University Demolishes Kellum Same Way It Does Student Spirits: Slow and Steady

As Florida State University works to take down the remaining skeleton of the once not-so-great Kellum Hall, students have begun to make a connection between the building’s demolition and the degradation of their own spirits. Both are deteriorating slowly and painfully at the hands of the university. “I was really hoping for a quicker and more explosive demolition,” told sophomore Jake Alvarez who set up a lawn chair in anticipation of a quick bulldozing, but has now been sitting outside for months simultaneously getting sun poisoning and ‘F’s in all his classes. “As it’s dragged on I’ve really begun to see myself in this building. I see a structure that was so strong and hopeful when it first got here, but as it stands now, half dilapidated and hollow, I see me. I am Kellum.”

Much of the student population has begun to treat the construction zone as a dark pilgrimage of sorts, setting up tents and listening to “The Sound of Silence” by Simon and Garfunkel on repeat while burning anything they ever received in elementary, middle and high school that made them believe they were above average.

“I’m not special,” said senior biology major Kelly Ender while writing “demolish me” across her stomach in lambs’ blood. “I am nothing more than a hollow moldy building slowly but surely being picked away at by a bulldozer named John Thrasher. My spirit is to die with this building, but my mortal body will graduate and go on to move back in with my parents and work at a Jo-Ann Fabrics in Venice, Florida.”