xvi

“I get by with a little help from my friends/Mmmm, gonna try with a little help from my friends/ooh, get high with a little help from my friends.”

      -The Beatles

            The lake is getting tired of our boat, as it skims the surface of the blackening water, creating creviced waves and steel-bleached foam from the prior stillness.

            We’ve been out on the river for hours now and my friends keep asking me whether I want to try wake-boarding, or surfing, or whatever unnatural plastic-board-aided activity they have planned next. They don’t seem to understand that I am perfectly content just sitting on this wet leather seat, watching the red sun fall over the distant shoreline, with them.

            This is one of the last times we will all be together, in one place. Already some are announcing their good-byes to Alaska or Pennsylvania or California with a handshake and a hug. Laughter and music push away the sadness for a moment but, coming back to my (finally cool) room after the long fourteen hours, I collapse and the teared significance rushes back to me.

            On the two peeling-paint doors in my room, I have carefully been taping hundreds of Walgreens-developed photos of the past four years, smiling faces and red-eyed grins watching me, watching over me, as I go to sleep each night. They are bending glossy snapshots of the most important years of my life. And they are all I have left.

It's almost as if I am back on the lake, the wake of the foamy water drifts behind our boat, returning to its normal sunset stillness seconds after we leave it.

xv

“Confucius say: Take out fortune before eating the cookie.”

                -Confucius (citation needed)

It is a Friday night and I am eating a late dinner at the new Chinese restaurant that opened up in the old Chinese shopping center. The soy-sauce and red-pepper hybrid from my meal still lurks in the corners of my rawed mouth and I can’t wait to leave. Signaling through my spiced tears to my Buddha-faced waitress, the illegibly scrawled character check comes.

Without a fortune cookie.

I have never been more upset, never been more Won-Ton-boiling-mad in my short eighteen-year-old-life.

            Without this hard, stale pastry of magic, how will I know how to live my pathetic life? It is impossible to survive unless I have the words of Wise Mystic #15, who crouches at the decades-old typewriter whose sole purpose in life is to guide me.

I can only imagine that it is early morning where is works, where he is being paid below minimum wage across the Asian-Zing brine of the Pacific Ocean, where he twirls his spiny fingers through his Everest beard, pulling words out of the well-worn dictionary and gently placing them onto laid-out thin red-lettered strips of paper.

But these red letters do not, cannot give me the comfort that I am promised with the opening of the plastic baggie.

All I am asking for is just one fortune cookie that says something along the lines of “Hello young one. Live your life according to these three easy steps and you will have great success in each and every aspect of your life. Domo arigato. ”

Is this so difficult, over-seas-fortune-cookie-company-CEO, employer of the Miyagi-typewriter-scribe? Do some research, find out my psychological insecurities, and guide my tomorrow, my week, my year. Lead the way to my ginger-bread destiny. I promise that I will follow your cookie crumbs through to the ends of the forests of soy-sauce-stained-napkins.

After I pay the check.

xiv

“Before everything else, getting ready is the secret to success.”

             -Henry Ford

            Fourteen minutes. It takes me fourteen minutes to get ready to go to bed. And I have not even taken out my stale contact lenses yet.

            I’m still not sure if I should be incredibly proud or deathly ashamed of this timefeat but, in any subjective case, fourteen minutes gives me a lot of time to think, with only the rasping of the Two-Minute-Gum-Care-Cycle on my electric toothbrush to keep me company and on target.

            Staring into the mirror is a scary thing. Because, sometimes, the guy staring back at you looks upset, or has nervous fear in his dark eyes, or is growing a noticeable pimple on his right cheek that hopefully goes away by tomorrow, or has a small tinged downturn in his Colgate-enhanced smile, or just looks lost.

            But fourteen minutes is more than enough time to work through all those problems. Fourteen minutes is long enough to animatedly lip-sync to 90’s boy bands, while giving a self-worth-riddled pep talk, while waiting for the acne-cleansing gunk to settle on the right cheek.

