A Cheery Wave From Stranded Youth

These days it seems every time I close my eyes, my mind starts inventing crazy ideas to mess with itself. This must be why I don't sleep much anymore. Actually, who am I kidding, I find my own reasons not to sleep anyway--Sunday night, for example, I stayed up until 9AM in a Jandek- and coffee-fueled blitz writing my Poetry of War final paper. You're only in college once...if you're good, that is.

Last Wednesday was the last meeting of my Poetic Forms II class, and probably the last poetry seminar class I will ever be in (unless I decide to get that MFA one day--but that will probably have to be reserved for the midlife crisis). A shame, really; from this point on, nobody will be obligated to give half a damn that I write. I finally wrote and turned in my Erica Dawson poem; it was called "Hands," and was somewhat influenced by the Four Tet song of the same name, if only in mood, and even then probably not very noticeable at all (which is to say, pretty much the only thing it has to do with the poem is that I listened to it on repeat while I wrote it). People seemed to like it; Sarah T. said it was the best thing I'd written this semester, and I'd say it had some pretty stiff (relatively speaking) competition.

An hour after class let out Jen dragged me from the Hut, where I had intended to nap a bit, back upstairs in Gilman to visit Greg. When we got to his office, he and Sarah were sitting around his big table and he had out Johnny Walker. Across campus, the annual Biophysics undergraduate feast was happening, but far be it from me to pass up the opportunity to down some Scotch with the man who over the past two and a half years taught me virtually everything I know about poetry. (Except the fact that deluded 15-year-old boys attempt it thinking they know how when they don't. I learned that one through experience.) Jen, who had been talking at Jess and I downstairs, continued to talk at us. We watched a Youtube recording of someone calling for a "bambulance" (had in his backseat a deer he'd hit with his car) and tried to explain to Greg what a lolcat was. We sat in the sun coming through the top-floor windows, passed the bottle around when someone's cup emptied, and listened to people cutting the grass outside. Greg showed us the annual photo indexes of Writing Seminars grad students from the past few years (including a Dan Groves with unshaven head), and pulled out stacks and stacks of poetry assignments, some of them our own, from years past--he'd Xeroxed all the best ones.

After we killed the Scotch--and between the four of us, we killed it, alright--we headed out to One World for dinner and more drinks (Allagash, my One World usual). Soon Jen left to meet up with a professor to salvage some grades--successfully, I hear--leaving me at the cafe with Greg and Sarah T. (Sometimes those two make me wonder...) Around this time was when Greg started and didn't stop talking about how good everyone in the class had gotten--"everyone in that class," he said, "has written at least one, if not more, poem that is fit to publish in a national journal." (Alright, man, you're in the Norton Anthology, so I guess I'll believe you...) It also became evident how damn sad Greg was that the lot of us were leaving: Sarah and I are graduating, and Jen is going to London for a year. All the drink I had by this point left me even more awkward in responding to praise than I usually am, but I felt (if only for the drink) moved, then, and was aware that I was there, had been there, crossed paths with these people and accomplished these things--good things, some of which people even saw. I tried my best (and also at the Writing Seminars dinner the following evening) to convince Greg that no, this will not be the end of anything.

And shall it? I came home that night having second thoughts about this coming year. I've been taking college writing classes for four years now with not much to show for it, and once I get into grad school (whenever that will be) science will be the only thing I'll have time to think about or do; worse, it'll be the only thing that anyone I'll regularly encounter in my life (advisors, labmates, colleagues) will be interested in talking about. What if this year is the last chance I will have to create something beautiful? I started thinking about a new course of action: I'll still reapply to grad school and do lab work, obviously, but perhaps I'll throw all the rest of my time into music and poetry. Try to produce some of each on a quasi-regular, self-motivated basis, revise what I have, send pieces out to magazines, elbow my way into a band (I messaged Joe and Chrissy saying I'd play for them; we'll see if they take it up) and play as many shows as I can, maybe end up with a marketable EP or something, etc. Wear my "artist" hat for a year before hanging it up until Lord knows when. A lot of the art I come into contact with in this city--whether it's my own fault or not--happens to be of the self-conceited hipster variety, but from hearing Erica Dawson and Dan Groves speak this semester I saw it was possible to create while being relatively normal human beings, which is, ultimately, the goal here.

I remember being somewhat envious of Vi for taking time off after college to wander up and down the East Coast taking odd theater jobs and making visits at her leisure; well, I got my wish, I suppose, so I might as well do what I can with it that I could not have otherwise. And next year, well, try to land myself a Ph. D. offer for an interesting few years--interesting being the key word. It's probably time to extract my head a bit from the maw of academia into which it's slipped ever deeper throughout the past few months. It gets hard to remember there's more than one possible way. I still would like to shoot for Boston, though, as I realized while talking to Jess on the phone last night; it just seems everyone's so damn tolerant there, which would make life a little more pleasant.

One way in which the end of college does not feel like the end of high school: it doesn't seem like the world's ending. Everyone's plans are materializing; we're not being cast out into the void. The process, whatever its true nature turns out to be, shall continue. This much comfort I take from my continuing concerns about the future.