All Of Reality Found To Be At 14º Angle To Fire Pit Outside DOC Clubhouse

In a shocking announcement today, a team of Dartmouth mathematicians working from Kemeny Hall revealed that all of known reality — your life and our lives, the structures of the societies we flow into and out of, the cyclical death and rebirth of the environment, the music of the cosmic spheres and their orbits, and perhaps even the machinations of some power higher to all of us, yet coursing through us with a still, subtle strength — was in fact at a 14º angle to a fire pit outside of the DOC clubhouse. 

“After performing careful measurements, and affirming our methodology through both Euclidean and Newtonian proofs, with full respect to the uncertainties posed by Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, the conclusion was impossible to avoid,” said lead geometer Said Urabi at a hastily assembled press conference called near the fireplace. “The true up in the world is actually this fire pit outside of the DOC Clubhouse. It is straight up. Everything, measured in relation to that, is at a 14º angle.” 

Many were confused as to what this meant to them, and the ordered plane of existence they had previously known. Urabi tried to reassure the anxious masses, and this correspondent. “Previously, up was up, and sideways was sideways. This is no longer true. Up, as we previously thought it, is actually 14º from up, and sideways is 14º from sideways.” He helpfully demonstrated this new facet of universal truth with his hands. “This, right here, was what we thought was flat. But it’s not flat. This, 14º at an angle to that, is flat. Flat is not flat. It’s tilted.” 

In response to a question from a troubled student, Urabi acknowledged dissenters. 

“There are those who will say that flat is always flat, and up is always up. There are those who say there is no universal ‘up’ or ‘sideways,’ and that, in a sense, all of reality is at an angle to itself. There are even those who say that accepting the blind pronouncements of a mathematics department as a final testimony over the truth we know in our hearts is slavish devotion to the cruel excesses of logic, the pangs of mindless thrall to the decrees of so-called experts.  This is patently absurd. My critics haven’t even seen the firepit.  Shall we gaze into the crystalline garden of paradise, cry out ‘water, water’ and lose ourselves to an infinite degree of perspectives? Shall we stare into the vast nothingness, the emptiness that pervades not just the stars above us but our souls as well, and lose ourselves to that void? Shall we become like the spider, looking with eight eyes yet seeing with none, or like the mole, blind even in its crawling nakedness to the world it inhabits? Once more, to my critics, I say you couldn’t be 14º further from the truth.” 

– JR ’25