I decided to split the original last several years of this up and write another few posts, because there's far too much to cover in one -- and, really, 2006 was a hugely formative year in my life. Previously, I was going to stop at 2005, but that would leave a really, really big cliffhanger on where my life was headed. So, without any further ado, let's jump right in.
In January 2005, I entered my final semester of my senior year at WVU. I thought that, for the most part, I was finally centered. Or, I should say, more at ease. I had been building up my confidence over the course of the year prior, my online diary had never been more popular (it reached #1 on the site and stayed there for several months between late 2004 and early 2005) and I was getting straight A's in all of my courses -- as I had for a good chunk of my college career. I was even getting more confident in my writing; my nonfiction piece "Traffic Lights" had won me a scholarship as well as an award from the university as a whole, and I parlayed that into a second piece, "Seeking Listrania," which was very loosely based on my experiences with Ingrid as well as a few other ladies I'd known at the time. That story really didn't go anywhere, though it is completed -- I haven't re-read either of them in years. I'm sure I'd think they were awful now. But, at the time I mean, I was getting noticed for them, and people were recognizing that I did indeed have talent...which is something that I desperately needed at that time in my life. Validation.
And then came Alley.
Alley is not her real name. I'm not going to use her real name here out of some weird sense of respect I still have for her, given the almost seven years of what we went through together. Alley was part of one of her several screen names, and is a female name (though generally spelled differently when it comes to actual names) and I'd rather leave her anonymous to the world as a kindness on my part, but also because she was there when this blog was originally created and was its primary reader for many years. I'll get to that, though.
In 2005, I was 22, still living at home with my parents, but getting ready to graduate from college in a month and a half with no real knowledge of what the future might hold or where it would take me. Meanwhile, just outside Kansas City, Alley had just turned 18 and was getting ready to graduate high school. Alley was young and inexperienced in life, but she was smart. She kept a diary on DearDiary.net as well, and we followed each other's posts. I don't exactly know when or why we started talking, but it was after she was legal, so get your minds out of the gutter, folks.
Over the course of a few weeks and months, we became online friends -- I was the older, (questionably) wiser one who already knew what college was all about, and she was the starry-eyed kid who was just about to start it. Biting and sardonic in her humor well beyond her years and possessed with a great gift for writing, it seemed we connected really well. This was very nice, as most of my older friends had already graduated or were working a lot -- meaning I didn't see them as much as I would have liked to, or at all -- and in my final semester at WVU I had a lot of free time. My "thesis," so to speak, had been mostly completed over the winter break (remember, I didn't have a job at the time) and the remainder of my courseload was simple 100-level lit courses, which I didn't need to get A's in to graduate, but I felt it was my duty to try, as well as Dr. Gale's History of Evil course. I was taking an 18-hour semester, but it didn't feel like it.
By March 2005, we had decided to pursue a relationship. Uncharacteristically so, I was rather optimistic about it. I didn't see myself being with her forever at the time, but there was an attraction there. So it started on DearDiary and moved to AIM and emails and phone conversations -- we would trade off on buying calling cards (remember those?) and give each other the codes, using them to call each other back and forth, a lot. Our relationship slowly grew and blossomed. It felt a bit taboo -- 18 to 22 is a huge age gap at that age when it comes to a relationship, and that was indeed a concern for me, but it was...well, good. The relationship overall, I mean, at the time. Try as I did, I couldn't get her out of my head. Our relationship slowly became everything to me over some time; however, it is all at once easy and hard to write about Alley, because my end experiences with her were bittersweet. She was also a very different person in 2005 than she was in, say, 2010 or 2011.
