Building Steam

In my sophomore year of school I went through a fog. Not the kind that impairs your driving like a cataract or disallows you from seeing where you're stepping, the kind that impairs your thinking and disallows you from seeing where you're...well, mentally, I mean. It started in a car ride with my friend Victor, listening to Dj Shadow's Endtroducing. Before the second track cut in I had already been feeling something creep from the back-seat of my 1990 Honda Accord. Something slow and deliberate, like it was mentioned to me before hand by someone or prophesied by a Persian palm reader with "years of experience". Something half expected and yet a surprise. We were on Rand Road, near Euclid. The track began with constant piano, underlined by an emptiness for accompaniment. The kind of blankness that could be filled by something upbeat or a smooth groove, but it's not. Soon, an equally calculated drum beat followed, abruptly. The without-warning/foreboding/vacant beat does very little, doesn't provide a lot of movement, and he tells me it feels like we're being followed. I checked the rearview mirror and he the passenger-side view.

And that's how it began. The drive back to school from my visit home was longer thinking about that song, the atmosphere and fog laying it's foundation. The usually three and half hour drive turned into the entire night. From sun down 'til about two or three in the morning I drove. The landscape of soy and corn and nothing is even more blank than I'm used to in the dark as I kept checking my rearview, elaborating on the story and hitting back on the disc player.

I don't think I slept well that night, upon my arrival to my apartment. The bed didn't fit me or the computer conversations kept me up, frozen to the screen of a computer that I no longer own. The aggregating emanations from the processing plant several miles away - pungent enough to cause drunk, college students to vomit upon escaping from their alcohol soaked dorm rooms in the coming morning - made me cough enough to want to close the window. I've never drank, never had the desire, really. At the time I told people that it was my Faith that kept it away from me, but I realize now I was hardly faithful and didn't drink because I was conscious to see what it did to others while, I guess, they didn't. The more I think about it, it had far more to do with believing that I was still faithful. The illusion kept constant.

I went in for a meeting with my independent study professor to talk about my portfolio of writing. He told me I needed more than just poetry to fill it up. Some diversity would help my grade as well as my own needs as a college student. I told him I had the idea, I just needed to flesh it out. I told him about a typewriter that I had found at the thrift store for five bucks, and that it worked. I was going to write a story, based on a song that I loved. He told me he liked the cross media link between writing and music, that I might want to spend some time writing more about the music, movies and arts that I encountered. Try to capture the aesthetic, he said; instead of just the moment, I thought.

Most of the writing for the story didn't take place on the typewriter, but in a notebook that I preferred at the time. If the me from now told the me from then that I would be using a computer or laptop more to write I would have laughed. I valued the tactile response of writing; the feeling of pencil on paper, sound of the eraser against the wooden walls of the desk I frequented on the second floor of the library that permeated the smell of the old books. The pages, piling up as I tore them out to show my professor the progress I had made, seem a lot more dark than what I normally wrote. The graphite smears personified my fog. As incorrect spelling accented and dug me deeper into my self-deprocating delusion.

I don't think I liked a word on those pages, never enjoyed the act of writing them, but I continued to do so. Perhaps out of fear for my grades, perhaps out of fear that if I stopped my fog would only grow rampant, or, more probably, the fear that by getting all of this out I could rekindle the love for myself, for God, my parents, friends, self respect that I had lost since... Looking back, I realize that most of my writing was not written positively like I told myself and others, and the rest out of sheer pomposity.

Now, this all sounds like I've grown to regret my previous writing and self. That hate or dislike that former self. On the contrary. I just no longer worship and foster that darker lens. I don't allow it to take over and, for whatever reason, enjoy the bite of the fog. Instead, that self exists with all the other periods of my life, in my head, around a table. Near the front. So that I can show them I know, now, how to get out of the fog instead of embracing it.