Places, part VI

2004: The First Legal Same-Sex Marriages Occurred In Massachusetts

Really now? Good for them -- Massachusetts being ahead of the curve and all that.

2004 would be the beginning of "The Glory Days of Brandon" or "The Rise of Brandontology" or however you'd like me to describe it; it was the beginning of the years I would spend getting my collective shit together, so to speak. Spring 2004 was the tail end of my junior year or college; I was 21, I had a job and some saved money, I had friends and goals in mind -- those goals consisting mainly of survive and graduate, survive and graduate. It would also be the last "easy" semester of college I had, as when my senior year started that fall I'd have to chain myself to my desk to get everything done in order to graduate on time and with all aces.

As it stood, I was feeling pretty good about myself for the first time in a very long time. This time, instead of the year waiting for me in a dark alley with a crowbar, the roles were reversed. It finally felt as if I was in charge of my life, or most aspects of it, for the first time in a long while. I wasn't out of the woods yet with school, though; I still had a number of classes to take that were required by my major. I'd finished up my core lit courses, my foreign language requirements (Spanish), my linguistics requirement (the only class at WVU I got a C in and was damn happy to get it), the classics (Chaucer and Shakespeare), my required math course, and most of the creative writing courses by this time, and was left with a few philosophy, science, and humanities credits that I needed to fill.

Truthfully, I was never big on any of those subjects; they were rather dry to me, and didn't seem like they'd be anything I'd use (or anything I really needed for my major). I'd taken Geology in my freshman year; it had a lab with it and it was fine, wasn't difficult at all. They called it "rocks for jocks" because it's what all of the football players took to avoid the harder lab sciences like biology or chemistry. I took Philosophy 101; it was a lecture hall course with no attendance policy, all course materials posted online on the course website, online quizzes, and (I think) but three exams throughout the semester that you had to be in class for -- oh, and those exams were open-book. It was a joke of a class. Psychology I wanted no part of, unless it was the "human sexuality" course (which always filled up within half an hour of class registration online, and I never got to take) or the "abnormal psychology" course (which I also didn't get to take because of prerequisites), and I'd already taken sociology and anthropology.

This left me with only a few options:

Astronomy: I'd heard good things about the class, but only if you had the right professor for it.

Food And Agricultural Science: Apparently a really interesting class, but was held in the engineering building on the other side of campus and would be very difficult to get to on time (8am sharp, people), and more difficult to get to my next class afterwards on time on the other side of campus.

Small Group Communications: Another large lecture hall class that I knew little to nothing about; I assumed it was going to teach me how to lead a discussion and/or manage a team of people.

And, finally...

Religious Studies: Which sounded to me, at the time, as "learn about Jesus and other mythical figures that didn't exist, yet everyone believes did!"

You may ask why I wasn't interested in any of the business courses, or engineering courses, art history, music history, etc -- the answer is simply because I was lazy and just wanted to graduate, and I didn't want some bullshit class I had no real interest in getting in the way of that.

With the rest of my schedule booked with the remaining junior-level creative writing classes (Poetry and Nonfiction), my work schedule being what it was in the lab, and proximity to my other classes, I'd decided to enroll in the Food and Agricultural Science course, give myself a gap in time after it to get back across campus, and then take an afternoon Religious Studies class before needing to head back up to the med center for work, then home, in the afternoon (or, depending on the day, the Guild meeting in the evening). I figured this was a solid plan.

The beginning of the spring semester was brutally cold and snowy, I remember; college wasn't like public schools, where if it snowed more than a few inches, it closed -- hell no, WVU stayed open almost all the time. My parents worked and only stayed home if the weather was really really bad, and I can count on one hand the times where I missed classes in college because we couldn't make it into town. My dad had a F-250 Super Duty with dual gas tanks and four-wheel-drive, locking hubs, big tires -- that truck could go nearly anywhere, and in the West Virginia winter you needed something that would go nearly anywhere or you'd be snowed into your house for weeks at a time when the snow came. You also needed something that would start when it was -15 outside, a temperature it frequently dipped to on the coldest nights of winter on top of the mountain. My Probe and my mother's Honda would do none of those things. Did I mention that up on the mountain, we got so much more snow than Morgantown? We did. I remember one of my high school years, school was canceled for almost the entire month of February because we kept getting storm after storm.

So my semester started on a very cold, icy morning -- hard wind and sleet/ice falling in sheets. It took almost an hour to get to campus, and my first class of the day was the Food and Agricultural Science course on the Engineering campus. All of us students got into a very cramped, crowded little classroom to be told two things:

1) "Actually, the structure of this course, and the workload involved, is more like a graduate level course than an undergrad course, and you'll have field operations where you need to go to X location for Y reason on Z date...." etc.

2) "This course is also overbooked due to an error in the registration systems, so if you don't need it for your major to graduate this spring, I suggest and request that you take it another time and let someone else have your spot this time around"

Welp, there went that plan. I was done. I dropped it that afternoon from the computer I did my work on in the lab, and Food and Agricultural Sciences was something I'd never learn about in my college career.

This, of course, left my mornings free, so for a while I changed up my work schedule on certain days -- go to work in the morning hours when my parents went to work, work until noon or 1, then go to my classes in the afternoon and have the parents pick me up from the main campus on their way back out of town. This worked fairly well for the most part, and I would be able to avoid the bulk of the bitter cold mornings.

The Religious Studies class I took in the afternoons, however, changed my life.

No, not in that way.

At the time (and it may still be), the Religious Studies department at WVU was really small. I'm talking two or three small offices and maybe three professors, with those professors actually taking on the courseloads of the entire department, including the big 101 lecture hall courses. The chair of the department, and my own professor, was Dr. Gale. Dr. Gale was in his early 40s, bald, tall, and thin, and had an infectious energy about him -- he was stoked to be teaching, and he was as energizing as a street preacher was to relay his message. He was also ethnically and culturally American Jewish, though he didn't let that bias him, and was honestly probably the best professor (at least my personal favorite) I had throughout my entire time at WVU. I took four classes with Dr. Gale -- History of World Religions, Old Testament, New Testament, and The History of Evil, which was generally only offered as a capstone course for the actual majors, but he made exceptions for me and my friends Adam and Josh. Had I taken a fifth class, or had room/time for another one in my senior year, I would've been able to get a second minor in Religious Studies.

These were not classes that were meant to minister to you, but were classes that studied the religious texts from an outside perspective, both as literature and as interpretation. They were taught from the perspective that they were just books, they weren't sacred or literal (and at times -- almost all times -- they were completely non-factual). We studied who we believed wrote them with a historical bent, connecting them to world events, connecting the fables to the reality they were trying to relay -- they were really historical literature courses. I thoroughly enjoyed my courses with Dr. Gale, probably especially because I was and am an atheist. Upon my graduation, I wrote Dr. Gale a personal letter of thanks for everything he'd done for me in his classes, and let him know what a valuable asset the university had in him.

In other news, the rest of my life was looking up as well. The Criminally Goofy was in its heyday, I was well-liked amongst those that mattered, I was entering my fourth year at my job (which I would need to give up, temporarily, at the end of the semester in order to focus on graduation), and I became President of the WVU Anime Guild, which was undergoing a bit of restructuring as some of us were graduating or entering the really time-intensive year(s) of their studies.

That spring, I met a woman named Nicole; she was kind, well-traveled, fun to be around, and meshed well with all of us in our group of Freaks. She took a particular interest in me, for some reason, and we began dating. Our relationship lasted about...oh, probably two, two-and-a-half months, something like that, before it dissolved and we went our separate ways. It was my first boyfriend-girlfriend relationship as an adult; I was 21.

I was bitter about our breakup for a while; I didn't want to see her or talk to her when we returned to campus in the fall, and over time I loosened up on that quite a bit. My friend Dusten began dating her soon thereafter, but not without talking to me first ("bro code" or whatever) and I was happy for them; their relationship lasted a while before it also dissolved, and Nicole found another guy on the outskirts of our friends group -- a friend of a friend of a friend, etc etc -- who she ended up marrying a few years later. They've been married ever since, and I wish them nothing but happiness.

Nicole taught me a lot of things; the biggest one was that I wasn't exactly ready for a real relationship. Not emotionally or maturation-wise, anyhow. I still viewed relationships and "love" as I did when I was in high school, which is to say that I was naive. I'm not afraid to say that now, but I would've been too prideful to admit it back then. I was naive. I didn't necessarily know how to act in a relationship, or know how slowly they can and generally should develop. I didn't know not to wear my heart on my sleeve at all times, didn't know how to follow relationship social cues and norms because I had no clue what those cues and norms were.

The previous fall -- and I had forgotten to mention this in my previous posts -- I entered therapy at WVU. WVU had free counseling and therapy available to any of its students (and probably employees, too, I'm sure); I had decided that it was something I desperately needed in order to keep myself a bit more stable and even-keel, and I'd had a very dark few weeks/month or two where I could feel myself slipping dangerously close to suicidal levels again. My parents noticed this time, and I told them that I needed to start seeing somebody and perhaps get on some medication because, if I didn't, I feared that this time I would not come out of it.

My therapist was a kind old man named Claude; he had worked at WVU for probably 30 years at that point, and seemed so old, so ancient to me. But, he was very calm, very soft spoken, and much like Mr. Rogers if Mr. Rogers had worn thick glasses and had a bushy mustache. I told him my entire life story (much like this series of posts); I told him about my suicide attempt, I told him about my struggles with depression, isolation, being overworked, alcoholism, not feeling as if I had any control, etc. He was the first one to tell me that all of these feelings were normal and understandable after what I'd been through, but more importantly, he was the first one to tell me that it wasn't my fault that I was so fucked up.

It was a revolutionary concept to me at the time. I'd had such low self-esteem and such high-levels of self-loathing throughout my life that I'd never questioned that everything that I'd been through was somehow my fault. Well, most of it, anyway. There were some self-destructive decisions I'd made, and he helped me face those decisions. I was encouraged to try to view things from an outside perspective, to battle my demons one at a time and figure out why they existed -- they could only hold power over me if I let them.