            Since I started working eight-hour days, this ritual has become my only time to myself. While I floss and thread through my metal-braced bottom teeth, I pray and I think, and I let the waves of grace, sink water, and zit cream wash right over me.

xiii

“Growing old is mandatory; growing up is optional.”

           -Chili Davis

            I watched a movie on VHS tape today for the first time in eight years. It was grainy, bad-quality, and I loved it. I still remembered the exact commercials, loud and flashing, that came before the movie itself, boasting arrival dates in the far-off future of dystopian 1994.

            I saw my childhood best friend today for the first time in eight years. It was awkward and I loved it. She legitimately hadn’t changed at all. Now I tower over her like the very adults that, a decade earlier, we would both look up to in awe.

            If this is what it feels like to be getting older, to be getting more mature with each passing day, to know that things are changing for the better, to know that things are changing for the worse, then I love it. Bring it on.

xii

"When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race."

           -H.G. Wells

            Every day, I ride my bicycle to work. Every day, it takes me about seven-and-a-half minutes from my sloping driveway to reach the already-rusting bike gate outside of the fitness center. Every day, I am able to listen to the same two-and-a-half songs before chaining the squeaking, bright red two-wheeler up. And, every day, those same two-and-a-half songs remind me of

            IV

The bike ride this morning is mechanically familiar,

duct tape on the parking levy scrapes the cement, waking me up, finally.

The brake is cautiously, lightly gripped by my freshly-showered hand,

plastic flecks of black engraining themselves against my slow-wrinkling palms.

The right pedal is slow to respond to my consistent plodding,

aware and disapproving of the hundred emotions drawing my attention away from the road.

The half-empty water bottle is swinging below me from its stainless steel frame,

aching to join the puddles of brothers littering the passing, freshly-watered pavement.

The nylon backpack jogging behind me is nearly empty,

save for the paperback copy of Tender Is the Night, which I will never finish, the one with the cover that fell off when I put it in the feathering front pocket,

its two painted lovers removed from their scripted Fitzgerald lives in sudden, sad finality.

And that unwelcome song suddenly escaping from my out-of-tune lips reminds me of

and I promise myself that I will never sing it again.

Until tomorrow.

           

Today it was raining on my way home, my lime-green polo gripping to the sweat on the three hairs on my upper-arm, suffocating me. I raced the raindrops down the sidewalk, egging them on with each click of the gears, with each muscle-straining pedal cycle. I raced the raindrops. And I won.

Belting out a song (that same song as yesterday) at the very top of my lungs (probably even louder because of the ear-buds crammed in my ears,) I cruise over the bumps in the fifteen-year-old cement, turning at red lights and crossing bustling four-way streets without paying heed to the screams of angry horns, without saying anything to the old Asian couple jogging past me, without thinking about anything except

Not telling.

xi

“In brightest day, in blackest night, no evil shall escape my sight. Let those who worship evil's might beware my power, Green Lantern's light.”

- Oath of the Lantern Ring

            After looking for my Senior Ring for the past month, I finally found it stuck in between the cell-phone/deodorant-stick vinyl pocket of my middle-school backpack. Call off the search parties, I guess.

            For some reason (I’m approaching Mordor, probably) it seems heavier than it was at the end of May, weighing down my right hand with its faux-metal engraving and fake semi-precious black rock. And after the end of the month, I will probably  never will wear this ring again, this staple of every outfit that I have worn since two long Decembers ago.

I

Childhood died that night,

warmly and calmly suffocated under black robes of Academia.

It was mourned for only a moment,

in between the flashing grins of family cameras and

the gulps of a warm, new air of

rebirth.

And I cried

unashamedly.

Through wet stains on my eyelashes

I remembered the boy I was,

eight years before,

thick glasses of naïveté

obscuring a framed world.

But now?

Now I could finally see.

            When I lost the ring at the start of the summer, I was distraught (big word.) I turned our poorly-air-conditioned house inside-out, flipping drawers filled with 90’s action figures and old poetry notebooks, under pillow cushions and carpet stains.

            I miss high school. I miss my forty brothers, the white-boards filled with formulas that I did not pay attention to, the familiarity of the compost-incense campus. I miss it all.

