Souvenirs from College
My body felt horribly weak after an awful night of consumption. I sat on my balcony, paralyzed by the emptiness of the hangover. What had I done to myself? What had I done to my life?
A telephone call at noon brought me back to life and instructed me to turn on the radio. I didn't know my re-animator--didn't recognize her voice--light and sardonic--but I trusted her. I trusted her benevolent force and followed her command with more than listless obedience--love. Love for what she had done for me--her mysterious voice the oxygen in me.
The radio was playing a song from Disintegration. Disintegration is the best album of all time. And when Plainsong was finished, the voice took the airwaves and asked me if my arm was alright? She hoped it was alright. She was sorry for breaking it last night--and she hoped it, along with my dignity, would be ok.
I fell into my chair and listened, waiting for another clue from the radio. What had become of my life that night, May 3, 2008, when the air outside supported the shirt hanging onto my shoulders, but couldn't bolster the weight on my legs. How far had I fallen? The fall wasn't criminal, I knew that for certain. But now I was at the destination, that bottom, and not wanting to climb back up to the top. And I knew that, even if not criminal, it spat in the face of all things American. All things industrious. All things holy to my past and my estimation of manhood and where I would be--where I would go.
I sat on the balcony and let that serene emptiness collect in me, and, listening to the mourning doves and chickadees in the trees all around, stared up at the clouds slowly descending, and contemplated this new honesty, and what it would mean.
Had I become in four some-times-long,-some-times-short years, the brazen poet? When I walked down High Street, people looked at me and many times, I know, thought I was someone who had done something to deserve that confidence. Something to merit that charisma. Was he an actor? Was he in a band? What kinds of names did he store in his phone book? Among those he had slept with, who had been the ones who he'd worn a condom for? Those he had not?
Beer bottles shattering in an alley a block over presented the situation: You are a small speck in a big world, it said. The cause and effect of your life has little bearing on the rotation of the earth on its axis. You are anonymous behind a beard and big blue sunglasses, under the brim of a cap, sitting in the same sunlight that touches movers and shakers and liars and thieves, campaigning today in Indiana and North Carolina for the reins to the Grand Strategy, and the right to bomb the living fuck out of whomever they please under the blanket security of our sacred creation document. The same sunlight that has touched the Austrian businessman who imprisoned his daughter into a sex slave, chained to the basement wall behind the water heater, as her mother and siblings ate dinner on the floor above, naive to the twisted darkness ravaging their family's tree, sprung forth from the bloody dick of their patriarch, rejuvenated from the rape just performed. The same sunlight that brought the trees out of the earth--the same sunlight that abandoned the dinosaurs behind an enveloping cloud of choking dust. The sunlight that dried New Orleans, and burnt southern California.
The roar of a lawn mower. A car driving by. Alec appeared from the street with a new Rock'n'Roll hairdo. Another week flirting with alcohol poisoning. The celebration of life--of living--consummated with the splash of vomit poured into the toilet. And never cleaning up after the party, but letting the party become the life you lived in.
I haven't shaved in a month or more. College is over.
A telephone call at noon brought me back to life and instructed me to turn on the radio. I didn't know my re-animator--didn't recognize her voice--light and sardonic--but I trusted her. I trusted her benevolent force and followed her command with more than listless obedience--love. Love for what she had done for me--her mysterious voice the oxygen in me.
The radio was playing a song from Disintegration. Disintegration is the best album of all time. And when Plainsong was finished, the voice took the airwaves and asked me if my arm was alright? She hoped it was alright. She was sorry for breaking it last night--and she hoped it, along with my dignity, would be ok.
I fell into my chair and listened, waiting for another clue from the radio. What had become of my life that night, May 3, 2008, when the air outside supported the shirt hanging onto my shoulders, but couldn't bolster the weight on my legs. How far had I fallen? The fall wasn't criminal, I knew that for certain. But now I was at the destination, that bottom, and not wanting to climb back up to the top. And I knew that, even if not criminal, it spat in the face of all things American. All things industrious. All things holy to my past and my estimation of manhood and where I would be--where I would go.
I sat on the balcony and let that serene emptiness collect in me, and, listening to the mourning doves and chickadees in the trees all around, stared up at the clouds slowly descending, and contemplated this new honesty, and what it would mean.
Had I become in four some-times-long,-some-times-short years, the brazen poet? When I walked down High Street, people looked at me and many times, I know, thought I was someone who had done something to deserve that confidence. Something to merit that charisma. Was he an actor? Was he in a band? What kinds of names did he store in his phone book? Among those he had slept with, who had been the ones who he'd worn a condom for? Those he had not?
Beer bottles shattering in an alley a block over presented the situation: You are a small speck in a big world, it said. The cause and effect of your life has little bearing on the rotation of the earth on its axis. You are anonymous behind a beard and big blue sunglasses, under the brim of a cap, sitting in the same sunlight that touches movers and shakers and liars and thieves, campaigning today in Indiana and North Carolina for the reins to the Grand Strategy, and the right to bomb the living fuck out of whomever they please under the blanket security of our sacred creation document. The same sunlight that has touched the Austrian businessman who imprisoned his daughter into a sex slave, chained to the basement wall behind the water heater, as her mother and siblings ate dinner on the floor above, naive to the twisted darkness ravaging their family's tree, sprung forth from the bloody dick of their patriarch, rejuvenated from the rape just performed. The same sunlight that brought the trees out of the earth--the same sunlight that abandoned the dinosaurs behind an enveloping cloud of choking dust. The sunlight that dried New Orleans, and burnt southern California.
The roar of a lawn mower. A car driving by. Alec appeared from the street with a new Rock'n'Roll hairdo. Another week flirting with alcohol poisoning. The celebration of life--of living--consummated with the splash of vomit poured into the toilet. And never cleaning up after the party, but letting the party become the life you lived in.
I haven't shaved in a month or more. College is over.