I also want to step back for a minute and let everyone here know everything else that had been going on in my life before I continue forward, because not everything during this time was about Alley (though looking back on it now, it sure as shit seems like it). In 2005, I was broke. I didn't have the job in the lab anymore, and almost all of my free money that last semester was spent on books or other course materials, not to mention the graduation fee and just trying to survive. I was also smoking about a pack and a half a day (meaning I'd go through a carton of cigarettes every week) and that shit was expensive after a while. I called it a personal victory if I could get through an entire day without opening the second pack of cigarettes I brought with me. By mid-semester I had to force myself to cut back because funds were getting tight, and by the end of the semester I was buying roll-your-own tobacco and papers almost exclusively because it was far cheaper to do so. By this time in my life I was so fully dependent on nicotine and caffeine that I couldn't function correctly without them -- I was bringing two-liter bottles of coffee with me to my classes, which I would take hits off of during class, much to the chagrin of some of my professors. I can't imagine the kind of asshole I would've been if vaping were a thing in 2005, either.
Because I was flat broke, I almost never ate throughout the day on campus; meanwhile, I would watch my friends eat meals every single day from the food court in the student union, or come back to the group after their classes with some carry out or fast food from one or more of the restaurants that lined Morgantown's High Street up and down both sides at the time. What little money I had was spent on cigarettes, the occasional necessary clothing from somewhere like Gabes or Goodwill, and (of course) the calling cards for talking with Alley. This left me very little spending cash, and most of the time I was fairly destitute.
Despite the reality that it was actually serious, I had a casual attitude with my relationship with Alley at the time. I didn't know where it would go, if anywhere, and wasn't really looking into a future with her past, say, once she started college. I was talking to a few other ladies on the side and online, mainly online, and one of them -- a woman named Lori -- basically gave me the ultimatum to choose Alley or choose her.
I don't respond well to ultimatums, and I especially don't respond well to ultimatums like that one. I chose Alley. I also told Alley everything that had transpired to be forthright and straight up with her. It was a hard conversation to have. In response, Lori did the same as a way to "blackmail" me; it turned out that she'd been stalking me for many months, long before Alley was in the picture, and had almost all of my online diary memorized, as well as every chat we'd ever had saved. I deleted and blocked her from anything and everything I could, but she continued to terrorize me and/or stalk me online for several more months before...I guess she just got bored? I couldn't tell you, but it eventually stopped.
When I knew I'd be writing about her in this post, I quietly looked her up a few days ago (she does not know this blog exists, don't worry). Her own, old online diary still exists, though it hasn't been updated since 2011, and she apparently got married in Maui in 2009. So, good for her, I guess.
However, she was not the only negative attention The Criminally Goofy received -- a random reader linked me to a web forum someplace who was screencapping a lot of my posts and using said forum to make fun of them. I was open in my posts about my name and the city I lived in, as well as my schooling at WVU -- anyone who actually cared could have found me easily. And there were a lot of people reading and commenting on that forum. I couldn't tell you where or what it was now, only that it made me exceedingly angry. How dare they criticize me and what I'd been through, what I'd written about? Mind you, I wasn't the greatest writer in those days and came off (a lot) as a whiny, sex-starved little shit in a lot of posts, but these people didn't even know me.
My only real recourse was to shut down the diary. So, I took a weekend going through every single post, archiving each one, and then hard-deleting everything one by one -- all except the last post, which explained the problems I'd been having as of late and why I was doing what I was doing. I left that post up for one month, exactly, and then deleted it and wiped the diary off the web. The Criminally Goofy was no more.
Alley, as well as my friends, didn't like this. I didn't really have much of a choice, though. My friends asked me to start a new diary or blog (because that term was in use by that point) somewhere else under a different name and different title. I refused to do so -- The Criminally Goofy had served its purpose and had its place, and it was done. I didn't want to just start over again. I wouldn't write anywhere else until I started the first version of this blog in 2007.