I always felt emotionally spent and drained after seeing Claude, but it wasn't necessarily a bad thing. He sent me a referral over to the med center to be psychiatrically evaluated for depression meds; I was really nervous about that because one snap reaction or something of that sort, in that meeting, would mean I could be institutionalized. The psychiatrist seemed bored and mostly uninterested, and wrote me a prescription for one of the new drugs on the market at the time, Lexapro. I decided to give it a try. It wasn't cheap.

Lexapro did two things for me -- one, it worked fast; I almost immediately felt its effects after starting it. Two, those effects were that it made me feel absolutely nothing about anything. I've felt numb and disaffected before, but this was different. It was supposed to "even me out," so to speak -- to balance everything going on in my psyche and brain chemistry -- it did not do that. It made me not give a single flying fuck about anything, good or bad. It drained my creativity, and made it hard to sleep, but also hard to stay awake and concentrate because the drive to do so just wasn't there. That's not what I wanted and definitely something I couldn't continue. I relayed that to Claude, who relayed it to the psychiatrist, who wrote me a prescription for Prozac instead. I never filled said prescription as I was very, very apprehensive about any other medications after seeing what one of them would do to me.

I continued therapy off and on for about a year; I would usually see him once every week or two, and that eventually became once a month or so, and then eventually we ended our therapy relationship at the end of my second semester of doing it; Claude had told me he would be retiring soon, and I wished him well and thanked him for everything he did for me.

Claude died in 2007, and is buried in his hometown of Luray, Virginia. He was 70.

During the spring of 2004, I would eventually whittle down my hours enough to where I had to end up leaving my job in the Microbiology lab; this was partially my decision and partially not. My job was funded by research grant money and was university-sanctioned -- however, that grant was ending, and for several months by that time I had been training my replacement, a small girl from China who spoke very little English but was very sweet. She would be joining the lab as a volunteer to help cement her visa stuff, or something of that sort -- I didn't really ask many questions. Once she was trained up and could fulfill what I'd done in the lab, my employment had an end-date.

This experience was bittersweet; I'd loved my time working in the lab and it had given me a strong work ethic as well as taught me how to deal with difficult people (read: some of the post-docs and grad students in the department), and my former boss there is still a very close friend of not only me, but of our family; we had dinner with him when the wife and I visited back home in 2017. But, in fall 2004, I would start my first year of schooling in several years without a steady, constant income. I'd like to say that was somewhat freeing, and gave me a lot more free time to be able to focus on my classwork, but really all it did was make me poorer.

Fall 2004 was really strange, but it helped center me a bit. I had finished all of my required courses for my major but the senior capstone course for the Creative Writing track (that I couldn't take until spring 2005, it was basically equivalent to a thesis) and I still had a ton of hours to fill in order to graduate on time in May. My solution: take the Astronomy and Communications courses and then take every 100-or-200 level lit course I possibly could and pound my way through them. In addition to those, I also signed up for the only-offered-once-in-a-blue-moon Screenwriting course that I'd desperately wanted to take since I started at WVU.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's start with Astronomy.

I am, and have always been, the type of person who looks to the stars. I grew up with Star Wars and Star Trek, and believed (still do) that the best thing humanity can do with itself is get off this planet and explore the universe. I was, therefore, very excited about this astronomy course; I wanted to learn about faraway galaxies and how stars form and gravitational forces and where we were headed in the future...and I learned about approximately none of these things.

"This course is a 100-level course, but the work load is more like a graduate course," the instructor said on the first day. Bad sign. "it's also more of an astrophysics course, so if you're not familiar with physics or you haven't taken Physics 101, it'll be more difficult for you." Worse sign.

The course was taught by the chair of the Astronomy department (yes, they at the time did have that; I don't know if they still do) and he was an astrophysicist himself. From everyone I'd known who had previously taken the course, he was the professor that you did not want for it.

I tried very hard in that course to even attempt to understand the concepts he was covering. When I thought I had the equations right, I was dead wrong and was forced to start over. The readings were ponderous, the homework monumentally heavy, the exams excruciating. I had gone to the professor's office hours numerous times, taking large chunks out of my day to see if he could help me understand what I just couldn't grasp. I was so frustrated that I'd come across something that was so far out of my league of understanding that I didn't know where to begin, but I was able to name constellations and tell him how beautiful it was to see Draco rise, to study the Pleiades as they got brighter in the fall and winter months, and he didn't really have a response to that other than a small, tight-lipped smile. I think he was happy to see someone actively trying to do well, despite any knowledge inadequacies for the course. By the time I realized I was drowning with no chance of recovery and was 100% going to fail this class, it was too late to drop it. I was sealed into my fate. I took the final on a snowy December morning and got a 40% on it. I needed something like an 82% to even get the lowest C possible in the course to consider it a "passing" grade. I felt like shit. I wanted the Lexapro again.

When grades were posted, I mentally prepared myself to see that F in bold print, but I didn't. Instead, on my report card, I saw a B.

I did not question it then, and I have not questioned it since. Either my professor actually cared that I went to his office hours and was doing everything I could or there was a huge curve on the final or there was a grading mistake somewhere....it didn't matter to me, I had a B and I was not gonna ask about it, thankyouverymuchbye.

The Communications course, Small Group Communications, was much different.

Look, I'm not the first to say that most communications classes are a joke. I have to watch my words, however, as my wife has a degree in Communications. This class was one of my least favorite classes of my entire college career, because "small group communications" translates to "a semester full of nothing but group projects followed by an exam."

I was put into a group with four other people. One of them was very clearly a stoner, one of them was very clearly a preppy young business major girl from New Jersey who looked like a coke whore, one of them never showed up to class or to any of our meetings after the first one, and the fourth dropped the course rather quickly once he found out it was all group work projects. Whatever grade we got on the projects, no matter who did the work and who didn't, the entire group got. I petitioned against this with the professor and asked to just be allowed to do my project alone since none of these people gave a shit and I actually cared about the class and grade, and was very quickly shot down. Within two weeks I learned that none of these people were going to give a fuck, so fuck it, I'd just do it all myself anyhow because I wasn't about to let them pass off substandard (or zero) work as my own.

I did 95% of the work for the group project and we got an A on it. I got zero thanks from the rest of the "team" that we had. So much for group communication.

The final exam for that class was on a Saturday morning at 8AM -- it was the only Saturday final I had throughout my entire college career -- in December, in the middle of a goddamn snowstorm. They had known the storm was coming for several days and the students in the class had asked that the final be moved up to Thursday or Friday to avoid the storm, but the professor wouldn't budge on it, because -- and this had become evident throughout the semester prior anyhow -- he was an asshole. I almost died trying to get to campus that morning and again on the way home, and noticed that a lot of people didn't show up for it. Naturally, I still got an A on the final because I actually cared to show up and had done the requisite studying and coursework.

As mentioned previously, the only other class I was really interested in taking was the Screenwriting course, offered only that semester and (I believe) restricted to English/creative writing majors. It was being taught by an actual Hollywood screenwriter, which was glamorous in 2004 West Virginia. His name was Clark Perry, and Clark has now worked on a lot of things in Hollywood since -- but back then, he was a guy who was about the age I am now, a starving-artist writer with a few good spec scripts and some minor Hollywood work under his belt. He was also a mentor and a friend to me, not only then but for many years afterwards.

Clark was a fan of the art of film -- in his course we studied sequences, acts, scenes and dialogue. We were given "homework" assignments of watching several films that he deemed culturally significant and/or changed the way the world looked at filmmaking, including The Godfather, You Can Count on Me, North By Northwest, and Night of the Hunter, amongst others. He also taught us to visualize the action and dialogue taking place on the page as we were writing -- one page equaled one minute of screen time. That's something that always stuck with me -- one page, one minute of screen time.

I took the course to better refine my writing skills, particularly for the screen -- I had been "working on" (air quotes) a story that I wanted to be on the screen for several years, and it desperately needed to be refined. This class let me do that, with the only downside being that, well, it needed to be shared with the rest of the class for critique. We were only required to write the first 20 pages of our proposed screenplay -- I wrote close to 90. I didn't share all 90 with the class, of course, but I did share it with Clark, who gave me pointers on how to make it better and tighten up some scenes. Even at 90 pages (so, only 90 minutes of screen time) it wasn't complete -- though I was getting close to the climax of the film -- and to this day, I haven't completely finished it, though I do have ideas for the sequel as well as the entire universe of the film, so to speak. Like everything else, there's never enough time to write all of it.

No, I'm not going to talk about it here; some ideas are best kept private for fear they'll be stolen or otherwise ripped off in the future.

In that class, I also met another girl -- I know, common theme throughout my college years, right? Her name was Ingrid.

Ingrid was not my type. I do believe, however, that she was the basis of what my type would slowly become over the course of the next few years. My type at the time was slender, waif-like girls with long blonde (or red) hair, shy and submissive, glasses, braces, freckles, the whole gorgeous-but-don't-know-it thing. Or Asians. I had a thing for Asians for quite some time.

Ingrid was none of these things. Ingrid was short, round,  of strong Scottish or Irish descent (I can't remember which, it was a long time ago now) with naturally reddish hair she'd bleached out to blonde and kept to shoulder length. She did have very pale skin and freckles, so I'll give her that. She was rather quiet and observant in public, but in private was (or, could be) rather brash and aggressive. This intrigued me. Ingrid was also engaged to be married to some guy named Mike who lived out of state -- I found this out when I had actually asked her out -- and she and I had had a few classes together in the English department over the years. We shared a few friends but were never really close ourselves, nor did we even really know each other.

Well, that changed, sort of, by the time we were taking Clark's class together.

I want to step back for a moment and let all of you in on my mindset at the age of almost-22. I was, ahem, not a good person then. I've touched on it briefly here before, but 2002-04 were the years of peak asshole Brandon. I am not proud of the person I was then -- very misogynistic, entitled, attention-seeking, a drunk for some of it, etc -- basically, I was the early 2000s version of one of those...what do they call themselves? Incels? 

Except by late 2004, I had some limited sexual experience under my belt (no pun intended), and I wanted more of it. By the end of the year it had been something like eight months, and for someone of that age, that's an eternity. So I made a rather evil plan -- I was going to seduce her. I was going to seduce an engaged woman. Secretly, she would be my conquest. 

