A good thing

Sometime over the past week and a half, I had some long conversations with friends who are still undergrads. The talks were typical, mulling over common interests with lazy pleasure. It was good to know that these friends had not abandoned me since I departed the university. But somewhere in the conversation, it became clear to both of us that while our friendship is not tied to my alma mater, I was certainly graduated and he was certainly not. And in that recognition, I did find at least one light shining in our collective darkness, Pangloss. We do not have to start another year of college this week.

Summer has been a bit of a blow-off season. I've searched for jobs and scrounged for quarters, but I've also spent a lot of June, July and August "taking time off." I've been drunk. I've spent hours listening to records. I started a blog. The depression of our condition is no reason to take heart, but the fact that I am, for all my non-starting, in the real world and not tied to the academic institution forces a smile. So Pangloss, times are grim, things are rough, but we do not have to wake for a class, study for a test or ponder theoretical interpretations of the presence of uncircumcised penises in modern French film. At least, not for a grade. And we are adults. So that's a good thing.

The desert of our youth

This is it, Martin, that great, vast expanse of wilderness where enthusiasm, idealism, and dreams perish. If we look backward, their scattered bones, bleached white by the sun, mark the trail we have followed, right into the Kalahari of post-graduate hope. Denied of spiritual sustenance, the water of life if you will, our faculties diminish to a faint glimmer of what they once were. Intelligence, sharpness of thought and tongue, energy for the task at hand, gone. Delusions, like thirst, set in and fog our mind, clouding our judgments and leading us to decisions which only worsen our condition.

What do I mean by this? I mean that in taking jobs we never dreamed of wanting, setting marginal, petty goals that amount to little more than survival, and wallowing in malaise, we are like a lost man straggling toward a mirage. We think it is what we want but in the end, whatever we hoped it would bring will vanish, just like all the hopes that we carried out of our alma mater's doors.

It is one thing to have a spiritual crisis, to not know one's own purpose and direction in life, to search for a new path when the sought-after one was blocked. Such a trial can be hard even under good conditions, where one is secure inside an institution or community or station in life. But confronting such a crisis while broke, luckless in finding a legitimate job, bereft of friends, and reduced emotionally to the level of a middle schooler by one's parents, is devastating. Devastating in the way carpet bombing is devastating.

Where does one go? Drawing inward is the only defense, trying to escape those external tormentors with the hope that one's internals will survive intact. But even that effort might prove fruitless in the end. One might deny one's capacity for living (and not merely existing) so much that it will be forgotten, blown away in a sandstorm which disorients the self as to its direction and goal.

Let us hope that there is an escape from this desert before it becomes too late, too late for us even to care about our pained musings on this site. But I do not know, Martin, if we will be that lucky.