It’s easy enough to overlook that Princeton has an extraordinary hard-working cleaning staff and grounds crew. By nature, their jobs are defined by normalcy; they are tasked with essentially “resetting” the campus to its perpetually photogenic state after the latest whatever has messed things up. Rarely should this be this more clear than in the wake of Princeton Halloween, where the student body straps to itself a great deal of shit to leave everywhere and chemically imbues itself with a heroic disregard for what it leaves everywhere. This particular year, I happened to find myself in a rare state of focus and clarity at the end of the night, and I decided I’d make a survey of the night’s leavings before the reset hit. What follows is a by no means exhaustive catalog of the detritus, damage, and general driftwood of campus post-Princeton Halloween 2012 (10/27), encountered by the author on his 4 AM walk from Terrace F. Club to Pyne Hall, from Pyne to the WaWa, and back to Pyne:

Discarded life preserver

Posters torn from Frist boards

Decapitated cigarette butt depository

Discarded yarn (powder blue)

Purple paper scrap

More yarn

Single tipped bike

Smashed tinfoil cap(?)

Wire with glittery stars, discarded in bushes

A black ribbon

Pile of corn stalks (origin unknown)

Paper cutout of witch silhouette with open safety pin affixed

More yarn

Single red feather

Tipped bike in Whitman archway

Whittled stick

Clear sounds of a postgame in Whitman set to Third Eye Blind’s “Jumper”

Aggressive make-out session in Pyne Courtyard, on a picnic table

T—— in a tiger onesie, bearing a Ziploc bag of corn muffins from a pair of local dancers.

Newly grown outcropping of mushrooms

Unopened Dannon yogurt sitting on curb

Single Under Armour sock

Explosive vomit (the noun; a main chunk deposit surrounded by Nickelodeon-style splatter)

Grey & white cat stalking something

Princeton Borough Police cruiser watching the Wa

Ring of vaguely costumed grad students completed by Wa gobbler cardboard cut-out.

“What theory of modality do you have according to which that is not the case?”, a sentence intoned jestingly by a bald grad student in suit.

Grad student vaguely dressed as Wolverine vaguely flirting with sole female grad student, in black dress & pirate hat.

Grad student in bowler hat

Grad student in toga

Nass business manager Andrew Sondern

Meatball shorti

Woman buying NJ Transit ticket

Pair of rabbits

Then I helped C—— carry her bike to her room on the third floor because she couldn’t get her bike lock to work and was afraid it would be stolen. On depositing the bike in her small single, regret set in almost immediately.

Then I ate my shorti and went to bed