#317

This is one of those posts written on the cusp of something, a border post, overlooking uncharted lands. Often, these posts are the final post before the blank, terrifying void of a hiatus, but pray with me, dear reader: this cusp is different. This cusp, this cusp right here? This is the cusp of heretofore unprecedented productivity, the cusp of rich, thick, ambrosial bounty.

When it was time for me, as a newly minted adult, to attend a four-year college, well, I didn't feel like doing that. What I wanted to do was ingest a bunch of drugs, drink till I went fucking blind, and smoke enough cigarettes to sound like Tom Waits. Wanted to work and earn only enough to pay a small rent and support my habits, at a restaurant or other food place so that I could mostly eat for free, and write. Also, play music on my bass guitar.

Also, die. This last wish went unexpressed, but was really the head of the pack. Funny how psychology works.

Over ten years and many adventures later, it is time to concede and accept that I did not die, and that the many reasons I gave and feelings I felt that prevented me from continuing my education and taking up a post in society that befits a whole and balanced individual were fabricated from that tempestuous mix of bloated arrogance, particular traumas, and corrosive self-hate that defined my tender youth. However, life has worked upon me, and I am a different man, a man that has been to the brink, back to the beginning, and ready for a new adventure. So on Monday, I go back to school, at the community college, and later, when I am done, I will secure work as a teacher. My feeling is that my experiences and skillsets will serve me very well in this endeavor, to which I feel unmistakably called.

Indeed, having withstood what I have withstood, and dealt with what I have dealt with, the idea of being derailed in my academic endeavors by what once derailed me is laughable. Once, I stopped attending a class because the teacher didn't deal with a student in a way I felt the situation called for. This other student stole about twenty minutes of class time from the rest of us because she could not see, and had to be informed, how understanding Nietzsche was supposed to help her with her business degree*. She hijacked the class, coarsely and witlessly, I might add, which incensed me greatly. After the allotted time had passed, I wanted to talk to the teacher about why that had been allowed. The man fled from me, literally, avoiding my eye, brushing past me, and exiting the building at such a rapid clip that I would have had to jog to catch up. Before this, I had liked and respected this teacher enough to have quite a bit of enthusiasm for his class. 

That's it. No more. An autodidact is all that I can be. It's all that I ought to be. I will not be taught by that kind of coward, I told myself, and left school; forever, I thought. 

Don't get me wrong; I love and live for being an autodidact. My only reservation about this process as I embark upon it is a reduction in the time I will have to pursue my own academic interest wholly unencumbered by outside demands from an actual academy. But on the balance, I believe it will only serve me to double my demands. No longer do I fear I lack the bandwidth to pursue my own interests and others at the same time. My time in the service industry and other brute workforces has taught me otherwise. Disengaging myself from various social and material pressures unique to the young and drug-addled has also broadened my perspectives tremendously.

For example, I have come to understand various hows and whys as related to that teacher allowing that sincerely idiotic individual to do as she did, and his subsequent ignominious behavior. It's not how I hope to comport myself if similarly tested, but yeah, I get it. We all have rights, and boundaries, and rights to our boundaries, and this creates untenable situations sometimes. So it goes.

Guess another basic worry is money and will we have enough, but that's never bothered me too much. This attitude, I believe, has kept me relatively unwrinkled and spry in the step, albeit light in the wallet, so I shall continue with this policy and hope it continues to serve me in more or less tolerable stead.

--JL

*this avenue of inquiry still repulses me viscerally. Fuck you, lady. Fuck you and may you have failed yourself utterly.