Again, I wasn't a good person, okay? I'm not that guy anymore, and feel like I have to keep saying that so that y'all don't get the wrong idea about me fifteen years later.

Please note, this was the first time I'd ever tried anything like this. I wasn't exactly a romancer, though I wanted to be. I had a lot of "good game" that was really just all in my head. But -- I did have a way with words, and I was definitely good at making women be interested in me by using those words (it's how I helped land Daisy, though she denied that when I read this paragraph aloud to her).

So I put my plans into motion. I befriended Ingrid. I let her know all about me. I gave her access to my diary. We spent hours talking on AIM. In the process, I got to know her more. I got to know her strengths and weaknesses, her turn ons and turn offs, etc. She was, as she said, an open book, and likewise I was with her. I also made no secret of the fact that I found her sexually attractive, though it's not like I was super-blatant about it or anything. I was just forward and flirty. She and I toyed around with the term "dirty little secret" in our conversations, which was -- not gonna lie -- really hot. It was no secret that on some level, she was definitely attracted to me as well, though it's not like she'd ever come out and say it. She never did.

Truthfully I am not sure what attracted me to her at the time. She was far from a "vulnerable prey" type of person, and I was far from a predator (I was still very shy in person; even though I put on the mask of oozing confidence, this is still part of my personality today -- it's known as social anxiety). It was a strange scenario to be sure. I think more than anything else it was that she appeared to be a fully upstanding individual on the surface, but had a bad girl mentality right underneath.

Ingrid rented a house off-campus with a few roommates. One morning, none of them were home, and I didn't have class until the afternoon, so she invited me over to watch a movie. I was so naive and inexperienced in the world that at the time, I didn't realize that this was sort of supposed to be a "Netflix and chill" scenario, because really, that concept didn't exist yet. When she nearly immediately took a shower when we got there, and I was sitting on the couch looking around the room like an idiot, I should've been heavily tipped off then as well, but I wasn't. If anything, I was nervous and slightly intrigued. Was she turning the tables on me? Was it now I who was being "seduced"?

I wouldn't even think about any of these things, or many of the blatant hints she'd been dropping, until years later.

Even during the times I was not a good person, I prided myself on being a gentleman at all times, or at least I tried to be after I'd stopped drinking and had some clarity again. I'd completely re-evaluated myself as a person -- the therapy had helped with that -- and it changed my framework (mostly) on how I viewed and treated other people. So, that day, I had a crisis of conscience. Sort of. I also wasn't confident at all in my sexual abilities, would they have come into play, and I was (at the time) maybe only 10 pounds lighter than I am now, so I didn't have much body confidence either.

So she took her shower, redressed in sweats, and we cuddled on the couch watching The Princess Bride, a movie I've seen probably twenty or thirty times over the course of my life, and nothing happened. I did not pull the trigger, primarily because my conscience knew it was wrong when she had an engagement ring on her finger.

I knew I could have, though. We probably could have done anything that day. Neither of us would have stopped the other. And that knowledge was enough.

After the movie, I had class and she had work, and we returned to campus. It was sort of a surreal drive back to campus.

After that day, my moral compass had definitely been set. I would never again attempt to "seduce" anyone already in a relationship. No matter how attracted to them I was.

Ingrid and I gradually grew apart over the course of the next year or so. She had another class or two with me, and after college our friendship dissolved. Last I knew, she had broken up with the guy she was engaged to at the time, and had later gotten married to someone else. We were never friends on Facebook (this is before Facebook was a "thing") and she is unfindable on there now, if she even has or had one.

Meanwhile, in the Screenwriting course, my script was one of the more well-liked ones in the class (though far from the best-written; that "award" goes to an acquaintance of mine who was writing a biopic of Elizabeth I, and what he'd done was phenomenal).

And so, with that stupid Saturday morning snowstorm final for my Communications course, the last fall semester of my undergrad career ended. I turned 22 the next week, and would start my final semester of college the following January.

Places, part V

2002: UN Weapons Inspectors Entered Iraq, Attempting To Find Weapons Of Mass Destruction

I used to think I was so ready for 2002, so ready that it needed to be ready for me, because I was comin'.

Instead, 2002 was waiting for me in a dark alley with a crowbar.

In 2002 I felt like I'd fallen into a good groove at WVU. I was nineteen, I was passing my classes, I had a job and solid income from it, and I had finally chosen a major -- English. I chose it primarily because there was a Creative Writing track to the course of study, which would bypass several of the otherwise useless (to me) higher-level courses as well as award me what was, in essence, a minor in Creative Writing. I excelled at literature courses, most of the classic literature courses featured books and plays that were in the public domain -- so I could download them for free from the internet -- or purchase a $2 paperback Dover Thrift Edition of them, and for the Creative Writing classes I could legitimately let my imagination work for me and didn't have to take final exams. After all, I'd wanted to be a writer, a creator, right? The major felt like a logical choice.

Plus, it helped that my aunt was the graduate school secretary for the department and gave me the inside track on who was teaching what and when, and could even get me some free books on occasion.

With that major plan on file and with me on track to complete my degree in four years, not five (as was becoming more common even then, what with people taking smaller courseloads and stretching out their education), I thought I was golden. Until, of course, I started getting the questions.

"What will you do with an English degree?" Teach, write, do as little as possible and make money.

"Is there any money in that?" Not really.

"Do you want to write? Can you write? Can't you do that without a degree?" Yes, sort of, and yes, but only if you're really lucky.

I was asked one or more of these questions, sometimes all of them, almost every single day. This was the early 2000s; you wanted a business degree, an engineering degree, a computer science degree -- that's what people expected out of me. Those were the "hot majors." Even my previous choice of psychology sounded better than majoring in -- as people said and perceived -- was "the language you already speak." When I tried to explain the degree was much more than that, I was waved off as a joke or a slacker.

Whatever, man -- ain't nothin' gonna break my stride and all that. I smoked a lot of stress cigarettes in 2002.

As I was entering my coursework, I started to spend more and more time online. I had just gotten a new computer for "Christmas," which was really code for "because you started college and your old computer was six years old and vastly underpowered" -- an HP Pavilion, gray and purple, and $799 at Walmart...with a printer. 128MB of blazing fast RAM and a 40GB hard drive meant that I had finally leapt into the 21st century of computing. I still had dial-up internet, but in rural West Virginia...meh, what could you do? Ya couldn't have it all, you know. Even better, the new computer ran Windows XP, the newest and fastest at the time, and it had a CD-RW drive -- finally, I could download music and burn CDs. I could make backups on disc of all of my important files. I could do everything I needed to do with ease.

Because I spent more time than ever online (thank you, unlimited internet access and dedicated phone line), I was constantly on AOL Instant Messenger -- AIM, as mentioned in my last post. Most of my communication was done via AIM, and I began slowly reconnecting with people from high school as well as a few new friends I'd made in college in classes or in/around the student union. It was easy for a smoker to make friends -- stand outside long enough and someone will come up to you to bum a smoke. When they do, you strike up a conversation with them. After a few chance meetings, you really begin talking and/or start hanging out, and a group forms -- they bring their friends along, and a sort of community is started over the course of a few weeks or months.

I met most of my friends this way. And, much like junior high and high school, we formed a band of Freaks. Except this was college now, so our band of Freaks had people with multiple piercings and tattoos, multicolored hair, studded leather jackets, etc. For the first time, I had many openly gay, bi, trans, or pansexual friends. All of us came from all walks of life and even from different states and countries. For the first time in a long time, as we all settled in and got to know each other, I felt like I really had a group of supportive, caring friends again -- a family away from my family, people who were there for one another, had experiences with one another, inside jokes, references, stories -- I finally found a cast of characters I could fit into, after so long.

I was not the official "leader." I'm not sure we actually had one. But if there was an unofficial leader, I certainly filled and played the part. I was a matchmaker, I was the one who facilitated connections, I was the one who kept the main group together. And a lot of that was done on my home time hours, across AIM and AIM chat rooms.

There was a big difference, though -- all of these people lived in Morgantown, either on-campus or off campus. Most of them had vehicles, as they had to be able to get to and from work and school somehow. Most of them lived pretty closely to one another, too -- either in the dorms or shared apartment complexes or what have you. I lived twenty miles away, on top of a mountain, at home with my parents; additionally, unless I was off work that day, my schedule dictated class, a short bit of break time between classes (only some days) and then to the lab or back up the mountain -- leaving very little wiggle room for socialization most times.

Even though I felt good about my college career (at this point, anyway) I still suffered from burnout at times -- I would look for excuses not to leave the house to go to work or campus, and if a class didn't have an attendance policy and put all of its study notes online in PDF or PowerPoint, then I wouldn't go to it except for the exam days. Outwardly I was fine. Inwardly I was struggling. I was constantly tired -- I would come home, eat something small, and go straight to bed at 6PM, then get up around 2 or 3 and do whatever work needed to be done before I went to campus the next morning. I installed a coffee pot on my computer desk and used the shit out of it. I would stuff a towel or blanket under my door in the winter months, set the fan to blow out the window, and chainsmoke while typing up papers and talking to friends on AIM -- much to my parents' chagrin. I did more socializing online than offline. Faster computer and faster internet meant a faster life.

But burnout is a bitch, and I was charging straight for it.

I don't remember when or why I started drinking. I was never really a drinker before, even when I'd had the opportunity, and severe alcoholism ran in my family (both sides, from what I've been told). I just remembered that it slowed me down and the effects of a few drinks would increase the buzz from a cigarette tenfold; it made it much more enjoyable to smoke, instead of just out of habit and out of needing nicotine.

It started small at first. The student union had a bar and a pool hall in the basement, and they started selling draft beer at 10AM. I wasn't even 20 yet, let alone 21, but this was a bar in a student union pool hall; they didn't necessarily care about carding people. I also looked older than I was, especially if I grew out my beard somewhat, and very rarely would anyone question me. So it started out there. I'd drink two beers on an empty stomach after being wired on coffee since the middle of the night when I got up, and would get a nice buzz before class. If I didn't have class or didn't have to work until the afternoon hours, some of the older people in our group would get a pitcher or three, and we'd play pool for hours on end as long as I could be there.