In May, two months into my relationship with Alley, I graduated from WVU. It was a very long day, as I recall. I met up with a few friends, who tagged along with me and my parents to attend the English Department graduation ceremony that morning -- it was the only ceremony I'd attend. I wore a shirt and tie, both of which made me look ridiculous. Coupled with the fact that I'd shaved my head the day before in preparation for summer, I looked like a penis in a suit. I mingled a bit, I hugged a few professors, I shook many hands in thanks, and then I got the fuck out of there and went home. I didn't even get the paper diploma that day and I certainly didn't want to go to the full graduation ceremony in the WVU Coliseum, which sounded like a nightmare. The best part of my college graduation would come afterwards, when cards with money started flowing in (much as they had in 2001 for my high school graduation). There was considerably less this time, about $400 or so total, given that a) some of the people had died since my high school graduation, and b) college graduation should be a bigger deal, but isn't. My parents threw me a "graduation party," though I don't remember much of it.
The money was very welcome, and I used it to establish my very first bank account -- which I had and used for everything up until and shortly after I married Daisy. Suddenly I had a debit card and checks, and felt like a responsible adult. The first thing I purchased with it? Amusingly enough, a subscription to Playboy. Not kidding, that's what I did. I also subscribed to two different Marvel comics, neither of which are still being published today.
Meanwhile, two weeks later, Alley would graduate from high school and would be gearing up for her first semester of college in the fall. In addition to a boyfriend, I became a mentor to her in a way. I helped prepare her for what would lay ahead. I was also very protective and somewhat possessive of her, despite West Virginia being a long way from Kansas City.
"What's the point?" my friend Adam had asked me a few weeks before. "Is this even a real relationship? She's still in high school, bro."
"It's very real," I told him.
"How can it be? You've never met her, you have no idea who she is or what she looks like, she could be some forty-year old guy in a basement for all you know."
"For one," I said, "we've done everything but meet; I have many pictures of her proving she is who she says she is, and I talk to her on the phone literally every day."
Adam paused a moment. "Okay, so then let me ask this -- what's the endgame here? Are you going to move out there to be with her? Is she going to move here? How far does this go?"
It was a question that up to that point I'd never really asked myself seriously. I'm not even sure that, at that point, Alley had asked it or had been asked it either. We'd only been a couple at the time for like two months, and while it was a bit early to ask that question, it was a question that needed asking.
"I don't know," I replied. "I mean, I guess we'll see how it goes."
The answer to that question would shape my relationship with Alley for the better part of the next full year.
I had more pressing things on my mind, though; I'd just gotten my Bachelor's degree, so it was time to look for a career. No rest for the wicked and all that. But, I had no idea where to start. I wanted an office job; I'd wanted one for years -- a cushy office job where I didn't have to do manual labor, I could work and make bank, and focus on my writing on nights and weekends. Ideally, I wanted something within the university, but was looking for anything that would allow me to make and start saving money, so that I could become fully self-reliant and get out of my parents' house. After I graduated from college, I'd felt more trapped there than ever -- there was literally nothing stopping me from going on to do something great with my life, from moving onward and upward...but getting out of that house was the first step.
And I failed miserably.
Over the course of the summer of 2005, I applied for over 1,000 jobs -- the vast majority of my time on those sweltering summer days was spent uploading resumes, writing cover letters, filling out applications. In 2005, it was slow going, especially with dial-up internet. The world was in transition from the "pound the pavement and fill out paper applications" time to the "upload your resume and maybe we'll call you" sort of job hunting that is the standard today. I, of course, had graduated at an inopportune time -- the midst of the Iraq War, the movement to a more-online-based society, and here I was with a liberal arts degree and a gross sense of entitlement, expecting the world to throw work at me, to validate that yes, I was smart and yes, I was deserving.
This is not how real life works.
I know it was over 1,000 applications because I stopped counting at 1,000. I had three interviews. None of them hired me. All of them were jobs I was fully capable of doing and wanted to do. Nobody wanted me. I began to get very depressed again.
There had been some brief talks -- both at the time as well as before graduation -- about graduate school. But, I thought to myself, for what purpose? To teach? The mere concept of me teaching a class seemed laughable at the time. Five years later, however...