And I was so eager to leave. 

x


Sometimes being a brother is even better than being a superhero. 

-Marc Brown

            Today is my little brother’s fourteenth birthday. For the past three years or so, his age has been altered in conversation because, frankly, I forgot how old he was. The time-travel-DeLorean of my thoughts would rocket his age from 10 to 12 in a matter of three seconds of 88-miles-per-hour of forgetful pre-Alzheimer’s. And, for that, I apologize.

            Last year, instead of buying him a present, I wrote him a poem that I forgot (again, the Alzheimer’s) to give him:

                        Birthday

The July sun beats down on

cracked marble tiles

and the sound of tiny, Velcroed tennis shoes slapping

cool hospital floor

echoes through scurrying hallways,

sprinting up the stairs, sending shockwaves upon shockwaves

ricocheting ahead, signaling the newly-four-year-old’s arrival.

His faded freckled shirt

ripples with excitement,

an equally faded stuffed animal swung under his arm.

And the squeak of the door reflects

the squeal of surprise, the stuffed animal is thrown to the side because

the red, wrinkled bundle wrapped in the carefully ironed blue blanket

is a  new playmate,

the best kind.

This year he got Airsoft guns and movie tickets. I think he likes those better.

ix

"You never really learn to swear until you learn to drive."

-Author Unknown Let’s pretend it was me

            I am sitting in this bookstore on a Saturday night, surprisingly content to not be doing anything: no wild parties, no rushed text messages with their letters messerdr up and abrvtd, no screaming friends and rap-heavy mix CD's. It is just me, alone with the Muzak and the five other customers. And the books.

            For two hours I have been in this book store of price tags and wall-to-wall-carpeting, reveling in the mused silence of the words of Unknowns, with their self-published memoirs of hauntingly beautiful insignificance.

            I am alone in this foldable corner chair, with these books, with only myself, with the silent prayer that, at any moment, that girl will tell me to come see her, that there is something to this night other than the first editions and me and the cashier with the lip ring who is wondering why I am not purchasing anything, taunting him.

            And now, somehow, I get a phone call, even though I have no signal, and it is rushed and desperate, as if the weight of the world is resting on my attendance at this t-shirt casual get-together, as if the world will collapse in on its Atlas shoulders without my poor parking job and loud Paul McCartney music heralding my savioric arrival.

            So I rush. I rush in my father’s car. His car, white and sleek. And I am rushing. In his car. Past the red lights (and, once, the flash of a Big Brother picture post.) And I am rushing. Towards my largely-ignorable curfew. Towards something that I am missing in my Pinsky, Rumi, Heaney pick-ups, bagged and buckled-into the passenger seat of my father’s pristine leather.

            But as soon as I arrive, I am back in the car again, now with that girl next to me, in my father’s leather passenger seat, and she is pressed next to paperback Pinsky, Seamus stepped on, forgotten. Damnit. I shufflingly push the buttons on the radio, my father’s radio, nervous and tired, still searching. Damnit. And I hit the brakes after another wrong turn.

We are searching for something pointless, unimportant, trivial. But this is the most important night of our lives, of our week.  Because we will never again have this chance to blow off the responsibilities and promises that are digitally being reminded to us through curse-laden black, block, LCD letters and vibrating phones in cup-holders. Because we have less than a month until the nervousness of newness becomes physically apparent in our eyes and through our skin.

Because soon I will be sitting in a new, far-away book store, finding a better translation of the Great Esteemed Poet and Scribe Rumi, and she will be many highways away, and the Great Esteemed Poet and Scribe Rumi will remind us both through his sand-tanned beard:

Look as long as you can at the friend you love,


no matter whether that friend is moving away from you

or coming back toward you. 


viii

"There's never enough time to do all the nothing you want."

-Calvin and Hobbes

            Goddammit.

The air-conditioner is broken again. And, since God is in an especially-pissy-mood today at me, the power is out too. I come home from work, barely having time to adjust to the absence of the screaming of little sugar kids, and the sound of my thoughts startles me. The house is a sauna and the internet, television, and microwave are all empty and unresponsive.