I would like to stop here for a moment to note that I have an addictive personality, and this all became a problem for me very quickly. There are large chunks of 2002 and 2003 I don't remember. I say this because I wasn't necessarily blacking out, per se, just that I was such a drunk sometimes that time just escaped me. I will piece together what I can of these years here, but a lot of it is simply a blur, and it didn't take long for this to happen.

Things...escalated. I guess that's the best way I can describe it. Soon I was no longer just drinking ill-gotten beers in the student union, but drinking a lot at home too. First it was a shot here and there, then I began keeping beer in my room next to my desk (my parents were always well-stocked with various alcohols, so it wasn't seen as weird or anything). I grew a fondness for Southern Comfort, which my dad drank as well, and as it was always in the house, I could easily get lit. Southern Comfort, vodka, some occasional tequila and rum, etc -- it was all the same to me. Whatever I could drink, my body (and psyche) wanted it. I purchased a flask, overpriced as it was, from the record store on campus and always kept it on me. There was always something in it; I would tilt it back in the bathroom or in an empty hallway or classroom or what-have-you -- it was hidden.

For some reason I was not a social drinker (aside from the pool-hall beers). It was like a dirty secret that I never let anyone else in on. Some of it was shame, some of it was classic addiction behaviors. I never drank before work or at work, because I thought that to be classless drunkard behavior; I was a more, shall we say, upscale alcoholic. I kept mints and a toothbrush/paste in my bag, and always had some aftershave or extra deodorant or what-have-you on hand so that I could cover up any smell of alcohol. I found that Axe worked pretty well for this too.

Nobody ever asked any questions, and if anyone ever suspected anything they never let on. There were a great many classes I went to with a good buzz on, and several presentations I gave that way as well. I would actively tell people I was not a drinker or a partier (the second part, at least, was true) and that I didn't get out much because I worked a lot and had a lot of classes to worry about. While that was true as well, I also feared that in a party scenario I would lose complete control, black out, do things I shouldn't, etc. As a control freak, I really internally wrestled with that; I needed to be in control of everything at all times, and when I had enough alcohol in me, I couldn't trust myself that I would be.

I'm sure this says any number of things about me, psychologically speaking.

In fall 2002, myself and a group of friends started the WVU Anime Guild, which later became the WVU Japanese Animation and Manga Society (WVUJAMS). I wrote up a charter and a constitution for it when I should've been reading middle-English Chaucer texts for a big paper I had for that class (one of my least favorite classes of my entire college career). The Guild was made up of a group of nerds -- we preferred to call ourselves "geeks" at the time -- and eventually became an official WVU organization. At the time it was simply a group of us using a piano lounge on campus with a large TV in it as a viewing room, and randomly recruiting others who would wander by or see one of our flyers in a hallway somewhere, and stop in. As a founding member I took one of the low-ranking posts and let my friend Ben run the show for the most part. I did not have the time, or the energy most of the time, to devote to running an organization -- and I didn't live on campus, which meant that if I had an exam the next morning or a big paper due that I needed to finish, I wouldn't be able to be in town late that night for the meeting. There were many meetings I missed in that first year or so -- we held them on Wednesday nights, from 7 to 10 or so. Sometimes they'd start a bit earlier, sometimes they'd run later. My mind was already shot most of the time from classes, work, and...well, the drinking, so I was frequently a spectator that first year and not one of the prime-time players.

Weekends were spent at home for the most part; I would meter out my schoolwork during the week and kept a meticulous planner -- this is also how I would remember things that alcohol would otherwise make me forget. I always knew exactly what my tasks were for my classes and when my assignments were due, so I would always know what day I would need to be working on them. Because I slept weird hours during the week, when I could actually rest on weekends I felt like dying if I was forced to get up. I began keeping empty Gatorade bottles next to my bed so when I needed to pee, I could just roll over and pee in the bottle, then seal it and roll back over to go back to sleep -- getting up and walking to the bathroom would wake me up enough to where I'd never fall back asleep.

I also realize this sounds disgusting and terrible, and it is, but I had to be able to get some real rest. The box springs on my bed were broken as well and falling in (I wouldn't get a new bed until the year before I moved out of my parents' house) so it made getting quality sleep that much harder.

If I left the house on the weekends, it was only to go grocery shopping with my mother, and that was generally only so that I could either get more cigarettes or food that was by all accounts as equally unhealthy -- I was not the person then that I am now, and my diet at the time consisted of alcohol, snack foods (chips and the like), ramen, fried things, and salami sandwiches. Rarely would I eat fruits or vegetables, rarely would I ever get any real exercise -- I'd stopped riding my bike by that point -- and I was getting fatter by the month. Of course, I noticed this, and it made me more depressed, and (of course) made me drink more.

I would question, many times, why I was actually in college. I wasn't doing what I wanted to do with my life, the classes I was taking (for the most part) in 2002 were the core classes that had nothing to do with my major, but were required for all majors, and I always felt as if I was killing -- or wasting -- time. Sure, I was better off than my high school acquaintances who had joined the military straight out of high school in June 2001...three months before 9/11...but that was a small comfort only.

I turned 20 in December 2002. I don't remember it. My parents generally took me out to dinner, to the closest Olive Garden (in Pittsburgh), and we would do Christmas shopping afterward at Century III Mall (remember when malls were a thing?) By 2002, Century III was already on the decline (it is now completely closed down with the exception of JCPenney, and is set to be demolished in the near future), so I don't remember whether we went there or not. I was always a big fan of Burlington Coat Factory, which had a massive store next to the mall, but by then it was also on the decline and didn't carry much of anything I wanted to wear anymore.

For Christmas that year, my parents got me the reissued Danelectro Convertible Pro in what I now know, in my adult research, as the color tone "Blueburst."

I still own the guitar and it plays beautifully; it's also worth a lot more now than it was when my parents purchased it; it is, as they say, collectible and rare -- apparently the blue one is really rare. It's not super-expensive or anything, but it's more than doubled in price compared to what was paid for it at retail.

I don't remember the end of the year; I wasn't in a great place anyway. What I do remember is that, upon finishing my third semester of college, I felt a great sense of relief that it was behind me.

Also, I was able to sell the unwieldy, 20-pound hardcover Chaucer book back to the bookstore for like $40, so go me.



2003: The US Invaded Iraq Without A UN Mandate, And The Iraq War Started

2003 was a year of great changes, both in myself and in the world. There was, after all, the above aforementioned beginning of a new war, and with it, cries and protests, millenials calling it as akin to this generation's Vietnam, etc. I went to a number of anti-war rallies on campus myself, actually. I remember them being sad, but loud, affairs.

"Sad, loud affairs" would be a running theme of 2003 for me. I mustered some optimism as I entered the spring semester in January, because I was finally getting into taking some of the classes I wanted to take -- sociology, anthropology, some of the actual creative writing courses, social work, and the like. I also took literature courses taught by some of my favorite professors in 2003, some of whom I am still friends with to this day.

If 2001 was a tumultuous year and 2002 was the year of alcoholism and (more!) depression, 2003 was a year of experimentation and discovery. I'd made friends, good ones, friends I'm mostly still in contact with today -- Herby, Adam, Jessica, Josh, Ben, etc -- and gathered a few more that have since dropped off the face of the planet after college. I had begun writing in earnest again, trying to piece together short stories and/or poems, or pitch ideas to comic companies (something I'd stopped doing for a few years). I also found myself, for the first time in my life, having strong political opinions and ideologies beginning to form, and that I was not a fan of George W. Bush. I became fairly liberal in a lot of my viewpoints, though I was always conservative on things like guns and government spending. To this day, even with all of the mass shootings that have happened as of late, I am still very pro-gun. It's not the guns, it's the people, and it's mentally-disturbed white men more than anything else.

I realize that I am a white man and could at times be classified as "mentally disturbed," but I'm not insane nor am I violent; I am, for the most part, a pacifist.

Anyway, I started 2003 with a revised outlook on life, or at least I tried to. I'd spent the winter break drinking rather heavily and glued to my computer, keeping in contact with my friends through AIM and distracting myself from the rest of the world. I switched to beer for the most part and found that it would take far more of them to actually get me drunk, and therefore I would (theoretically) drink less or "drink more healthily" by eliminating the harder alcohols -- this was spurred on by what is still referred to by my parents as "the rum incident," in which I drank an entire bottle of rum and ate half of a red velvet cheesecake in the span of about two hours during their Christmas party, and led to a vomiting fit that lasted most of the night afterwards. My brother and best male friend Michael were witnesses to some of that sickness.

For me, that was rock bottom. At the time. I needed to stop, I needed to end it. The thought of hard alcohol made me ill after that night, and beer had become just beer -- I could distance myself from it, I didn't need it to function or anything like that. So, slowly, I stopped drinking. I got rid of the flask -- the flapper top was beginning to leak anyhow -- and once I had distanced myself from most alcohols of any and all sorts, I was able to pretty much stop completely. To this day I really don't drink outside of the occasional beer or mixed drink -- and only when it's rare and appropriate, or part of an event. I learned my lesson all of those years ago and have only occasionally fallen off the wagon since.

I'd well settled into college by spring 2003, but I was still lonely. I'd never been able to find love, or a real girlfriend of any sort. I wasn't even completely sure I was straight, and for a while did not identify completely as such. 2003 was a year of experimentation of all sorts, and I'll leave it at that.

There were women, of course. I had a sort of strained relationship with my female best friend, Brittany, who didn't go to WVU with me (well, she hadn't yet gone there at that point). We were very close, yet she and I hadn't seen each other in some time. We kept in contact via AIM and letters/emails, kept journals for one another, etc. I'd known as early as the beginning of 2002 or so that I was falling for Brittany; we'd gone to high school together and had gotten close then, but she'd had a boyfriend at the time. She'd had a close friend at her own college who had recently died, and she fell in love with his friend afterwards (they actually ended up having a storybook romance and getting married a few years later, and are married with a kid to this day). Brittany and I had mutual feelings for each other, but it would never be in the cards for us. When she found her now-husband and they began their relationship, I won't say I wasn't hurt, but I also was not going to stand in their way. I remember being bitter and jaded about it because I didn't really know how to process it.