I brushed off the concept of graduate school with a wave of the hand, like shoo, fly, you bother me-style. I couldn't foresee any reason for me to go to graduate school, and even if I did, for what? My strength was in my writing, and I could do that without any degree, even without the one I'd just earned. Some of my professors thought it ludicrous that I wouldn't continue on to grad school given my abilities, but at the time -- while flattered, mind you -- I just couldn't see it. I couldn't fathom spending another 2-5 years of my life in more college. The thought of that sickened me. Why go for a PhD? The only reason I could think of at the time was to make people call me "doctor." And that wasn't good enough of a reason for me.
Plus, there was the added factor that grad school costs money, and you're not getting into grad school on a scholarship for free -- you're either going to be a teacher or you're going to take out student loans. I was at the time 100% debt-free -- no loan debts, no credit cards, no bills, no cell phone, no car payment, nothing. Taking on a fuckton of debt didn't seem like that great of an idea. Rather, I wanted to get out into the job market. I wanted to make something of myself. Thirty years before I graduated, people my age could graduate from college, buy a home on a single income, have a station wagon, get married and start a family where the wife didn't have to work and could raise the kids and go to PTA meetings and bake breads and cookies. I wanted that.
In my free time, what little of it there was that summer, I started really getting into podcasts. The podcast boom was just beginning, and I voraciously downloaded and listened to everything I could. Adam Curry's Daily Source Code had started it all, but I'd been occasionally listening to (even streaming, a concept that for dial-up internet was almost unheard of) live shows like 2Sense and NewsReal with Sean Kennedy for a few years prior. I focused on two realms -- political news and comedy -- the two realms that even to this day, almost fifteen years later, I haven't strayed far from. After Daily Source Code ended, No Agenda started (and is still running today, having now reached almost 1200 episodes), and I branched out into shows like Nobody Likes Onions, Red Bar Radio, Penn Radio (with Penn Jillette and Michael Goudeau, continuing today as Penn's Sunday School), amongst others.
However, the obsession with podcasts had started two or three years earlier, when my friend Bill told me "Hey, you have to check out this show, these people are doing something new and really funny" -- that show was one of the first real "online radio" shows I'd ever heard, broadcast on a schedule, with a discussion board and fans and a following -- and it was called Freak n' Bitches. Broadcasted (or, I should say, podcasted) out of Tampa, it was like a real radio show -- multiple on-air personalities, segments, the occasional guests -- real people producing internet radio that was actually entertaining and was damn hilarious. I downloaded and archived every single show they put out, and over the course of the next several years I listened to them over and over. I reached out to the hosts, primarily Freak herself (real name: April) and befriended her and her husband in the years after the show had ended, following their lives and careers (as well as multiple other shows they've done). I remain the sole archivist of Freak n' Bitches, to my knowledge, and was later able to provide April with the full collection of the "master recordings" (so to speak) after she'd lost all of them.
Flash forward to 2014, when April was one of the "groomsmen" in my wedding, with her husband Damon in attendance as well.
And that, folks, is how online friendships are formed.
Meanwhile, back in 2005, Alley had plans of her own.
I should stop before I go further and note that my parents did not know about Alley; I did not want to tell them because I didn't want to seem like I was seeking their approval for her, but if it fizzled out and the relationship ended, I didn't want to have to answer questions about it. I knew that in living at home, I'd be getting some sort of interrogation over it. I always kept my relationships private and away from my parents -- I was always a very guarded, deeply private person about who I loved and why, and it wasn't really of their business anyhow. This continued for many years after; after Alley, my parents didn't know about my next girlfriend until the day they met her, and when it came to Daisy, my parents had spoken to her on the phone maybe twice throughout our entire relationship and didn't meet her in person until two days before our wedding.
My parents found out about Alley really quickly, though, when Alley's mother looked up my information in the student directory on WVU's website and called the house to ask what my intentions were with her just-eighteen-year-old daughter.
That was a fun call.
I hate being interrogated.
