in an alley near the Burger King restaurant on Jones Ferry Road.
Seeing the distraught Powell, the medicine man wordlessly donned a beaded sombrero symbolic of his mystical powers and led the prep school graduate into the tarp-covered sweat lodge adjacent to his mobile home. Waterfall instructed Powell to remove his zip-neck sweater as he heated ceremonial coals and prepared a dark, pungent tea, commencing a sacred and mysterious Huichol ritual. At sunrise, Powell emerged from the hut with serenity in his heart and a neoteric vision for UNC’s future in his mind.
“Last week we were deep in the river. This week is just the runoff,” Powell said to reporters as he ran his hands back through his hair, leaning his head against the Huichol yarn painting on the wall behind him and lowering his eyelids. “Oh, recursive regularity of the elective. Same, same, year after year, until eternity. Infinity plus one is still infinity – am I the insignificant one?”
Powell said that, since his first encounter with Waterfall, he has returned several times to seek the medicine man’s transcendental wisdom, and that Waterfall has also provided him with the necessary ingredients to “take spirit excursions of [his] own guidance.” He expounded upon the visions that he said have inspired his platform anew.
“Tuition is skyrocketing up, the sky is a rocket in blue indigo, but I have seen where the sky is a void below, and the sky cost rockets down, down, down,” he said. “We only liberate our perspective and flip the reference frame. When we flip the classroom, lecture time is free and lectures are a jaguar that is free to be an eagle soaring on the jet stream of time, ex-panding concepts through students’ perspectives which take flight of their own through the digital. The eagle whispered it in dancing colors. Face-to-face innovates, and creates, but the faces change shapes and melt inward, so that students’ and professors’ senses sense their own sense of reality, but connected, their face features stay on the skull outward and thats the key, connected, skeleton keys to the infinite. We flip ten courses, and then 100, 1000–UNC leads the model geometrically on the domain of all UNC system schools. We proactivate the first step and step through the plane of the finite sphere to the Riemann space, thriving from change over suffering, 72% on average. Registration in a deeper register. The meta-analysis is streaming, and the lectures.”
“God, I could see it,” he said.
After pausing to stare blankly at his palms and ask one reporter if she “would take his shoes as payment,” Powell smiled and slowly nodded, adding that he has also experienced a vision for the intended organization of his executive cabinet.
“I just finished talking to Meshkoul,” Powell said, “and he congratulated me on my success in the election thus far but also intoned with furrowed brow that today’s student government is not optimized for results. An example? Not even Satan can effectively manage the 35 different chairs and co-chairs. Then his voice dropped to a subsonic octave, where he had left a streamlined organization, one with a matrix organizational model that is favored by leading startups, and mandated listening tours for all the underground run-hitters, without re-making mistakes consistently made by new staff. Every existing student government committee, with the exception of Greek Affairs, is nested diagonally in the matrix on four cross-cutting Powell-Aids that will both aid committees on infinitives as well as host articles of their own. With streamlined structure as a backdrop, 2014-2015 proceeds as follows: streamline, streamline, streamline. Follow the flagship, and the new structure is topologically continuous with the present. I tried to scream, but it took on a whole new meaning that tasted horrible.”
Around campus, students have responded positively to Powell’s visions as he continues to gain ground on Vicente.
“In a candidate for student body president, having a vision for the university is the most important thing, no question,” said sophomore Lindsey Reader. “When I saw Andrew naked in the arboretum, singing that we had to ‘uproot the iniquity tree eating the quad,’ I knew that he was having stronger visions than anyone else.”
Asked about his plans for the remainder of his campaign, Powell said that he would focus on “becoming one” with the student body, a process he described as nearly complete. He added that, if he is elected, Gary Waterfall will be his first choice for vice president.
“‘Warden’ is ‘Andrew’ rearranged,” he added. “I am the Warden of Change.”
The Minor 