Brittany and I fought a lot; truthfully, I don't know why or how she put up with me not just as a friend, but as a person, during those times. When I was drinking I was not a nice guy, and had a tendency to slip even more into depression and "poor me" self-wallowing; I also had a sense of entitlement that cut like a knife as well, and that didn't help much either. I was invited to her wedding but did not attend; while I was indeed working that day, I can't help but think even now that, deep down, it was really because I was being stubborn and bitter, jealous that it wasn't me.

In the years since, I have matured and have become much more level-headed; Brittany and I are still friends to this day, but we differ drastically in our political views and opinions, and have seen each other but once or twice in person since college. Our friendship would grow apart further and further as the years went on, though she did get me and the wife our Keurig for our wedding present. Falling out of constant contact with her is something I regret.

But I digress.

In March 2003, I needed an outlet to vent my thoughts and practice my writing. Blogging wasn't even called blogging yet, or if it was, it wasn't what it became in the following years. LiveJournal was around, but it was pedestrian and too bogged down with too many users. I wanted someplace of my own that would be quieter, I could invite readers to follow, and I could make look and feel the way I wanted it to. That was DearDiary.net. I don't know, exactly, how I found the site -- I don't remember, really -- but I started a diary there. It was called, from the beginning to its end, The Criminally Goofy. I'd found the phrase in a review of one of the Ramones' records from the '80s, and co-opted it for my own use.

Within a year, out of 28,000 running active diaries on the site, mine was the most popular. I was getting 15,000 hits a month. I was interacting with all of my readers and "fans." All of my friends at WVU were intensely interested and it was like must-see TV when I posted a new entry. And I wasn't saying anything out of the ordinary -- I was telling stories about my daily life, about interactions I had with the people I knew. I had a cast of characters as well -- I would use the diary as a medium for discussions with my "gay guardian angel," Leonard, for example. I would have conversations with The Fates, who generally "sent" me letters that were written and sounded like office memos, etc. It was as much theatre as I could muster on a single webpage, and people loved it.

I met a lot of people through The Criminally Goofy, some who stayed in my life longer than others. I even inspired a few friends to start their own diaries on there, to varying degrees of success. Cathy kept a diary on there and kept it running long after I shut mine down, for example.

However, there's one friend I met through that site that I've been very close to almost since that diary's inception, and that is my friend Jae.

I will always refer to Jae as Jae in writing here (or anywhere else), even though that's not her real name -- we both have our reasons for that and she is an intensely private person. Jae and I were acquainted early and often through that site, from reading and commenting on one another's posts, and formed a friendship that soon spread to email, AIM, phone (and, later, Facebook). I always saw Jae as a kindred spirit, a soul split off from mine -- or, at the very least, coming from the same sort of soul stock I came from. While I had suffered from some pretty extreme depression issues, Jae dealt with, shall we say, a lot more than that -- something she never shied away from talking about but definitely something I don't speak or write about lightly as it is not my place to discuss it.

Over the years, Jae became a very close friend and she is one of the very, very few people I've known for as long as I have that I've not only never met in person, but have remained in near constant contact with; I just sent her an email this morning, in fact. She and I don't talk anywhere near as much as we used to, though -- life is life, and it's funny like that sometimes.

Because of my diary I was able to begin to feel a bit more confident in myself and as a person -- as I mentioned, there were women in my life. I'd chat them up, and when I felt it was appropriate or if someone mentioned it in passing, I'd eventually let them see the real me and give them the link. I was not shy about any of it, really; my diary was about the only exhibitionist side I had as the rest of my life I was intensely private about. It also gave me a way to be social with people outside of being in person with them -- they'd read my posts, shoot me an instant message, and then we'd talk. This wasn't just limited to college folk; I had many people who would IM me out of the blue saying they'd found my diary and liked it; we'd generally talk for a few days or weeks and then go our separate ways again. It's like I was a minor internet celebrity.

The diary did alienate some people too, of course; some acquaintances from high school read it and weren't necessarily big fans of me, but I at the time thought that was jealousy. 2003 was like the toddler years of the internet. Nobody had any real caution or secrecy then. Thinking back on some of the stuff I shared about my life then completely mortifies me now. But, it was what it was. Some people got me, and some people didn't. Some family members learned way too much about me, some didn't know the diary existed. My parents knew of its existence but I made sure they could never find it. If they ever did, they didn't tell me about it.

To this day I still have most of the entries saved as full webpages. An excerpt:


2 Jun 2003 - I Have a Fan!

10:58 AM Monday
CURRENTLY WEARING: Green Lantern t-shirt (yes, the same one), green boxers (yes, the same ones).

CURRENTLY LISTENING TO: Premium Blend on Comedy Central.

CURRENTLY DRINKING: Coffee, as soon as I get a cup from the kitchen.


So wait till all of you hear this. I'm sitting at my computer last night (where else would I be, hmm?) when, out of the blue, a fellow diarist whose diary I have been reading on a regular basis, IMs me and thanks me for the supportive comment I left in their diary. This turned into a 5 and 1/2 hour conversation in which I thoroughly enjoyed, and during which this diarist told me how they like my diary...teehee! I have a fan! Who is this diarist, you may ask? Why am I being so secretive about their name? Because I was asked to be secretive and I don't want to betray their privacy. :) I'll just say that the conversation made me really happy. Kinda made me feel like I'm famous or something, like I'm being approached in public by my fans. I was positively giddy. I still am to some extent. I have made a new friend. Okay, so it's an online friend. Still a friend. I don't make friends that easily. That's why I'm happy.

So what else is new with me? Well, B and I had a fight yesterday. Then last night we fixed things up. She actually apologized first, which amazed me. Usually I'm the first to apologize about anything, regardless whether I'm at fault or not. I whip out heartfelt apologies like I'm drawing a pistol at the O.K. Corral. I think I'm overly apologetic in all situations, regardless of whether or not I'm at fault. I think it's a way to escape the situation so that I don't have to deal with it.



And so on.

The "fan" I was referring to, amusingly enough, was Jae. B was my friend Brittany. I gave many people codenames or letters for their names, except for the ones who personally told me that they just didn't care. Over the course of 2003 alone I probably wrote 100 posts or more. My writing style was far less refined then, and I was far more whiny and bitchy. My posts were also far shorter than these ones -- DearDiary.net didn't have a save option, so if I wanted to write a longer post that I couldn't finish in one sitting, I had to save it in a Word document to come back to later, lest I risk losing it if my internet dropped connection or something else happened.

In fall 2003, I became vice president of the WVU Anime Guild, as I had a bit more time after cleaning up my core classes. My best male friend, Michael, would stay late in town for the meetings with us and then I'd ride back up the mountain with him (I went to high school with Michael, and he lived a few miles down the road from me). Michael was -- and I'm pretty sure still is -- gay. Really gay. He was the first gay friend I really had in my life, and he was just beginning to figure it out himself. When we first started college together, he was all about girls; he'd fallen in love with a girl (I can't remember now who it was, but it was someone we knew) and she'd rejected him, which made him morose. He gradually began to open up his opportunities; he first came out as bi, and then later confirmed that he was, yes, completely gay, and somehow he'd always known that. I was progressive enough at the time to know that sexuality wasn't just about the act, and made sure he knew I supported him and that he never had to feel like he needed to hide himself or who he was around me, or what-have-you -- and that extended to my parents, as well. My parents adored Michael, enough to where on nights when we'd come home late from the Guild meetings, they'd make sure he had dinner waiting for him at our house. Michael spent more time at my house than any other friend I've ever had; he was like a brother to me.

Before you ask, the answer is no. While I was experimenting and questioning my own sexual fluidity around this time -- something that I'm not going to discuss here -- Michael and I never did anything. It would've been really weird and I was absolutely not his type anyhow; he'd told me as much and I knew his type anyhow, and they were dudes who were the exact opposite of who I was. I wasn't offended by this, of course -- to each their own, and it's not like I was trying to get into his pants -- but I knew several people (both male and female) who were trying like hell to do so. One of them was a girl named Beth, who I was really into at the time; she didn't want me, she wanted my gay friend. Oh, sweet irony.

I did have my first sexual encounters in 2003, and am proud to say that I was sober by then. I'll leave it at that, but I'll say those encounters were fairly far from conventional ones. It is what it is, I'm not ashamed of any of it, but I'm also still a fairly private person and those involved don't need me telling the story to the public now, sixteen years later.

The early 2000s were a weird time, man. I mean, I bleached my hair and wore denim vests with Hawaiian shirts:

Outside the WVU student union, September 24, 2003

It's shocking to me how young I look in that photo, but that's me. Blonde hair and all, no glasses, no graying beard or vape in my hand, existential angst well-buried; it was a simpler time. I barely recognize that Brandon now. I used this as a profile photo as well as part of a banner photo for my DearDiary for years, even after I no longer had the blonde hair.

I also really miss that vest; I "lost" it at some point in one of my many moves after college and have no idea where it went. I'm sure it ended up in a Goodwill or DAV thrift store someplace. I want that Hawaiian shirt back, as well -- I ended up donating that in 2009 upon my move to Kansas.

I turned 21 in December 2003, and as I recall it wasn't particularly noteworthy. My parents always threw a Christmas/birthday party for me, and I remember that some friends were over (Michael and Brittany amongst them, I believe) but it wasn't a huge affair or anything of that sort.

After Christmas and the holiday break ended, I would start what I refer to as "The Glory Days of Brandon" -- but that's a story for the next, and final, post in this series.

Places, part IV

A warning to my readers:

This one gets dark, and/or may be triggering to some friends and family.

Reader discretion is advised.
Don't say I didn't warn you.

...the high school (with some college) years, section II...

2000: George W. Bush Defeated Al Gore In A Controversial Presidential Election

I finished my junior year of high school in June 2000 to little fanfare; I had spent most of the first half of the year recovering from Becca as well as burying myself in schoolwork. I didn't miss a single day of school throughout my entire high school career at Preston, and ended up getting awarded a perfect attendance certificate for it when I graduated.