But the downstairs hasn’t gotten as hot as its stair-cased separated counterpart yet (known in some social and cultural circles as "the upstairs floor".) So walking down the flight of carpeting from my stuffed bedroom to the living room is a strange shift from 100 degrees of red attic-escape to 79-and-rising degrees of photo albums and open windows. This is how I spend my Friday nights: up and down and up and down two sets of steps to judge the difference in home climate.

And, for once, I have time to think.

vii

“I reject your reality and substitute it with my own.”

-Adam Savage

            I’m home alone.

            My family is all at some genericprivateschoolbasketballfunction, where the only attendees are eighth graders, mom jeans, and my Junior Pre-Cal teacher. I should be calling up all my friends or using this time to write all the verses and paragraphs that have been stuck in my busy head for the past six months. Maybe even getting some real work done.

            But instead I’m flipping between Jersey Shore and Family Guy, using this precious time to slowly sink further and further into our living room’s ragged red recliner, away from the night of literary/social/root beer merit that I had planned in my badly-in-need-of-a-haircut-head.

            My excuse for not moving from the leather cushion sticking to my back, is that its too much of an effort. While I was at work today, my little brothers built a fort using my sheets in the living room. All over the living room. It took me a full five minutes to navigate my way past the carefully stacked pillows and the straight line of dinner table chairs. Like a responsible adult should.

            Well, fuck this shit.

            On my hands and knees, I find the main entrance (labeled in Christopher-colored pencil as “Main Entrance,”) and crawl into the Secret Rebel Base. I have taught my little brothers well: they’ve stored it with snacks and (my) (rare) (vintage) (expensive) comic books. I could live here forever.

            Adulthood is overrated. I’m just going to hide in my living room, slowly suffocating under blankets and sheets, waiting for someone to find me.

vi

"We all have a dinosaur deep within us just trying to get out."

-Colin Mochrie

"Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed."

-G.K. Chesterton

            I think the first multi-syllabic word I ever learn was Triceratops. Or Jesus. The jury is still out.

            In any case, dinosaurs ruled my four -and-a-half-year-old world and, for about a year, were the sole priority of my every day life. Of course, this translated into sneaking downstairs to watch Jurassic Park on VHS and bi-weekly visits to The Science Place in the far-off kingdom of Fair Park, my hands running up the fossil-encrusted staircase outside, stone-encased crustaceans basking in the Texas summer heat. I was an archeologist. I was an astronaut who found dinosaurs on Venus. I was Sam Neill with a bandana around my neck and a velociraptor claw dangling from my belt-loop.

As I said in the angsty, pen-soaked months of 2008:

Jurassic

This stale air is drastically different than your steam-drenched Eden,

isn’t it?

What once were billowing trees have been replaced by marbled pillars and

the comfortable, damp soil has changed into smooth, tiled linoleum.

And, after all these years, I don’t think you’ve adjusted.

Just look at you!

Your jowl is still clenched, captured in a final act of defiance and

you, scaled angel of Death, still have that

flaming sword, gripped between those gnarled, petrified fingers,

your empty eyes still

daring anyone to come nearer. But the

gummy-gaping four-and-a-half year old just can’t seem to hear your

roaring warning, still crawling its way through stony lungs and

his grimy hands will snatch your Apple of Knowledge.

            Today I went back to The Science Place, for the first time in over ten years, on a field trip with my anxious campers.  The wonder that I experienced over a decade prior was completely absent from their ten-year-old eyes, replaced with boredom and twitching joystuck thumbs.

The Powers That Be, in their white lab coats and spectacles, have changed the name to the much-more-official-sounding “The Museum of Nature and Science,” evoking Smithsonians and long hallways of wax prairie dioramas. TPTB have removed the prehistoric shells from the front-steps, polished and empty, now only crevices and grooves. TPTB have taken down the giant mural of brush-stroke illusions at the entrance, leaving only peeling egg-shell-white paint on the silent wall.

They’ve changed everything.