To her credit, Alley's mother ended up being a very nice person, a very sweet lady who, in time, I became close with and I saw as a mother figure as well. But she wasn't always like that to me, and she did not make a very good first impression on me.
It was at that point when the relationship became real, I guess. I felt some sort of sense of relief. Alley was not happy with her mother for doing that, but I brushed it off -- I probably would have done the same thing, were I her mother.
It certainly didn't help matters much, though. Our relationship was slowly failing, and we were both already seeing the cracks in it. My depression didn't help much; I was floundering after college and couldn't get hired on anyplace. I spent days preparing a very detailed, professionally written proposal to Tokyopop publishing for the script I'd written in Clark's class, with the intention of getting it turned into a graphic novel. I did not have an artist lined up, however. I felt the need to do something, anything creative that I would be able to make some money from and possibly turn into a sustainable career.
So, in September 2005, I created my own fashion design company.
I wish I were kidding.
The company is still in existence -- barely, but it still exists. I spent days (and weeks, even) designing logos and slogans for shirts, hats, notebooks, underwear, baby clothing, clocks and calendars -- you name it. I self-promoted heavily, I told all my friends and family about it and told them to spread the word, and the nerdier folks I knew (everything there was designed for comic and anime nerds) did buy some things and I was able to make a little money from it. Alley, of course, bought several things. But, with dial-up internet at home and limited by the freeware design software I had, it's not like I could create a ton of stuff that actually looked really good that people would want to buy.
I changed my strategy and branched out -- I opened two other associated design companies, one for the internet nerds/dorks and one specializing in a more "adult" line with more swearing and bawdy things on them. In the adult store, I had a BBQ apron that said this on it:
Yes, that's the actual graphic file I created for it.
Well, apparently people found this item and started sharing the link to it across different platforms -- if social media had really been a "thing" at that point, I'm sure it would've gone completely viral.
I began selling this apron like crazy, out of nowhere. I'd sell ten of them a day, then twenty, then it would peter off for a few days before I'd sell several more, and more, and more. The holiday season is when it really exploded -- I sold literally hundreds of these aprons during the few weeks leading up to Christmas.
However, the manufacturing company and the hosting website took like 80% or more of the profit on each one, so I never got rich, per se. However, there was a time over the span of about three years where I was pretty consistently making about $50-100 per month, take home, just from these aprons alone. I had to set it up to where the company would cut me a check whenever my sales went over $100, instead of on a monthly basis or what-have-you.
The rest of the business(es) didn't fare as well. I think the apron is still for sale on the site, though I'm not sure -- I haven't logged into my account there for several years, as I haven't really sold anything since before Daisy and I got married. The last paycheck I got from the company was for about $110, and it had been waiting for about two years to cross the $100 point to cut the check. That was mid-2015 or so.
I got a response back from Tokyopop after about eight months or so -- after I'd forgotten about actually submitting the proposal to them. They called my work "derivative" and that they were only looking for writer/artist teams at the moment. By that point I didn't really care anymore -- it was sort of the final nail in the coffin of trying to succeed on my own creativity alone. I never prepared another pitch to another comic or media company ever again.
It began to appear as if nobody wanted my particular brand of creativity.
When Hurricane Katrina formed and hit New Orleans that summer, I was at home watching the news. I didn't really have any friends or family down there, but my parents had gone down there for Mardi Gras a few times during my middle school years, back when we lived in Morgantown. My own personal knowledge of New Orleans was limited to Interview with the Vampire, Emeril Lagasse, and some vague mentions of cajun voodoo or what-have-you. I wouldn't actually see the city for another eleven years, when Daisy and I ventured down there for a friend's wedding. By then, of course, it was fine.
During this time, Alley realized how depressed I was; she was in her freshman year at college by this point, and wanted to work on a plan to move me out to Kansas City -- where there were jobs everywhere, there was a rich community, plenty of things to see and do, and where we could (obviously) be together.
I had no desire to do this.