I was the genius to my extended family, after all, and they expected great things from me. My mother wanted me to go to culinary school or become a doctor or a lawyer; meanwhile, I really didn't have much to offer. My work ethic then wasn't what it is now (read: it's much better now for most things), and I learned very quickly -- especially as an adult -- that always being the smartest person in the room in West Virginia isn't that difficult a feat to accomplish.

I did not want to go to college, yet it was fully expected of me and was a given that it would happen whether I wanted it to or not. My mother, who was particularly controlling and domineering in those days, basically forced me into it. As an adult I can see her reasoning now compared to then -- she wanted better for me than she'd had. She, who got married at 20, had me at 22, hadn't gone to college until her 30s (and even then part time), and who had given up whatever dreams she'd had to raise me and take care of me. I see that now, when I couldn't then.

There was also the factor that I had that vast amount of intelligence that most people around me did not possess, and I felt intense pressure (both from myself as well as other people in my life) to put it to use, to refine it, to go to college and "make something of myself." I lived in rural West Virginia -- there wasn't much to do there job-wise unless I wanted to slave away at the university or work at Wal-Mart, or drive 100 miles (round trip) per day to work in a coal mine or a Toyota factory. While my intelligence was my biggest asset, it was also my biggest hindrance on my psyche. I saw myself as above menial work, above a menial life. All I knew that I wanted to do once I finished school was that I needed to escape the black hole of my state.

But that wasn't helping me then. In summer 2000 I was still a kid without direction, and a kid without opportunity and means to find it.

So, once more, I turned to music, writing, and introspection.

I had received a stratocaster and a screaming-loud practice amp for Christmas the previous year, and when my parents weren't home I hooked it all up and let it wail, usually through an effects pedal. I'm sure I was nowhere near as good as I thought I was, and though this guitar is literally sitting next to me in my office almost twenty years later, I can't remember the last time I played it -- I'd be so out of practice now that I wouldn't know where to begin. As I couldn't read music (and still can't), I subscribed to Guitar World magazine (which yes, still exists) and had new songs delivered to my door every month in the form of tablature, which I could read and play. I tried to learn all I could. I imagined myself, as many teenagers did, as being in a band, or starting one -- the impetus behind that being that if I were a rock star, I could also get the fuck out of West Virginia that way.

In my formative teenage years, my musical tastes had gone off in many strange directions all at once. By 2000, I was beginning to refine them into what they are today. Coincidentally, most popular music at the time was absolutely going right down the shitter, so I learned to appreciate stuff that I never would have appreciated before, or would've written off as stupid or otherwise meaningless. Yes, I discovered Weezer and Beck, but I also discovered Fleetwood Mac and garnered a new appreciation for some of the oldies and classics like Johnny Rivers and Dusty Springfield. I was equal parts Motown and Epitaph -- Bad Religion, The Offspring, and Rancid called to my rebellious side, while The Temptations and The Chi-Lites soothed it. There was a song for every feeling, for every mood, and as I had just upgraded to a 56k modem (lightning had blown out my old 14.4), I now had access to find more music quickly. I began amassing large playlists in the infancy of the mp3 years, and burned out my 3-disc CD player in a year or so from everything I was running through it.

Still though, I was mostly unhappy in my life. I had no idea what I'd be doing after high school. The thought of an uncertain future scared me, and the pressure to perform well in school (even though I was getting straight As) was crushing. I had nothing to do during the summer, so in addition to music, I filled notebooks with journaling, recording the day's thoughts and feelings, and hoping that some anime would play on one of the basic cable channels I had access to. Most of the time, it did not.

I don't know if I can accurately describe what life was like in a time before the internet and smartphones dominated every aspect of it -- to people who didn't live through it, I mean. It was, for lack of a better word, boring. Especially in West Virginia. When the school year was on, I could bury myself in books and papers and work/study until I tired myself out on any given night. When school was out, it was three months of...nothing. With oppressive summer heat and no AC on top of that nothing. I could have been researching career paths or trying to figure out what college I was going to be forced to attend, but...I just didn't have the drive or the care to do so.

When I was a child, I had some hopes and dreams. As mentioned before here, I always wanted to be a creator. I wanted to be a writer, I wanted to draw comic books, I wanted to write novels and movie scripts and television series. I'd also been inspired at a young age by Ghostbusters, when Dr. Venkman tells Peck that he had "PhDs in parapsychology and psychology." It was the and that I'd found so fascinating there. I looked up schools who had parapsychology programs -- one of them, ironically enough, was New York University. I ordered the catalog and literature from them only to find that tuition there -- for fall 2001 -- was just shy of $30k per semester.

I was smart, but I wasn't $60k-a-year-in scholarships smart. At the time, I didn't really know what student loans were, and as an adult nearing 40 now, I am very glad I didn't.

Because I was already on the college track, I'd taken the ACT in the spring. I got a 23. A full ride, room-and-board-and-everything scholarship to WVU started at 26, so after studying, prepping, quizzing myself and generally not sleeping for a week or so beforehand, I took the test a second time. I got a 24 the second time. I'd also already been enrolled in dual-credit courses starting that fall, both Composition English 1 and 2 (which ironically, I'd be teaching ten years later), and History 151 and 152. The credits earned from them would transfer to most colleges in the area.

Looking back on this time now, I can see that I was very depressed, and had been since I was rejected by Becca. That was just the beginning of a long downward slope that got worse by the end of the summer. As mentioned, I became more isolated and withdrawn, and by the time the school year started again in August -- this time for my senior year -- I was just tired and numb all the time.

It would, as they say, get worse.

Adding to my dark thoughts and feelings were the fact that an acquaintance I'd known in Morgantown, a fellow nerd on the far outskirts of my group of friends, had been killed in a car accident that fall. His name was Matt, and though I didn't know him that well, his death weighed heavily on my thoughts.

That fall, the weather went haywire really fast. We got a freak snowstorm the first week of October, which snapped tree limbs and bent other large trees in half, followed a few weeks later by the worst windstorm I've ever lived through -- which ripped siding off our house like it was paper and knocked out power for at least a full day. My parents were worried about money and insurance, and I was worried about, well, everything. It was the beginning of my anxiety issues, the beginning of a deeper downward spiral.

I was feeling pressure from all sides to pick a college and figure out what I wanted to do with my life, at seventeen, and really the only thoughts I had were two things: die or get the fuck out of West Virginia. It had been almost a given that I would go to WVU even before I'd applied there, but I didn't want it. I didn't want anything; really, I just wanted to be left alone. I could stay in this room 24x7, I thought, only coming out to eat and to use the bathroom, and that would be far better for me than trying to force myself through more schooling. I didn't have a plan; one was being thrust upon me. I hated my life. I hated everything about it -- the expectations put on me, the feelings of dread the next year produced, feelings of being unloved, unwanted, and uncared for (whether it was true or not), feelings of inadequacy and of jealousy of others who seemed to have it so much easier, and were so much better off, than I was. I didn't have a car or a license or rich parents, I didn't have almost anything I'd wanted in life. Instead, my parents had uprooted me from the town I lived in and loved, from a house I lived in and loved with close access to entertainment and opportunities and my friends, and had dropped me into a farmhouse on top of a mountain half a mile from the nearest paved road, into a school in which I would never truly fit into, and now I was being forced into college? Being forced to go to school for four more years to do what, exactly? I didn't know. I didn't want to know. I slowly came to realize that I had no control whatsoever about anything actually happening in my life, I hadn't had any control over it for a long time, and (perhaps the worst part of all) I didn't see that changing anytime soon.

Stepping back for a moment, any of you who know me well know that I am the very definition of the term control freak. I have to be the boss, be the leader, be the center of attention (unless I have chosen not to be for some reason), and I will be listened to, respected, and obeyed -- even if I have to do it by force -- or you will face the consequences, as well as my deep, volatile anger. It is legitimately the only reason I became a manager at my current job (the bump in pay I received was mostly negligible) -- so I could tell other people what to do instead of being bent to others' wills and wishes. I don't respond well to authority figures' edicts, proclamations, or ultimatums because I need to be that authority figure. It is one of the most deeply defining aspects of my personality: my way, my rules, my control. If someone is above me in leadership hierarchy they'd better have a damn good reason why they're there, or they'd better have my respect -- because without it, they're not even going to get so much as my acknowledgment.

When I don't have that control, and I don't have the ability to obtain it, my natural response is that I need to get it or obtain control over something that will give me leverage. At that point in 2000, the only thing I could leverage was my own life.

So here's the story, folks. It is a story I have told very few people, generally only very close friends and some family -- the story of how I tried to kill myself. It is not easy for me to write about, as (with everything else in this series of posts), writing about it makes me re-live it to a certain extent. While I've briefly mentioned it to many in passing, and while I don't feel like there should be a stigma to talking about it openly, there is. You tell people you tried to kill yourself and they look at you like you're insane, or look upon you with pity -- not empathy and understanding. So, it's something that I (for many obvious reasons) don't like to talk about that much. I am not the person now that I was when I was seventeen, at least not in most respects, and I feel that I've evolved and, well, grown up. But that person is still a part of me, deep down, and it helped shape who I am today. So, let's tell the story.

It was mid-October. I don't remember the date in particular because, truthfully, I just didn't care. It was before the huge windstorm mentioned above, I know that, because that was early November. I was in a very dark place. I didn't have a gun, I got queasy and sick at the sight of my own blood (to this day, I still do) and hanging myself when I was fat was simply laughable. I didn't want pain, I didn't want to suffocate or drown or any of that, and we didn't have a garage to where I could do the old carbon-monoxide-exhaust-pipe trick. So, basically, an intentional overdose on pills was truly my only option.

I took an entire bottle of aspirin, handfuls of pills at a time, quickly, and went to sleep.

This. Did not work.

I awoke a few hours later and violently vomited great clusters, chunks of pills -- with blood and mucus mixed in -- multiple times. I drank water to wash the chemical burning out of my mouth and throat; it felt like someone was squirting fire out of me from the stomach up. Every time I drank more water, the vomiting came again. This continued for several hours in the middle of the night. I have had food poisoning and the stomach flu multiple times, bad enough to where I wanted to die, but this was something completely different. This was a burning, dizzying pain that blurred my vision and made me so weak I couldn't move.

