What do you want outta me, Shakespeare? Shakespeare couldn't spell his own name, they said. At least one book explaining who the hell I am. That's what I was after. Who the hell am I, anyway? Does anybody care? Probably not. Huck Finn. Holden Caufield. the guy in One Flew Over the Cukoo's nest. Get a book by what's his name that wrote catch 22. joseph heller. And so on and so forth. So many fucking books. Discouraging just to look in a bookstore. All the musty paperback tomes that nobody ever reads. I hate collecting books. NO, but, I don't particularly love the dusty old things. I just like to read them. sometimes. Oh what a web we weave. It'll take a while to send that file. Poet. What? The dank dark secrets. The bar. The student hangout. The bric a brac all over the walls. The look in the bartender's face when I didn't know what kind of scotch I wanted. My insecurity. Self-loathing. That's what what's his name called it. My reading. I'm always reading, and then I put myself to sleep in front of the tv. My my. Will it ever be finished? And so forth and so on. What do you think of the ways in which? I don't know. Do you? And so forth. so we went down. Bowling Green OHio. Howards bar. That black-painted box of crowded hormone charged twenty-year-olds drinking watered down beer. Pizzanellos. The tidy little old town streets. The time I got splashed with water fromt the huge puddle in the street. The time my front tooth was absessed. Living in the dorm with Roger. The time I tried to tell roger there was a hole in the ceiling, just to see him try to find it. Mean thing to do. Poe ditch. I used to walk occasionaly out in the country. The time we walked out there along Poe ditch, and we stood on a freeway overpass. Some semi truck driver honked his damn horn just as he was under the bridge. Scared the shit out of us. The time I worked in the garage door factory. Things seemed so weird. I was sort of autistic, was I not? These weird people. There was actually a guy they called hash oil bob. And I was a hanger on a friend of a friend in the house where they did all these drugs. I was a weird kid. I was lonely. I was me, even then. There was some survival in me, something was trying to strike out on my own. Something was trying not to knuckle under. It was and is a struggle. Things are better now, at least in some ways. Sometimes it seems like nothing has changed much from those days. I was depending on some sign that someone was supposed to give me. I was hoping for some knowledge out of the mystical East. The only connection there was was the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and I only heard about him from the Beatles and from a posters plastered on campus. Bookishly, I looked up articles about him in the library, and concluded that he was a fake, that I could meditate and find some calm all on my own. Just pick a magic mantra and say it over and over again to yourself. It'll help to quell the compulsive thoughts about how shitty you are and how you'll never amount to much, and how you could be gay, and how you probably not, and how you'll never know, and how you wish you weren't here, and how all you want is someone to comfort you, a woman's voice a soft breast, ah just comfort me, please, and the echoly sound in your brain, and the way you hear your footsteps they sound so loud and echoing in your spiny ear canals, and how you wish it would stop and you just wish there was some way you could know how it would all turn out, and how you wish you could be more withit and people would like you and all that stuff, but how they just see you as a geek, your sure, and you just don't know if you'll ever fit in, and about then it starts to seem like a pretty damn good idea to chant some word over and over again until it all goes away and cancels itself out and you start to feel calm and better and not so compulsive and you don't hate yourself after all, and how long will it take to learn that lesson, and at least I wasn't dumb enough to cough upt he fifty bucks to the Maharishi, you got that caution from john lennon, didn't you, that song where he says they don't need no mahareshi, It was called Sexy Sadie, but it was actually supposed to be about Maharishi… Maharishi… How did you know… you made a fool of us all… The latest and the greatest of them all… You'll get yours yet… However big you think you are… However big you think you are… trying to learn from somebody elses mistakes, so logical, is it not, wanting some credit, I mean after all. It would have been nice to have a guru a teacher a guide a swami, but I couldn't afford one, and I didn't want to make a fool out of myself, so instead, I tried to analyze it and figure it out for myself. Nobody cares about you really, except your family who you know loves you, but who are pretty clueless, can't depend on help from them, that's for sure. That's sort of what I thought as I bumbled along desparate but clinging to my tough view of myself and my little compensations my little ways of calming myself like watching reruns of gomer pyle and the dick van dyke show on tv and like getting into rituals with my friends like roger my few and far between friends, rituals like playing ping pong in the dorm every afternoon and then watching dick van dyke when it comes on and then waiting for it to come around again. Not feeling anything much, but knowing you like your comfort, knowing you like your comfortable little life, like the one back home, but that's a nest you've got kicked out of, even though mom is willing to take you back, but only for a while.