Yeah, that's right, the man who had previously wanted nothing more than to get the fuck out of West Virginia was now refusing the opportunity to do just that.
I had some concerns, the first being that yes, I loved Alley, but she was moving a bit fast in this department. And I did love her by this point; it wasn't just bullshit and pillow talk, or late-night whisperings on our calling-card-calls, but love. I had accepted that, I knew I wanted to stay with her, I just didn't know how to make it work. I didn't have a driver's license, I couldn't afford the car insurance or to pay for the gas and upkeep on the car that my own mother had basically given to me, the 1993 Probe, I didn't have a job or any actual steady income, and she wanted me to drop everything and make a plan to move to Kansas City. I guarantee you the Probe would not have made it out there anyway.
I avoided the subject. This was partially out of fear and partially out of depression. I didn't think it was a good idea. What would happen if I got out there and she hated me, or if we didn't work out, or she or I met someone else, etc? I'd be stranded there with nowhere to live, nowhere to go, no way to get back home. There were too many variables and I was not a risk-taker. When it finally came to a head that fall, I told her no, that I didn't want to do it at all, and would rather she move to West Virginia and transfer to WVU instead if she wanted us to be together that badly.
This did not go well.
Alley was young, but she was smart. She did not want to uproot herself and her life for some dude halfway across the country, especially when she'd just started college. Her counter-argument was that I wasn't tied down to anything in West Virginia, that I was done with college, that I had nothing keeping me there and that all I'd wanted for years was to get out -- all of which were valid points.
It ended in a stalemate and we ended up breaking up.
I have mentioned here before that I don't like being pushed, I don't like ultimatums, and I don't like not being in control of myself or my destiny. I could not foresee any of those scenarios working out in my favor if I were to move to Kansas City. I would've found myself trapped there into whatever situation I ended up in, forced to make the best of it. I couldn't do that. I would not let myself make that leap without any sort of safety net. I had no safety net, Alley didn't want to continue the relationship if there weren't some sort of future plans being made to that ended up with me moving there, and so it ended.
Looking back on it now, it needed to happen. Breaking up with Alley gave me some clarity and some space, which I desperately needed. But it hurt. It hurt a lot, and I didn't exactly know why because I was having trouble processing it. Being destroyed over a girl I knew and saw every day in person, living and breathing, was one thing -- being destroyed over an eighteen-year-old college freshman a thousand miles away was something completely different, and it was something I had never experienced.
It was mostly fear and anxiety, I guess. I'd destroyed yet another chance at peace and happiness, or so it felt like. Yet there was a part of me that was relieved when we broke up, an open door for new beginnings and the like. I began to believe that I was destined to be alone, that I had too many "issues" to work through on my own -- that whole you have to love yourself before you can love anyone else mentality that at the time I did not yet believe was patently false (it is, by the way).
I retreated into myself, into designs for the store, into my writing, into podcasts, into music, into anime. I was completely floundering. I couldn't find work, my personal life was a train wreck, and I was quickly running out of money to support myself. Nothing was going right. Nothing was going as planned. I was going to become one of those fat nerds that lived in the equivalent of his parents' basement.
It was around this time that I got an email from Becca.
Becca hadn't emailed me in a long time; after our date two years prior, we'd sort of drifted apart a bit as both of us were working to complete our degrees on schedule. Still, we'd kept in touch a bit, off and on, maybe once or twice a year -- very sporadically. Yet, I knew when I saw that email pop into my inbox, something was wrong, and it wasn't going to be good news on the other side of it.
I was right. Our friend Robbie had been killed in a car accident on some icy back roads. It was mid-October, and winter came early and fast on top of the mountain. He had (thankfully) been alone, but that made it no less painful. Becca offered in the coming days to give me a ride to the funeral. I declined.
I'd just seen Robbie a few weeks before, maybe a month or two -- he and I were on opposite sides of the PRT station on campus, with a crowd of people separating us. We each threw up our hands and waved at one another, that still, hand-in-the-air, eye contact wave of acknowledgment, before he got on one of the PRT cars and vanished.
