Monday, May 30, 2005
(10:43 PM) | Anonymous:
I graduate from college in a week.
My room was in the basement of my parent’s house. It was always messy, paper everywhere, clothes scattered on the floor, CD's lying here and there. For some reason here was a bottle of Tabasco sauce sitting on the elaborate headboard of my bed (my parents had given me there old bed, a huge queen size with dark wood and a large mirror). I remember the reason, I had bought it from the local Wal-Mart one Sunday night after church because the local diner my friends and I always went to had some cheap knock off of Tabasco sauce. I liked to eat my ham and feta omelette with real Tabasco, and so had bought this. I wonder where that bottle is now.My Danelectro guitar had recently been replaced by a Fender Telecaster, which was lying against my amp. I played in a folksy band at the time, somewhat silly really. Just me and a bass player, who was really very good. We said we were going to try and keep the band going, but of course we didn't.
Recently C.S. Lewis and I had gone through a falling out. In his The Weight of Glory he had an article entitled "Why I Am Not A Pacifist" that I found to be very badly reasoned theologically. I certainly wasn't a pacifist of any respectable stature, but I had recently gone through the odd experience of signing up with Selective Service after reading The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien and had decided that I would never fight a war for American interests. C.S. Lewis be damned, no matter how much I had loved him, after that moment I would never again read his non-fiction. Still haven't.
I had only four tattoos of the time. A half-sleeve of a sacred heart, a praying Jesus, a crucified Jesus, and praying hands wrapped around my left arm. I knew I would get more, now I have 24 or so.
I had never heard the names Derrida, Deleuze, Heidegger, Guattari, Foucault. I had heard the name Nietzsche and it always scared me, like I knew it would be my undoing. I was always very worried about losing my faith. How can I explain that and give justice to the experience of this? It was a strange and vague notion that I didn't really believe anything I thought I did. I didn't believe in a God who was mad at me for whatever I was doing sexually, but I also was scared of what would happen if I admitted that I didn't believe in this God. Worried that, at every moment, both those where I had my faith and those where I would lose it, I would also be lying to myself. Could it be any other way?
That was four years ago when I graduated from High School, from what I can remember and can think to share, now I wonder what it would be like to experience that all over again and what lies before us.
