I was living alone in an apartment in my hometown the summer after I graduated from college. I had a job working, I think, at one of those corporate electronics retail places. Like Best Buy, but not. If memory serves, I wasn't reading anything at all, though it's difficult to imagine that now with the pace I usually maintain. Instead, I was spending forty hours a week (a fat $1100/month) selling and stocking cds. The highlight of that job, incidentally, was listening to people sing. Of course, some of the singing was bad. Think people who don't know they're looking for Chumbawumba crooning a couple bars of "Oh, Danny Boy..." Not that singing. I liked it when people would be listening to cds, and they would kind of lose their grasp on what was going on in the world around them. Rather understated people would suddenly start singing the ubiquitous Goo Goo Dolls song (everyone remember "Iris"?) or Third Eye Blind or whatever. I loved that. Sometimes, what was even better, were the people who would pick their own cd to listen to. These folks were mostly No Limit Soldiers, though I doubt very much Master P would have given them the nod. There were also your metal heads and jazz folks. Some strippers, a handful of concerned moms. The coolest of these listeners was a ten year old girl belting out "Like a Virgin" on a busy Saturday afternoon. Really, it was almost as though the presence of headphones and music took everything else out of the picture. When they could no longer hear the bustle of the retail gambit going on all around them, they simply behaved as though the souls occupying that bustle couldn't hear them either. They always reminded me of the whitetail deer, which roam around the hills where one set of my parents live. They have such bad eyesight that they think that if they hold very still, you can't see them. You know, they can't see you, you can't see them. The metaphor works, right?
Anyway, so this post-graduation summer, as I dated around aimlessly a little bit before giving up in abject frustration, I was bored. Or maybe a better way to describe it would be to say that I had gone from taking eighteen credits and working forty hours to just working forty hours. I didn't know what the fuck to do with myself. And quite honestly, I can't remember what I did do. I wasn't running or cooking at the time, both things that take up a lot of my time now when I'm not reading or writing or fretting. What I do remember is coming home one day and determining to call the phone company to shut the thing off. I had decided, rashly as it turns out, to withdraw utterly from the world. With the spare exception of the forty hours a week I spent working retail. I was pretty set on it, and I couldn't tell you why I decided against it in the long run. Maybe my better self stepped in and reminded my everyday idiot to relax a little bit. Maybe I just got distracted. Most likely, it's the latter. It was a dark hour, my friends, and a good example of what can happen if you let your world shrink to the size of your head.
I guess what I'm trying to say, in a bright hour, and to quote our brave leader, is this: Bring it on.
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When I visit my parents, and think about how I lived in that tiny town for 18 years, I wonder what the HELL I did every day after high school. Then I remember that I was in marching band, and chorus, and show choir, and played soccer, played softball, swam, and was on the debate team, and in national honors society. Yep, my parents kept me veeery busy. Otherwise, I might have murdered them in their sleep.
The first time I went back home for Thanksgiving after I left for college, I had a near-panic attack because there was nothing to do. At nine pm, it was ink-black dark outside, and everything in the whole town was closed. I almost got hives.
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