Life's a long song (to quote Jethro Tull)
Nearly every Friday night, the liquor would flow, the pizza would scald the roof of my mouth and the conversations ranged from the crude to the confessional. It rarely if ever qualified as a party, just a small gathering of friends alternately lauding and lamenting life.
It's a rare day here -- months and miles from those paleskin pow-wows -- when I don't feel an itch in the foot that thumps the gas pedal. If I could afford to flit back home each week, I almost certainly would. My duo of cell phones and the ever-present Internet keep my friends within reach, but sitting solo in a small apartment day after dispiriting day has become the new routine.
I had the astounding good fortune of meeting a woman also new to the area. We began dating, and grand hopes of romance took root. A sinister sequence of events has kept us from seeing each other for more than three weeks, and though I'm scared of ultimately being rejected, I remain hopeful that we'll soon resume our courtship.
Even with that tenuous bright spot blazing overhead, the absence of social interaction with close friends strains my spirit. Days off from work leave me feeling frantic. I rush to make some semblance of plans for the evening out of implied guilt; as the valuable time will only be wasted if I don't spend it in someone's company. When my scarce social options are exhausted, I'm dejected.
Maybe the best use of my overabundance of time would be an overdue return to creative writing. A novel manuscript is a better outlet for frustration than the liquor cabinet, though my fiction is forced and I'm rarely pleased with the results. Many aspiring authors write prolifically and fret about landing a publisher, but I have more faith in my copy editing and polished presentation than my prose. If I could just write something serviceable, I don't doubt I can pilot it into print.
My thoughts turn to death and dying more often than is normal or helpful for a young twentysomething. I'm afraid of dying, fearful of no longer existing, and creeping doubt has challenged my Christian faith. I'm reading an apologetics primer, law school-educated journalist Lee Strobel's "The Case for Christ." The book dispels many of the popular myths used to discredit the faith and asserts, with many footnotes and scholarly references, that the New Testament has more historical corroboration than any other significant work of antiquity.
The skeptics have their books, too, whole manuals and digests of doubt. Out of fairness and intellectual honesty, I'll read them as well. In the end, however, it's a matter of faith. The multitude of early manuscripts and painstakingly documented historical fidelity of the Bible can't conclusively prove God's existence any more than a philosopher's high-minded treatise on humanism can conclusively disprove it.
It's 7:30 p.m. on a Saturday night in the city where I now live and work, and I'm waiting for arrestee mugshots from the sheriff's office. I wish I were clinking glasses of absinthe with the usual suspects, trading sophomoric humor and clever coinages. With patience and persistence, I'll adapt to my new surroundings. I'll integrate myself.
If only because I have to.