Dear Abby,
Abby, you sexy omniscient bitch, I’m worried. My roommate hasn’t changed out of his robe for a week because—according to him— “Robespierre doesn’t wear peasant clothes.” He’s built a guillotine in the middle of our one-room double, all eleven feet high of solid oak and shining steel, and though I’ve never seen him use it, squirrel heads have been appearing under mysterious circumstances. I asked him about it, and he said, “They work for Kamala Harris. The squirrels are her army, and everybody knows she’s trying to spearhead another Thermidorian Reactoin. They brought this upon themselves.” Lately, he’s been looking at me suspiciously. He mentioned earlier this morning that “a true Jacobin would never wear Birkenstocks” before starting to polish the guillotine’s blade.
It’s not like this is all coming out of nowhere, though. It all started when he enrolled in MS&E 103—sort of a weird choice for a Political Science major, since normally he just pretends to understand what Congress is and claims he could solve the Israel-Palestine conflict if only he knew Cory Booker’s favorite soap scent. He once even petitioned Stern Dining to rename their couscous “Condoleezza Rice.” So when he signed up for a class that seemed to be some sort of crossover between vector calculus and woodshop, it was a little strange.
I didn’t really get suspicious until he started to build his midterm project—this was after the singing about bread and dreams and policemen. The project involved a lot of wood and rope, and at first I thought it was just an art-deco bird house or maybe a really bad boat. When I asked him what it was, though, all he would say was that it was “a tool for the Tribunal” or, sometimes, a “chop-chop machine”—this among mutterings about “filthy sans-culottes” and “traitorous Girondins”. Even when he started insisting that the reign of Terror was just misunderstood, I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. But when he put in the blade, the truth was just too obvious to ignore: he was building a guillotine.
I’m frightened, Abby. I’m worried that my roommate might decapitate me in my sleep and hoist my head on a pike in the name of glorious revolution and I don’t know what to do. Please, help me out.
Signed,
Monarchist Scum
