The non-chronological collected works of my misspent youth, with notes, for your reading pleasure. Most names have been changed because I probably didn't ask you first.

Thursday, August 28, 2014

Califonia: Journal, October 1994


It’s time for me to do Philosophy reading and I’m not because I’d rather sit here and cry and stare across the quad to that Freshman dorm with LM and all the crazy man-hating knee sock bible girls in it. I’m quite unable to decide what to do with my life. Do I stay? Do I go? Do I drive out Williamson Road and see if I can find a decent chocolate milkshake?
 
Perseverance? Yeah, fuck perseverance. I realize it’s a good quality, but how is it even remotely logical to endure shit you don’t like when it costs lots of money and makes everyone miserable in the process.  There is not a soul here that would lose a night’s sleep if I lit off for the territories or whatever.

Anyway, I guess it’s kind of a serious decision. There’s something horrible and painful about staying at Hollins and suffering through it that kind of appeals to me because I might make the campus less shitty for someone else that just tragically washes up here. At the same time, staying feels like weakness. It feels like settling and cowardly It feels like I’m only here because I’m supposed to be in school when a braver soul would take off, get a job, live in some crappy apartment and make real visceral badass art [1] instead of writing stupid sestinas [2] for workshops full of Equestrienne Barbie and her jodhpur haikus.

Jesus, this sounds like something I would have written in the tenth grade. On the plus, it’s a nice afternoon for skipping Tinker Day and I’ve got Ween on the stereo and I get a little excited whenever I so much as look at transfer applications for schools in California.

Maybe. Just maybe . . . [3]




[1] The great thing about being eighteen is that you can say this sort of thing without any sense of shame and completely mean it. The great thing about not being eighteen is no having to worry about mistaking your worst possible idea for your destiny.

[2] Even at eighteen, I knew I was a worthless poet.

[3] Nope.

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