I had a lot of trouble processing Robbie's death. I'd had friends die before, of course, but they were few and far between, and they had died after I'd parted ways with them or moved on in life. Robbie was different. Robbie was a guy I'd seen every day in high school. Robbie was one of the nicest guys I'd ever known -- he was funny, nerdy, intelligent, and had all sorts of hopes and dreams. His death troubled me on multiple levels and sent a slow, rippling shockwave through my life.
Seeking some sort of friendship and needing to see people, on Halloween I made plans to go to campus to hang out with my friends who were still there who hadn't graduated yet. I'd looked forward to it for weeks -- seeing everyone again, being social, getting some much-needed quality time with people I knew and people who cared about me during (and not really many knew) a rather difficult time of crisis in my life. And on Halloween, at that -- one of the best days of the year to go out and be social.
Instead, only a few people I knew were around, and those who were spent little time with me before wandering off to do their own things -- or asked me why I was there, hadn't I graduated? Why come back?
I returned home that night feeling more alone than I'd felt in a very long time, and just went to bed. The trend continued for another month or more. I sporadically talked to Alley, but she didn't seem to want much to do with me and she was leading a life of her own without me in it.
What I remember the most about that fall and winter was the rain and ice, how it always seemed to be at least somewhat precipitating -- whether it was mist, sleet, rain, or light snow. Everything was gray. Everything was morose and sad. Outwardly, I tried to put on a brave face, tried to be the normal me. I told my parents that Alley and I had broken up, but played it off as minor, as in it just wasn't meant to be, people change, etc.
To occupy myself so I didn't go crazy, I watched series after series of anime, stuff I'd collected over the years but had never watched. I watched friends who had graduated at the same time as me either go on to grad school or move on to their first careers, I watched people be happy and live their lives while I was completely miserable and near rock bottom. Some friends got married. Others had their first children. Some did both. One of the guys I went to high school with had become a realtor, made quite a bit of money in what seemed like overnight, and bought an Escalade. Many people moved out of state, never to be seen or heard from again -- especially some of those I'd gone to college with. Others simply vanished.
I was isolated and I was very alone, but I wasn't the "I want to kill myself" sort of depressed. I was just sad and withdrawn. As warped as it was, I wished I'd never gone to WVU and wished I'd not had any of those experiences. I could've been sad and alone and unemployed without a college degree, too.
On Christmas morning, I got up very early and made coffee for my parents, then descended into the basement (where I would sometimes go to smoke and watch TV when it was too cold to do it outside or in my room with the window open). I lit up a Winston and stared at the old tube TV down there, which was tuned to Cartoon Network and was playing the old Fantastic Four show from the '70s. You know, the one with the robot instead of the Human Torch. I wasn't even really watching the show, I was just staring into the screen and taking long drags of my cigarette, which wasn't even making me feel better. I remember that I just wanted something to change, wanted something to be different, to get better, and I had an epiphany of sorts.
If you want something to change, Brandon, you have to change it yourself. You want Alley back? Go get her. You want to see your work mean something in the world? Go make it mean something. You want to get out of the house and become independent? Then find a way to do it.
Easier said than done most of the time, right? I found that what I was really lacking was motivation. Or, rather, the right kind of motivation, or enough of it, or the 2005 equivalent of big dick energy, or whatever you want to call it. Whatever it was I didn't have before, I found that day and I found it fast.
I began pursuing Alley again. We were back together within two weeks. I swore off any sort of substances; I quit drinking completely, even the occasional beer, and for a time I stopped smoking (though that was more monetarily-based than anything else). By the time the new year came around, with reinvigorated energy and focus, I was applying for jobs again and focusing on bettering myself a little more each day. That would be a life goal I would carry within myself for many years, especially during times of unemployment (and there were a lot of those) -- make yourself a little better each day.
It was an adage, in time, that would both serve me well and get me into trouble.
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