If you listen real carefully, someone up at the top of the UCSB ladder is popping open a bottle of bubbly.

Haven’t you heard? Next year’s crop of undergrads is the smartest — statistically at least — than the last influx of bookworms.

Arguably, this is a huge victory for the regents and those who want UCSB to, in time, reach the upper echelon of the UC hierarchy: UCLA and Cal. But for bottom feeders like myself that actually attend the school, I can’t say I’m too optimistic about the future of our booze-, sex- and drug-filled campus.

Two days before my 21st birthday, conventional wisdom among either my small following or even in the Nexus office believe that this would be the easiest column to write all year. Perhaps a trivial end to several years of underage boozing with an unblemished criminal record, including near MIPs in San Francisco and on DP. Maybe even an open invitation to my 21st birthday party (or not). The opportunities are endless — but I was instead inspired away from some liquor-related soliloquy this morning on the bike path.

This new breed of high GPAs and aesthetically pleasing SAT scores has also led to a bevy of intellectual snobs who don’t know how to operate in ways that normal human beings do. I was thrice almost ran off the path on a relatively non-crowded morning, even having left a little bit early to avoid sitting on the floor. So this is what we’re left with — book-smart textbook junkies who don’t understand basic concepts like staying on the right side when you’re riding slow on the path. Haven’t you ever driven on I-5 before? Half the kids who are on the bike paths these days hog the middle of the lane and wobble to and fro worse than I do trying to bike home after a few too many adult beverages.

Shame on your parents.

How stupid do you have to be to not look where you’re going before crossing a bike path, or the street for that matter? Last week we were driving behind two skateboarders for an entire block before they realized that they were preventing several cars from moving faster than 5 miles per hour. Things like getting out of the way of a large moving vehicle when it shadows your path is seemingly common knowledge. But if that’s too much, go take a physics class and find out when my truck traveling at 30 mph hits a skateboarder too oblivious to simply get out of the way. My parents always taught me to actually utilize that skinny thing holding my head up called a neck to survey my surroundings before moving. I swear I’ve almost hit the same kid rocking headphones in front of San Raf every other week.

Every tour group that comes through campus almost always meets the same fate: the front tire of my cruiser nearly avoiding some future Gaucho or their equally airheaded parent’s ass. It makes me start to doubt the future of UCSB when its potential students and their parents — who would presumably also be smart if their kid brandished a robust 4.0 in high school — fail to notice the little signs with the no walking symbols on the ground every 20 feet or so — not to mention the angry bikers that are swerving around them, mumbling random profanities. Or in my case, giving them the finger.

And no, parents and kiddies, flipping you the bird isn’t some sort of twisted UCSB way of saying, “Welcome to the University!” It means “Get the fuck off the bike path, assholes.”

So this is what we’ve been reduced to: a bunch of newbies with illustrious GPAs who probably are far more disastrous on the bike path than their equally uncoordinated predecessors. This is the future of our school that once had a unique experience unlike any other. It’s quite disgusting, in fact. What’s next, are they going teach classes on how to tap a keg or make a PB&J?

If I’ve learned anything in my two and a half years here, it’s that adversity is by far the most important thing I’ve taken out of school thus far. Being at work until anywhere between midnight and 5 a.m. on any given night during a week just to sustain a living, still pulling a 3.0 and logging a solid three nights of wetting my whistle a week is probably more significant than anything any class could teach.

In the meantime, go experience life. Go get tanked, learn how to ride a bike. Otherwise, I pledge to no longer get out of the way of you transportationally challenged folk. Butch (That’s my bike, after “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”) and I will run you and your intellectual ego over and laugh my ass all the way to the Study Hall.

And you’ll still be on your rear taking notes.

You should listen to Daily Nexus assistant opinion editor Sean Swaby — he’s kind of a big deal.