Fish in a Barrell

The most widely read publication in Idaho

Those of you who attended BYU-Idaho are undoubtedly familiar with The Scroll, the university's "newspaper." This thing has always hurt me in many deep and personal ways, all four years of college. In fact, this thing was hurting me even before my mission when I did a semester as a freshman. That was probably the lowest point of my life because it was also the lowest point for my testimony. I was surrounded by all these Mormon teenagers and twentysomethings on all sides, and what I started with great enthusiasm quickly became abject misery. I thought I would find other Mormons like myself-- other Mormons who weren't country-music listening, tucked-in t-shirt wearing, a cappella choir enthusiasts. I envisioned Mormons who liked video games and The Simpsons and the films of Stanley Kubrick. Mormons who didn't think Dungeons and Dragons and Stephen King was on par with devil worship, and who could enjoy a nice cold Mountain Dew from time to time. I got this instead:

Actual photos from my wife's yearbook, circa 1999-2000

I look back now and realize how naive I really was. I'm not saying closet-nerd Mormons didn't exist, but they were far more rare than I imagined at the time. That freshman semester took place way back in 1999, in a time before Hot Topic and the ubiquitousness of the internet. When I was eighteen I always thought I was born too late; I figured I would have fit in better in the seventies or the eighties. I now realize that I was also born too early. I was living on the edge of the cultural takeover of pop culture by nerd/geek culture and I didn't even know it.

LARPers, circa 2010

You'd be hard-pressed to find a LARPer on campus in 1999, but when my wife and I moved back to Rexburg in 2010 there were LARPers battling it out in the quad. I'm not saying the khaki-wearing sports-worshiping douches are gone, but they're not as prevalent. There are now board game clubs, anime clubs, video game competitions, and a bona-fide board game store where people play Magic: The Gathering on Friday nights. Yes, this stuff is actually more geeky than anything I was into at age eighteen, but it's proof that things have changed quite a bit.

The Scroll factors into all this because when I eighteen and on the brink of personal disaster, I saw it at the embodiment of young LDS culture. Its opinions, its articles and its comic strips all painted a picture of what it meant to be Mormon and a BYU student. The articles were horrendously stupid, the opinions were usually half-baked and borderline senile, and the cartoons usually made me want to take a shotgun to anything living and subsequently end that living thing's life.

I hated The Scroll for everything that it represented.

Serving a mission in New York City transformed me from an idealistic but spiritually crushed eighteen year old into an semi-world-weary but emotionally mature twenty one year old, and by the time I returned to college to complete my freshman year The Scroll lost most of its power over me. By then my testimony was starting to become firm, and I started to understand that some people were just retarded and couldn't help it.

This didn't lessen the intense bouts of rage that would overcome me when inevitably reading The Scroll, but it did lessen the damage it could do to my faith.

Now I've returned to Rexburg after a four year absence, and subsequently The Scroll is back in my life. I've decided to do something constructive with the rage that still comes from reading it and write my own commentaries on its ridiculous articles and stories. I do this in an effort to heal the world and to let any fellow young Mormons out there know that they are not alone.

Some of you may say, "Hey! Aren't you a little bit too old to be making fun of some crappy student-run newspaper from your old college? Wouldn't a better person just ignore the stupid little newspaper and go on being an adult?"


The answer to that is, "Probably." But you know what? The articles, ideas, opinions and views expressed in The Scroll represent more than just adolescent inanity. Sure, you could say that making fun of The Scroll is like going to the Special Olympics to scoff at the high functioning retards... But the difference is that the high functioning retards featured in the pages of The Scroll are all going to go on to become the future leaders of our church. Do you understand that? These men and women are going to graduate, become dentists and dental assistants, have families, buy big effing houses and cars and boats, and become bishops and Relief Society presidents and so forth.

Future bishopric member

So basically I'm a hero for making fun of them.

But enough of this. I'll let The Scroll speak for itself. The inaugural article I'd like to post is a bit of a classic to me. It ran sometime during my college years, and it epitomizes everything about Rexburg in just a few inches of text. Every week The Scroll runs what it calls "The Police Scene," or basically every phone call the local police department received that week while they weren't busy handing out speeding tickets to people going twenty seven miles per hour or making out in a public park.


Here it is. Bask in its wonder:

I promise you this is unedited.

Special thanks to my sister for making a bookmark out of this for me which is why I've been able to keep it all these years. Of course these are all worthy of their own little movies, but really nothing could ever been item number sixteen on that list. Two simple words and yet, what a mystery! What was that call about? Why did the editors of The Scroll see fit to include it on their list? How did everyone go on with their lives after such a horrifying incident?