The lush life

Some lives seem distinctly more literary-- textual-- than others.

Jack Keroauc was a Catholic and a sufferer and a vagabond and he took all the pent-up energy of the fifties and took it on the road only after he decided that he wanted to create a novel out of a trip. Jorge Luis Borges was handed care of the largest library in Argentina after he had gone almost totally blind and after he had written about the world over, and no one was more sensitive to the irony than he. He had books arranged on his shelves in such a way that he could find his favorites by touch.

I don't feel like I'm living a literary life-- rather, a life defined by literature-- because books rarely surprise me or take hold of me the way that I sense that they do for other writers.

The emotional fabric of my life, thus far, is actually bound to music far more than it is to any literature. Unlike with all the books I own, every album I have has a story, and all the good ones have a history. In fact, the very best ones literally make history. The Long Winters' bizarre first two albums supplied the texture to the weird malaise that was my senior year of high school. Charles Mingus' The Black Saint and The Sinner Lady carved the shape of my bittersweet summer of 2007 into an angry color of trumpets, saxes, tubas, and pianos.

Each of them were like a relevation, a genesis of sound that seemed to signal that something *new* was happening, sort of like those big obelisks in "2001: A Space Odyssey," as if the time in which I was listening to them was in fact unique and that this period had its own story that could now be embodied by this certain sound, the likes of which I had never before encountered. I was not living the same day over and over again; things were actually changing. Historians name epochs in history much like music gives the moments of my life their own identity. (2001 was actually the year of Pearl Jam's Ten.)

My problem-- my double vision-- lies in the fact that I lack the musical gifts to funnel my own life experience into a song the way that I can put that experience on paper. The distance between what's in my heart and what I can put on the page is closer than, say, what I can create with the strings of my guitar. Any jazz improviser knows what I'm talking about. In order to riff and create your own distinctive sound, your own bag of licks, you have to make playing the horn as natural as possible by closing the gap that exists between the sounds in your head and the sounds that come out of your bell. You literally have to become the horn. Well, writing feels most natural for me. Everything else is just foreplay.

I write, but I'm not living a literary life. I just know what a literary life sort of looks like, and I'm using a substitute. That's just how it works for me. I'm glad, though. I'm allowed to have times when all the stories simply run out, when intuition just says that nothing needs to be said. Those are the good nights when all that really needs to matter is the distinct wordlessness of the sheets of your bed and the sound of the 3A.M. rain on your windows, and the almost never-ending drone of that idiosyncratically absurd latin funk album by a bunch of white kids from Iowa that's been put on repeat, repeat.

Most things work out in the end

Today I took my final courses as an undergraduate and went down to the South Quad where they were serving free beer and free food to all the outgoing seniors. The turnout was good, if turnout can ever be bad for a student event offering free alcohol. The lines were long, which was all right, because it gave us all a chance to stand around and look at each other in the hope that we'd see someone we knew. I posed for photos with anybody with a familiar face.

For me-- I'm not going to graduate school-- graduating from Mizzou means that not only do I become an alumnus of the university, but I also become an alumnus of the kind life I'm used to living and an alumnus of spending time with all the people that I've come to know. No matter what happens, things are going to be different from now on.

I've heard a lot of people say that their college years were the best years of their lives, but I think the real tragedy would be to say that the best years of my life are now over. Were they great years? Yes. But the best? That's obviously yet to be seen. There's certainly no doubt that things might not get this posh again. I'm an English major, and so I read the subtext in everything; getting free beer today was sort of like a symbol for This could be the last time you have it this easy.

But I don't think any of us should be feeling sorry for themselves. After all, most of us standing on the South Quad today come from a long line of people who work for a living. Hard work keeps this country running and makes a college education possible in the first place. We certainly shouldn't worry about not figuring what we are meant to "do" with our lives when we can pick up the paper on any day of the week and find that there are no shortages of opportunities for our lives become things of real significance.

Am I scared about what happens next? No. If I'm leaving this place with nothing but an education and a handful memories, then you'd better believe I'm going into the world nothing less than well-armed. And as soon as everybody finishes this beer, it'll already be time that we were seeing to the work at hand.