…I hunkered with pink-cheeked, chubby-fingered activists in shoddy, paper-walled dorm rooms dreaming of social revolution. I read the works of Marx from cover to cover and imagined Trotsky, Lenin, and Hegel taking turns pirouetting Engels in the hope of copping a feel somewhere behind the illuminated depths of the mind’s subconscious. And yes, I stood on plastic buckets railing against corporate abuse, engaged in fruitless, mouth-frothing debates with tie-choked campus conservatives, and upturned the American flag at a local gas station when no one was looking...how very brave.
I even stood up for my rights, on occasion, shamelessly assaulting customers and labeling them simple-minded. I wrote three page responses in employee log books, revamped company policy during work hours when I was nothing more than a file clerk, and smugly turned down job offers for fear of losing those ever diminishing moments of solitude in which I could read the greats and fantasize about being a writer.
I sat in crowded bars scribbling observational bravado into a leather bound notebook, indifferent to the sneering stares of spoon-fed twenty-something punks dateless, drunk, and dumb. And I leaned against sweat-filmed walls in smug, downtown LA nightclubs where hair-teased fad-hags flashed sex for drinks, later spotting them slouched over the bathroom counter snorting six lines too many, their eyes crazed with vacant purpose, lipstick smeared, make-up splotched, while creatine bloated men chock full of Viagra prepared to make their move.
I sought rebellion, finding only depression, and retreated among coffee shop misfits, smoking unfiltered Lucky Strikes in between GRE word lists and endless refills of coffee. The agony was delightful, the anguish exquisite.
I was raging with uncontrollable emotion, so I turned to Kali-Ma, to bask in the ultimate auditory vision of imagination; molded into the couch, eyes closed, neck craned, and head bobbing to the chalk screeching brilliance of Coltrane and Miles, to the post bop Panther screaming “Fuck You!” to two hundred years of slavery.
In time, the effects of liberation waned, and instead of discarding the training wheels, I chose to persist in my addiction, baked into a doughy lump of indolent forgetfulness. For me, rock bottom was the moment when I could no longer sustain myself through delusion. At the sight of my muse tattered, ragged, and disoriented, lewdly splayed, undesired - its once voluminous breasts nothing more than shriveled raisins grotesquely flopped across its bulbous belly - and stretched out across a friend’s dirty couch, I finally felt the throb of urgency. It was time to change.
And there she was, drenched in rain, asked to express her opinion on a local news station about the unprecedented amount of rain affecting her city. This was fate, if ever such a thing exists. This was my last chance, and the next morning, with hands trembling, I looked up her old email address and sent her a message.
I was called into action. The journey of rebirth had begun.