After continually drinking a few glasses of water every hour or so and after multiple hours of throwing up, it got to the point where there was finally nothing left inside me. When I was able to keep the water down, and started feeling more normal, I knew it was done. I vaguely remember cleaning up the bathroom and returning to bed to pass out -- it was a weekend, so I didn't have school -- and I just slept.

I awoke feeling no better, and felt a great deal of shame for multiple reasons -- the first being that apparently I couldn't even kill myself right. Worse yet, I was in no better situation than I was in before trying.

I'm not sure my parents ever really knew. I tried telling my mother about it once, but I'm not sure it really stuck, or if she actually understood what had transpired or what I was trying to say. I'd also like to say that it changed me as a person at the time and gave me a new, more optimistic outlook on life and the future, but it really didn't. If anything, it made me more hopeless and sad, made me feel more trapped. Nobody knew about it and I didn't tell what few friends I had -- outwardly to the entire world I was still the same witty, sardonic Brandon I'd always been. It was yet another mask. By this time I'd put on so many masks for so many different people and situations that I didn't know who I really was anymore underneath all of them. Realizing this, of course, made me even more sad.

I was incredibly lucky. I could've sent myself into multiple organ failure, I could've blown out my kidneys or thinned out my blood so much that there would have been no recovery, and it would have been an incredibly painful, gruesome death to endure as one organ shut down after the next. I don't want to even think about the possibilities any further than that, honestly.

Stepping back for a moment, if anything, my suicide attempt put me more on the path (at that juncture of my life, anyway) of becoming sociopathic in my behaviors. I've done research in the years since, I've taken the tests and have studied the traits, of which I feel that I, even now, match up with quite a few of. Some I very strongly matched with then, but don't now, and others I very strongly match up with now but didn't then. Others I have never matched with, and still more I match with only a little or rarely. Do I think I'm a sociopath now? No, not really. Do I think I was well on the road to becoming one when I was in high school, if my path would've stayed the same as it was then? Yes, absolutely.

Others will say that you don't "develop" sociopathic tendencies, that they're something hardwired into you and your brain chemistry -- I don't agree with that. It's the classic nature vs. nurture argument, and while yes, I do think some people are born sociopaths, I don't think ALL sociopaths are, and probably not even the majority.

And yes, I plan to write a post discussing how closely I match up with those traits in the near future.

Anyway.

I was a month too young to vote in the 2000 election, and truthfully I wasn't paying that close attention to it at the time, as I was not generally a political person when I was in high school. With nothing else to focus on or occupy me, I very slowly resigned myself to my fate of college and graduating high school in a few short months. I spent the winter reading and writing, burying myself in my schoolwork as an attempt to keep my mind occupied with something constructive. The election came and went. Thanksgiving came and went. I turned 18 in December 2000, and I don't even remember my 18th birthday or what I did for it. I remember that my mother bought me an Eagles Hotel California t-shirt, which I had until it fell apart a few years ago.

Christmas and New Year's came and went with little fanfare, and I was happy to have the year 2000 behind me when it was all said and done. And it took me years before I could look at an aspirin bottle again without feeling incredibly queasy. It took even more years before I would let myself take aspirin again for any minor aches and pains. Surprisingly, it still works.



2001: The September 11 Terror Attacks Killed Thousands

Okay, so here's the big one. Let's just get it out of the way now, and I can tell the rest of the story of 2001 afterwards.

When the actual 9/11 attacks happened, I was sitting in my 8AM Math 121 class at WVU, and nobody knew anything about it. It was a Tuesday morning, and I had back to back classes all day on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so I didn't even hear about the attacks for several hours, when my Geology professor announced what had happened and that he was cancelling classes for the day so everyone could go home and "be safe with your families." Almost all classes at the university were cancelled for the rest of the day, so I took the PRT -- WVU's above-ground light rail system -- back to the medical center where I worked, and worked all afternoon in the lab with the radio on, listening to the latest (remember listening to the radio for news?)

That night, we stopped at the grocery store on the way home and I purchased a special-edition afternoon run of the local newspaper, The Dominion Post, and immediately took it home and sealed it up inside two manila envelopes; it has remained sealed to this day, and it is somewhere in this house. Upon arriving home, I put a blank tape in my VCR, set it to 6-hour mode on one of the news channels, and hit record. When it had finished, I put a second tape into the VCR and did the same. I still own those tapes, as well. One of these days I'll hopefully digitize them.

So now that's out of the way, let's tell the story of the rest of 2001.

I returned to school after the new year with a strange mindset. I was over the hump, so they say, and barreling towards the end of my high school education at a fast clip. I still didn't know what I wanted to do with my life and didn't know if I'd ever get out of West Virginia, but I sort of settled into a mindset of "some people have it way worse than I do" and decided to at least attempt to make the best of it, because who knew what the future would hold?

I wouldn't say that it was optimism, per se, but rather more of a "I need to see what happens next" mentality. So basically, I leveled off a bit. My rebellious teen years were long over by this time, so I was mainly just trying to be normal in the eyes of my teachers and peers. I was dressing fairly normally, I had a normal haircut, I always kept clean-shaven (though admittedly it was hard to grow any real facial hair until I was mostly through college anyhow). I took Driver's Ed and got my permit. I made some friends -- Brittany, Kristen, Chad, John, Hannah, Becky, Robbie, Whitney, and Shanna -- most of whom I'd stay in contact with for many years afterwards. Brittany would be my best friend for several years, throughout college and afterwards, and Shanna and I were so close that we were practically dating. If things had gone differently, we probably would have been.

I was still far from "normal," but I was slowly getting there. I applied to WVU in the spring and was almost immediately accepted and awarded a number of scholarships, including the "employee dependent" scholarship, because both of my parents were employed by the university. This scholarship covered most, if not all, of my in-state tuition, and state and federal grants not only ensured that I'd have the cost of my books covered every year, but would provide me with a refund check in cold, hard cash -- basically, spending money that I would need as an adult. As my education was free and I wasn't going to be a financial burden on the parents for it, I figured I'd see where it went. If I didn't like it, I didn't have to keep doing it. It was also decided fairly early in this process that I would just remain living at home with my parents instead of on campus -- my parents both working at the university meant that I would have transportation to and from school every day regardless, and this would actually motivate me to go to my classes. It also gave me the benefit of being able to get away from everyone and everything and decompress for a while when I needed to. Sometimes I'd get an early ride home from campus with my neighbor, who was also a student there, so I wouldn't even have to wait until the end of the day.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

While I didn't necessarily dislike my high school, I was ready to be done with it. I'd been going there every day without fail for three years, and was ready to get out and move on with my life. I was on the school newspaper staff, and wrote a few articles for the paper -- but I stayed far from the yearbook committee. I didn't want to have senior pictures done, so I didn't get them done. Instead, we just ordered a set of the normal school pictures, which I didn't look terrible in, and I ordered one of the lower-end "graduation packages" from whatever company was doing it (Herff Jones, I believe). Even in the lower-end packages I got a mug and a t-shirt, both of which I still own and use today. I didn't buy a yearbook. I didn't go to prom, either as a junior or as a senior, and I had no clue when homecoming was or what it was about. I cared not for such foolishness.

As graduation neared and I finished up most of my work for the year, I sent out probably close to 100 graduation announcements -- or, as I liked to call them, "send me money cards." My school was small, so it's not like I could personally invite everyone to our graduation -- there was a limit of three tickets for each student to give to only the most important friends and family, apparently. I remember this angered a lot of the students' families, who wanted to bring everyone possible to the high school graduation and....who knows, tailgate or something? I hadn't a clue. I wanted my grandmother to come, but even in 2001 she was frail and it was a very long trip for her, and an even longer day (she didn't die for another seventeen years, but still). Instead, my aunt Barbara would end up coming along with my parents.

During the last week-ish of school, I reconnected with Becca a bit and made my own peace with the situation -- she and I had grown apart quite a bit over the course of the year prior, but we were still close-ish, and part of what kept me going was the friendship I had with her as well as the thought in the back of my mind that maybe, eventually, things would change. She wasn't necessarily opposed to us being in a relationship, but her feelings hadn't really changed either, and we'd already grown apart enough to where going to different colleges in the fall would just make it that much harder to stay in touch. So, instead, I wrote her a letter and told her not to open it until well after graduation.

In that letter was everything I needed to tell her, all of my thoughts and hopes, everything that I'd personally experienced since we'd met, and how she had broken my heart but it wasn't her fault -- I was a different person then, naive and immature, and how much her friendship had helped me ever since that first awkward day we'd met. I may or may not have told her about the suicide attempt; I can't remember. I just remember telling her that I wished her the best in life, and that she'd helped save mine. I remember it being one of the most honest letters I'd ever written, and once she had it in her hands, my pursuit of a relationship other than friendship with her was officially over. Time marched on, and so did we.

Graduation was scheduled to be outside on the football field. We'd done rehearsals of it earlier in the week that May, when it was dark and gray. It was scheduled to be held on June 1, a Friday night. I lived 20 miles from the school, and there was literally nothing to do at home that night (I had all of my graduation robes/stuff with me, as well as my guitar to play as I killed time), so I planned to just stay at the school and hang out with friends from 3:30 to 6 or so, when families and parents would start filtering in for the ceremony, parking, getting their places in the bleachers, etc.

Around 3 that afternoon, the sky became dark as night, enough to where the parking lot dusk lights kicked on, and a severe thunderstorm rolled into the area, dropping a few inches of rain as well as some hail and horrendous lightning. As the football field quickly became a mud pit, the announcement was quickly made that graduation would be moved to the following night, Saturday June 2, and that it would be held in the gym as a backup plan, and I went home as normal. The strict ticketing rule was immediately put into effect, as the gym only had so many seats.

And so, the ceremony commenced the next night. Truthfully, I was bored by most of it and was attempting to not fall asleep throughout it. Our Valedictorian was one of the rich kids, and ended up going to Brown, I believe. Where he is now, who knows, as I didn't really know him at all. Despite my perfect attendance and straight As, I was still ranked 50-something out of 360 or so, even with a 4.25 cumulative GPA (there were many others with 4.5s or higher due to weighted classes).

After the ceremony, hats were thrown, pictures were taken, and we went home. I didn't really feel any different. Gladiator premiered on HBO that night, I watched it, and then I went to bed.

