the first draft of the first pages of the fictional account of me

Somewhere between the end of high school and the beginning of my real life as a functioning adult i'd hit a roadblock. that cliche moment of my life where in the middle of studying for one career i suddenly found myself either wanting another or wanting to become a hippie. the solution changed almost as often as the weather as the two sides fought for supremacy over the rest of my life. the stakes were always high as i knew that it meant enjoying the next 60 years or hoping that my decision about the existence of God was seriously flawed. To be sure the intellect that could be said to reside with me was nascent and had none of the worldly charms nor graces of those my peers had seen develope in their short time. still, they held, for me at least, a certain quaint charm and value. at the beginning of what was to be my twentieth year none of these thoughts had dawned on my with the same ferocity that they soon would. i was a calm, shiftless gulf intent on becoming useful and respected.

as new year's day passed i was enjoying an admittedly short escape from the reality of life away from the woman i loved. there we sat drinking orange juice- not for lack of convivial feeling but because we were still hung over from the night before- while we waited for the celebration of the brand new year with a truly decadent seattle tradition: watching with fascination as, for ten minutes or perhaps slightly more, our famous space needle was devoured in fires and explosions of green, white, red, blue and every imaginable phosphorescent combination thereof. meanwhile, from the inside, people who had paid a pretty penny for a ticket to the party at the top sat in a grey haze as thick as those i often imagine carpeted civil war battlefields.
this, of course, brought me back to the reality of my own, for the sake of this obvious metaphor, clouded situation. i was a second year student in college with grades far below what was expected from a person who had standardized tests scores as high as mine happened to be. here i will add that i am not being egotistical or praising myself unduly. i have been able from a very young age to turn out consistently high rankings in standardized tests. i have always been, and still remain, among the top ten percent of all people taking any test that i have been forced to waste myself taking. the reason is simple, if there is a right answer on the page i can find it at least eight times out of ten. that is not to say that i am actually intelligent but only to say that i can read into the intent of questions and find the answer that most closely resmembles the lesson i am supposed to learn from them. this fact meant that even though i never earned a semester with grades above a C average, i made it to the 90th percentile of individuals taking any standardized test be it the ITBS, the ASVAB or the ACTs. the most startling part of the test was that i even showed up to take it, as far as i was concerned. after all, only two years prior to this very day i decided that i would much rather sleep than show up for my schedules SAT test. my father repeated his mantra that someday i would learn the errors in my ways and that it would be by taking the hardest way through them. i often joked that it was not up to me because i was a Scout and we must always go about anything we undertake the hard way. i still believe that there is a grain of truth to that saying today.

the scenario would not be so bad if it were not the general tenor of my life. those things that i enjoyed i did and those things which i did not enjoy i did not do. a very simple equation but one that meant that while i would read the story of the famous jumping frog of Caliveras County or the beautiful and haunting tale of a mariner cursed i would never do any assignment related to these.
the reason was twofold: firstly, i didn't enjoy doing essays or answering assinine questions, and secondly, there were far more stories in the world than i had time to read. the second, sad fact meant that even though i wanted to experience all that a human could experience i did not have the time nor ability to do so. this is the cruel twist of life. you can only enjoy the knowledge of life when you have almost passed beyond its breadth and into the harsh, final firing of your neural net. is that blinding light the beginning of something new or is it truly the end of all that you ever were?
at the end of my senior year of high school i was quite sure that it was the new beginning and that i wanted to be a nurse. this would allow me, i thought, to travel the world and to see the many sights that my fellow humans had to put on for me. but two years later while i was doing clinical in a recovery facility i realized that the best a nurse, or any human being for that matter, can do is watch the dying as they pass from this life into nothingness. it was then that i realized that i could never wash myself clean of the endless tide of blood that always seem to pass under the watchful eyes of doctors and nurses.


There are endless proofs that God may never be proven to exist. an ironic fact, to my mind. perhaps the one that rings most true to me is the argument that God and the Big Bang have equal philosophical footing in relation to the basis of their conception to us human beings. both make an argument for something we cannot see and will never experience but nonetheless believe we have strong evidence for. the faith of a man is unshakeable if he believes he has seen proof of his God in the sky, his life, his family or any other thing that is dear to him.
and now i'm tired for tonight. in tomorrows assignment i'll find my lighthearted banter!
stay tuned.