But the IMAX screen is still there, now falling apart in individual tiles, and still curving upwards to strained infinity. But the marble floor is still there, planets and constellations formed out of lines and circles, trampled on by Velcro, light-up feet. And the exhibits are still there, the old ones of the T-Rex, bubbles, and nose-blowing, hidden behind the new interactive shit that the “experts”, TPTB, have set out for this new generation, featuring Timmy Turner and Nokia sponsorships, hidden behind the new truths and virtual realities that are alien to me.

And so my childhood is all-but-forgotten. Extinct.

v

“Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.”

 -Rabindranath Tagore

I have decided to lie down on my front lawn’s itchy grass and watch the clouds float by and listen to the leaves whisper to their branches and trace their final fall to the ground. It might have been an unconscious rekindling of my inner-three-year-old’s flame, a brief, firm nod to a foggy past filled with finger paints and French fries. It might be just a quiet excuse to avoid the family or the television or the used textbook search and bask in something other than my room’s sole flickering lightbulb. All the same, the leaves continue to gossip behind my back, as they stroll along with the humid July air. But the clouds above are silent, wordlessly condemning the freefalls below them.

I gaze up at the blood, gold streaked sky, a stretching, private art gallery. Acting like an under-paid tour guide, my scuffed headphones begin to screech explanations, adding commentary to the panorama.  The Beatles chime in together, their haunting strains of static classics points out one cloud in particular.  

I smile when I see it. Fluttering away into the eternal corner of the pale red canvas is an enormous kite, its tail wagging in the celestial exhales. For the benefit of Mr. Kite…It’s the kite I lost when I was an anxious toddler, the splintered string had escaped the prison of my dirt stained hands and had flown off into the dusk…there will be a show tonight, on trampolines.

A rusting green car plummets down my street, shattering my thoughts. For a half-of-a-second, I wonder what the driver must have been thinking as he raced passed me, curled up on the soiled dirt, gawking stupidly into the heavens. And now my red-faced neighbor, taking her yapping dogs for their twilight walk, pantomimes her disapproval with her steps down the sidewalk. I smile and the music plays on:

As Mr. Kite flies through the ring, don't be late, John Lennon drones, performing his tricks without a sound…

The music fades for the briefest of moments and I find myself holding my breath, waiting for the next song to escape from the confines of the sky. The sun had set many sprinting minutes before but I am still lying on my back, grass clutching my sweatshirt, watching as the Man in the Moon rises into the evening sky, Mr. Kite passing directly under his cratered nose.

iv

“A man’s gotta do/what a man’s gotta do/don't plan the plan/if you can't follow through...”

-Dr. Horrible

Aunt Jemima is dead.

When starting a novel or a screenplay or a poem, any writer worth the MacBook Pro that he invariably types on will tell you that the first line is always the most important, drawing the gullible reader into a story of, probably, well-written half-lies. So, now that I have the attention of the global literate, let me carefully rephrase explain, with a few sentences of semi-truths: our family mini-van, the hunk of polished scrap metal known in used car lots as a 2001 Honda Odyssey and in my inner circle of friends as Aunt Jemima, the trusty, cranky 1900’s African-American housekeeper that chauffeurs me around the metroplex, has been donated to charity.

She blew her transistor before the first week of summer had even finished, while chugging down the dry roads towards Houston, quick-spewing steam bubbling out of a panicking hood. She just gave up.

I have been in three “accidents” (a word I use loosely) with Jemima by my side and her incredible top speed, my personal record was 97 miles-per-freaking-hour on a long stretch of highway on one Sunday morning. (The accidents and the speeding are not related.) She was my senior prom limo, my first hit-and-run vehicle, and only a slightly-better alternative to riding my bike down the HOV Lane for fifteen miles.

And now she is dead.

So, today, my mother had to drive me to work in her humid rental car, an alien-skull-shaped P.T. Cruiser, the grandest of all circus car ringmasters. But, again, it was a slightly-better alternative to riding my bike.

Shuffling my way from that three-ring death trap, I marched down the air-conditioned halls of the fitness center, pretending not to notice the clock loudly insisting my lateness from its perch on the bleak graypaint wall. Every morning before work, I stuff the same incredibly worn backpack into the same broken Locker #71 at the same slightly-tardy time of 9:07. And, every morning before work, I walk right past the coat rack, past the two permanent residences who hang from it: Mr. Windbreaker and Mr. Leather Jacket.

