Ethan Goldberg

Wearing a newspaper hat at a jaunty angle, and sporting a virus making him “as sick as a million horses,” Ethan J. Goldberg sat down tentatively for what promised to be an unforgettable conversation.
“When are we doing this interview?” he demanded boisterously. He then thoughtfully proceeded before given a response, “I wonder what people think of me … ”
To which he was asked, “Well, how do you think of you?”
“Fantastically, I hold myself in the highest regard!”

And indeed he does, in the most modest of fashions, of course. Goldberg is the type of person reporters both dream and dread writing about. They dream because rarely do such intelligent, openly opinionated, and mysterious people exist to be written about; and they dread because they know their writing is doomed to be a lackluster dud in comparison to the cunning possessed by their subject.

One idea Goldberg produced was to state his name followed by an extensive catalog of descriptive words pertaining to him, and allow that to continue on for the articles 400–word entirety. To coin a popular phrase of Goldberg’s, “that’s ridiculous.”

But, in short, here are a few words to better acquaint you with him: Ethan J. Goldberg is idiosyncratic, candid, uninhibited, bizarre, sharp, amusing, willful and confident.

Goldberg is a series of contradictions. He will start classes at UC Santa Barbara in the fall where he plans to be a math major, however he intends to become a writer after college. Or to be exact, he intends to, “Become rich in a mysterious and borderline illegal fashion, the details of which I never fully disclose,” which we were led to believe had something to do with writing.

He is unique because he performs unimaginably difficult mathematical equations (that we can’t even pronounce, let alone spell) without breaking a sweat. Then, he turns around and just as easily writes ingenious stories, poems, essays and plays, the likes of which would leave Oscar Wilde and P. G. Wodehouse in awe and in desperate need of a dictionary.
A peer admiringly stated that he felt Goldberg’s goal was to lose as many people in his never–ending train of thought as possible. This holds some truth, but we are partially to blame since we simply can’t keep up.

Goldberg was not shy about stating that his greatest memory of high school was graduating from it (a tad premature, but we’ll let that go … hopefully as you read this he is walking across the stage, or at least scheduled to). As for what he learned from high school, he learned that he fucking hated high school.

If you feel that by reading this you don’t understand Goldberg any better than before, our mission has been accomplished. Just let your befuddlement at this article be a metaphor for your still unenlightened comprehension of Goldberg.

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• Ethan Goldberg