Becca eventually read the letter, and wrote me a long email telling me that it made her cry, but it was a "good cry."

And so ended my high school career. Many of the people I went to high school with I would never see again -- many others would die long before their time, including a few close friends. Suddenly, my last free summer was in front of me, a summer where I would spend relatively little free time alone and would, instead, be plagued by a series of unfortunate events.

I've mentioned here in the past that I have two historically unlucky months out of the year -- August and October. In 2001, the bad stuff began happening in August, but I am (again) getting ahead of myself.

In summer 2001, as I would be entering WVU in August, I took a job in the department of Microbiology as a laboratory technician; this was offered to me through a family friend who worked in the department, and would be paid with money from his research grant. It was minimum wage, $5.15 an hour, and was 20-30ish hours per week. This meant I'd be making about $400-600 a month before taxes, which was not a lot, but it was amazing money for me at the time when I had literally nothing else to do, and the job was simple -- clean glassware, mix some formulas, answer the phone, order some parts here and there, and keep the research lab in general running condition. There were four graduate students who worked there doing research, in addition to two professors. Two of the graduate students were post-docs, and the other two were but a few years older than I was, doing doctoral work. I spent many long hours in the media room, autoclaving glassware, getting distilled water at the proper percentage out of the onsite distiller machine, and doing the general lab labor. It was not a hard job, and was definitely not a hard job for someone of my skills and knowledge base. I started it six weeks before classes started, after which point my working schedule would change slightly.

Over the summer, I slowly received replies to my graduation announcements. Most of them had a little money inside them, ranging anywhere from $10 to $150 or so. I finally had a little money to my name, and could purchase some things that I wanted (something that previously had been a very rare opportunity). I only felt a little guilt about spending said money on frivolous things -- such as when I spent the $10 that a family friend sent me on a Judas Priest album, and said family friend died the next week. I'm sure she would've appreciated that, heavy sarcasm intended.

By the beginning of August, I was in a decent groove -- I was ready to start college. This was, of course, a drastic shift in my demeanor from the previous fall. I was beginning to lose a little weight, I looked and felt pretty good for the most part, and things were looking up. I didn't have a clue what I wanted to major in, but I'd already gotten my courseload and schedule (that was done on orientation day, back in April or May) and it was full speed ahead to the future. I'd even gone shopping and had gotten some new clothes and shoes, like I was a kid in grade school again.

On the way home from work one sweltering 100-degree evening, my mother and I were caught in bumper to bumper traffic and were rear-ended, hard, by a lifted Silverado from the late 70s/early 80s. The truck was lifted so high that its front bumper was sitting on the hatchback of my mother's 1993 Ford Probe. The hatch would need to be replaced, as well as the entire back end of the car, pretty much. I can't remember if the frame was bent or not, but the repair costs were over $1000. Thankfully, neither of us were hurt, nor did we have any real lasting physical injuries from the accident. As it was my mother's only vehicle at the time, she got it repaired (but it was in the shop for a week or two, as I recall).

A week or so later, right before I started at WVU, my aunt Eilene -- who had been in the hospital for a few days because she had been sick and was about to be released, had a blood clot break off somewhere inside her body during a walk down the hospital hallway, and collapsed and died.

I haven't written much here about my father's side of the family, as for a good chunk of my life, they were fairly ancillary to it -- as my father had basically broken off all contact with me eight years before, I didn't really associate with my extended family on his side that much. It wasn't really by choice, honestly; I lived about 50 miles or so from any of them and I really just wasn't around and/or in their lives. They always wondered why my father didn't want anything to do with me, and Eilene and my uncle Ronnie (my father's brother) were particularly vocal about it as my father had moved in with them as a teenager after his own father offed himself in the 70s. I spent many days and some holidays at Ronnie and Eilene's house as a child, and had a closeness with them that I didn't have with anyone else on my father's side of the family. Adding to that, I'd just seen both of them while out shopping a few weeks previously, and they'd sent me a graduation card with $50 in it.

I remember getting the call at home that day (it was a day I had off), and then remember letting my mother know -- and then numb and in shock, I sat outside on the front porch of the farmhouse and chainsmoked half a pack of cigarettes, staring off into space. I'd been a smoker since before I graduated high school, but it was that summer that I really became a real smoker, a cigarette aficionado, if you will. I had my favorite brands, my favorite flavors (remember when you could buy flavored cigarettes?) and figured that I could allow myself one vice. If nothing else, I could tell myself that at least it would kill me slowly, unlike downing a bottle of pills at 1 in the morning and hoping for the best.

Eilene's funeral was one of the most surreal experiences of my life. I told my mother that we needed to go, that I wasn't going to just not show up, and she agreed. It was the only funeral I've been to in the 21st century. Eilene looked gray. Generally, I mean, they look dead of course, but she was gray, no real color to her face, nothing. She didn't look like herself. Her body just looked like an empty shell. I found the entire experience deeply unsettling. My Uncle Ronnie was deeply somber and kept his head down for most of the funeral, withdrawn, broken. As people filtered up the aisle of the funeral home to pay their respects, I felt a hand on my shoulder. I looked up to see my father standing above me.

"Hi, dad," I said. He looked down at me and nodded slightly, lips in a tight line across his face, and kept walking. He didn't say a word.

It was the only time in my adult life I would see my father in person, to this day. And he looked just as broken as everyone else did.

We followed to the cemetery and watched her be buried, in the scorching hot August sun, near the top of the cemetery's hill. And then we returned home.

I started at WVU the following Monday. Three weeks after that, September 11 happened.

Everything changed after September 11. I know people say that a lot, and generally mean it in grandiose, exaggerated terms, but for the rest of that year, it all felt very real and everything was changing around us in real time. For the first time, no planes flew overhead for days at a time. When they did start flying again, people would visibly cringe if they looked like they were flying low. The National Guard would fly training sorties in their Apache helicopters up and down the Monongahela River. We were a nation of fearful people who didn't know if 9/11 was going to be the start of World War III or something worse, and I was just an eighteen-year-old kid just starting college, watching a good chunk of his friends who had gone directly into the military three months prior all getting phone calls one by one -- they were being called up for active duty. There was talk of reinstating the draft. President Bush told everyone to not let the terrorists win, to go out, spend money, and keep the economy going. My mother did that, actually -- after the Probe was fixed, she went out and purchased a new Honda CR-V. The Probe was paid off and was being reserved for me -- when I could actually afford to pay insurance and put gas in it, of course. That was not going to happen anytime soon, so it sat in the driveway most of the time.

Meanwhile, I had a 17-hour semester for the first semester of my college career, and it was brutal. I had preliminarily chosen Psychology as my major -- the study of the mind -- so that I could not only understand myself better, but to possibly use it as a stepping stone to a career in the field or a related one (sociology, anthropology, etc). My Psych 101 class was taught by a grad student, but it was very difficult for me. After studying hours upon hours for a test in that class, burning myself out on it, and then getting a 30% on it, I summarily dropped the class. I was not going to be a psych major.

My first semester at WVU was incredibly humbling -- I was no longer the smartest person in the room. I wasn't even in the top 50% of smartest in most of my classes, or so it seemed. I slogged through my core classes as best I could, got several Bs and B-minuses, and felt like I was drowning. I had no real friends there, really -- there were a few people I knew from high school, but my closest friends had gone to different colleges -- Becca to Fairmont State, Shanna to Pitt, Brittany to Potomac State. I caught up with Kristen more, who had gone to WVU with me, as well as a friend from Morgantown High, Stephanie. But, really, I didn't make any friends in any of my classes -- I was swamped with coursework, and when I wasn't, I was at my actual job.

However, there was one friend I made who remained my friend for the next seventeen years. Her name was Meredith, and she was in my Intro to Creative Writing class with me.

Mere was a non-traditional student by that point; she was several years older than me, and had gone to Appalachian State for a few years, I believe, before transferring to WVU. She wanted to be a doctor and was very strong in the sciences, and was taking the creative writing class to kill time. Meredith was brilliant; she may be one of the smartest people I've ever met to this day. She could write like it was second nature to her, she could sing like a bird, and she was exceedingly kind. During that first semester at WVU, she was like a guardian angel to me. She showed me the basics of what being a college student was really about, taught me about life, about music, showed me how to roll a cigarette with loose tobacco and papers (American Spirit, naturally) and was more of a mentor and guiding light to me than anyone else I'd met at WVU to that point.

I didn't fall in love with her or anything, but there was an attraction there. It was an attraction of mutual admiration and respect. It was love, but it was not a romantic love. It was a love of deep understanding. She was older and far more mature than the simple green freshman I was -- she'd been married and divorced, had lived in many places, had seen and done many things that up until that point I'd only seen in movies and read about in books. She was a sexual assault survivor. She'd had several major surgeries and her health had always been a concern. And, because she was a med student, I didn't see her much outside of class -- we'd primarily keep in contact via email or via AOL Instant Messneger (AIM; oh, how I miss the glory days of AIM). She and I bared our souls to one another in long late night AIM sessions, telling each other our life stories. She was one of the few people I trusted with the suicide attempt story, because I knew she wouldn't judge me for it.

Mere and I stayed in contact throughout the entirety of my college career and long afterwards, moving from email and AIM to Facebook. As much as she helped me over the years I also helped her when her fiance at the time killed his mother and then himself. I was there for her when the doctors thought she had cervical cancer and performed a hysterectomy, only to find out later that she did not have cervical cancer, but cancer somewhere else (I don't exactly remember where). Because she couldn't have kids, she bonded very strongly with her niece and helped to raise her. When she posted last year that she was sick again but was doing well and had gone into remission, that she was fighting everything off, I cheered for her and sent her my best wishes.

When a few weeks later, she died, I was very, very upset and broken by it.

I never got details on how or why, or what had happened; I only saw the post from her mother on Facebook as well as a barebones obituary on the funeral home's website. I don't know whether she was buried or cremated, and I didn't want to ask for any details.

2001 ended, finally -- and after everything that had happened during it, I was not sad to see it go. But, I had a new focus, I had a job, and I was working to better myself. After such a tumultuous year it was the best that could be expected.