Crouching in one corner of the shelving unit, Mr. Windbreaker is still trapped in the eighties, the bruised purple, strobing blue, and neon white nylons clashing with one another to create the ultimate eyesore reminder of the worst decade in human history. He is the calm, silent, forgettable one; a piece of clothing that is stuffed into the back of the apartment closet and forgotten or, as he is here, a piece of clothing that is hung in a men’s locker room and then forgotten.

His companion, however, a certain Mr. L. Jacket, is proud, noble, and aging gracefully; the leather smells of a must consistent with the odors of a work-out facility, mixed with the eau of the Muzak speaker shouts. He is a pilot, a motor-cyclist, a cynical archeologist.

 I have already decided that, when the last day of my job finds its way onto my often ignored, basketball-themed calendar, mere days before I will leave my childhood home and subsequently be lost to my mother forever, I’m taking Leather Jacket off the rack and with me to my new life, leaving Windbreaker alone with the rattling lockers.

Looking back on my high school days, I have always been sort of a Windbreaker: calm, somewhat forgettable, out-of-place. I have too many regrets. To become a Leather Jacket would translate to forming myself into an impulsive person: someone who says what they are feeling, no matter how beautiful the girl is; someone who does not, will not, take “no” for an answer.

We’re buying a new car this week. I’ve been sending emails with links to Accord's and Camry's and Malibu's but my mother keeps coming back to the 2010 Honda Odyssey, Jemima’s younger sister. For my mother, the Japanese steel is both familiar and comfortable, while the leather interior, the cruise control, the back-up camera is bold, new, and different. Everything has its place, it seems. Even mini-vans.

On the night of the big heist, the final minutes of my summer employment, when I take Leather Jacket from his dusted hanger, I think will grab Mr. Windbreaker, too, before I storm out of the glassed double doors. Just for the hell of it. For the sake of familiarity. And for the sake of that small piece of bruised purple shyness still living inside me.

iii

"To be a successful father, there’s one absolute rule: when you have a kid, don’t look at it for the first two years."

-Ernest Hemmingway

            Due to forces out of my control (mostly sheer boredom), I have developed some truly nasty habits during the past few months, including (but definitely not limited to): slouching in chairs during meetings, staying up until early morning to write in falling-apart notebooks, and (the worst) texting during Mass.

            On nights like tonight, when I have to go to a later service than my family, I purposefully sit in the back corner of the church so that the screamingly-bright screen of my cell-phone draws the attention of the least number of people.  I am like a crack-addict roaming the shadows of the city’s graveled streets, shameful of his crippling malady. My streets, however, are the smooth faux-wood paneling of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton’s pews, my malady is the drug of constant communication, of uninterrupted contact with the outside secular.

            And tonight I was caught.  The little girl in the row in front of me, fidgeting between her parents, turned around halfway through the homily and, with wide, sad eyes, stared first at my phone and then at me, this criminal, this damned soul.

            For a second, I tried to make a silent excuse, my head and free hand bobbing idiotically, so sure of my innate innocence. But she continued to stare, her eyes, the same color as her dark blue hairpin, boring into my text-message-blackened soul, it seemed.

If I were her dad, I would quietly, deliberately drop whispers into her little girl ear, saying, “This is bad. Never do this.” And then I, as the responsible daddy, would turn around and focus on transubstantiation.

            When I am a father (I always say this as if it is a fact, a guaranteed future occurrence as true as “When I renew my driver’s license next week…” or “When I go to work in the morning…), I don’t know what I will do, say, or act in any given situation, emergency, or crisis. Unless there is some monster of a book, sacred, leather-bound, and pressed, that the tired nurse hands the equally-tired new father containing all of life’s secrets and step-by-step conversation installment guides, then, frankly, I’m screwed.

            But that is (maybe) years from now. I should be worrying about tomorrow, or the collared, putrid green shirt that I need to iron, or the spaghetti I need to heat up when I get home.

           

For right now, though, the least I can do is to put away my phone, which is still whinily vibrating incessantly against my tanned thigh, and listen to the words of the now-fourteen-minute-long homily. Maybe I’ll learn something, words of wisdom imparted from one Father to another.

ii

“The problem with writing about religion is that you run the risk of offending sincerely religious people, and then they come after you with machetes.”

-Dave Barry

“Doubt is a part of all religion. All the religious thinkers were doubters.”

-Isaac Bashevis Singer

            The cross in my room does not even have a Jesus on it.

Dark, gun-metal pewter likenesses of lambs, bibles, and doves frame a grimacing visage of St. Joseph at right angles, as he holds his gray flowers, draped in his silver cloak, clutching a blackened new-born something (Something, rather.) To me, it defeats the purpose of having a cross mounted on my stuccatoed wall at all. It merely provides impetus for the constantly quipping Evangelicals who worry about this goddamned saint-worshipper; the ones who disapprovingly shake their scraggly pointer-fingers at my kneeling body through cracks in my blinds.

My mother is worried that, just like every other newly-freed adult before me, I will lose my faith in college, like two quarters through a hole in my jean pocket. Since I am stereotypically leaving a generic private, single-sex school for a generic, impossibly-enormous state school, it can only logically follow that I will stereotypically leave every worn rosary bead and tattered prayer book behind me and, thus, stereotypically adopt an appropriately apathetic view of the world around me. And, for now at least, the evidence continues to pile on top of each other in squealing favor of this opinion.

She should not worry. My faith in something (Something) is secure. Last summer I battled this topic with myself, refusing any help from More or Marcel or Mohammed, and, by the end of August, was able to set out a course of my beliefs on a cheap piece of notebook paper. The tenants were few and simple:

1)   Life is complex.

2)   God created life.

3)   Love is more complex.

4)   God is love.

This was, of course, thought to be both profound and slightly hilarious by its author, a then-blossoming cynic of seventeen. However, a passing year has forced me to add one more tenant to the Commandments:

5)   Life is good. Love, not so much.

This next month, this first semester scares me. I am unsure, unprepared, and uncomfortable. I have spent eight years with those same forty boys, eight years sitting in the same kind of seventies-import chair. And, right now, the only things that are being carried over to my new life are my clothes, my books, my religion, and my sacrilegious pewter Joseph Cross already packed in a cardboard box, patiently waiting for me in a pocket of my room.

i

"When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me."

-1 Corinthians 13:11

The air-conditioner is broken. We are in the exact middle of another Texas July and the air-conditioner is fucking broken.

Yesterday was my eighteenth birthday, so I can officially now drop f-bombs onto my own little Japanese cities of wordclumps without having to endure hours of curt reprimanding from one, or both, of my graying, bickering parents. I suppose it is one of those things that come with this new territory of fresh adulthood, tagging along behind the quick steppings of the draft, lotto tickets, and cigars. This is my new set of privileges, tangible examples of maturity.

But I am not a mature person. And I do not consider myself an adult.

As of twenty-four hours ago, I became a laminated-card-carrying-member of the generation of Peter-Pan businessmen, wearing clumsy sports jackets over sarcastic screened t-shirts, collecting mint-condition cereal boxes and basketball cards from past lives, trying to hold onto a familiar yesterday.  And it is into this mindset of self-centeredness, of astounding egotism, that I am thrust headfirst towards my future.

And it is into this mindset that I thrive, selfishly and solitarily; a mindset that I adopt without hesitation, now that I have been effectively baptized in the waters of cheap cake and nylon-trapped helium. My life begins again.

So here I am, trapped in this heat of self-created technological failure, a personal Hell, a steady ninety-six degrees of uncomfortable. So here I am, sweat or tears (sweat) dripping down my face, still pockmarked by the battle-scars caused by black-headed bombs of the Great Acne War of 2008. So here I am, changing literary styles four different times in six different paragraphs, quoting Scripture and then cursing unapologetically two lines afterwards, creating a paradox solely for the all-important comfort of my cynical, often-socially-inappropriate spirit.

So here I am.