Chapter four

The first time Pubert and myself had to see the dean of student affairs because we filled the campus fountain with bubble bath and used it as our own personal bathtub.  Campus security came right as I was starting to brush my teeth and informed us we had to put our clothes back on and see Ms. Carter.

The night after I had won our conference cross country meet, being that I was in a celebratory mood, we went to a field party.  Cumberland was pretty lame on the whole, but one of the students who was local had property way out in the hills and out some gravel road, in the middle of nowhere, where occasionally he would throw a field party.  There were usually a couple of kegs in a the bed of a pickup truck, and a big bonfire, around which all fifty or so normal human students would congregate and consume large amounts of foamy beer out of red solo cups.

On this occasion I drank roughly half of my weight in alcohol, which wasn't a whole lot at the time because I was skinny as can be.  Actually it was probably about ten cups full, a lot for a runner with little body weight and lots of miles in the legs.  So drunk was I that I completely blacked out.  The rest of the story I had to piece together from my friends and from what campus security told me.

I woke up the next morning with a ticket on my desk, which informed me that I was on campus drunk and I would have to pay a fifty dollar fine and meet with the dean of student affairs.  As if this wasn't bad enough, when I went out to my car the back seat was covered in vomit.  My little Suzuki Esteem would smell like Twizzler scented vomit for the next couple of weeks, against my best efforts to clean the sonofabitch.

Joey was the designated driver, which meant he was the least intoxicated.  Fortunately he was able to get us back on campus without wrecking and running into innocent bystanders, and thinking that the back seat was the best place for Day and myself to sleep off our drunkenness, he left us in the car and went into the dorm.

Not too long after he left us, campus security swung by to see two passed out retards in the back of my car.  We were ushered into the dorm, forced to sign our tickets, and released to our rooms.  Ultimately, Day and myself would have to tell our coach what happened which we did.  We were not allowed to run the next race, which was regionals.  We had to attend four two hour "alcoholics anonymous" classes, where we were joined by a couple of football players that had been busted from the very same party.  None of us took the class seriously.  The lady who was our instructor was very agitated by this.  I felt bad for her, but I have to admit, it was pretty funny how the football players made a mockery of the process when she herself took it so seriously.


So the lasagna in the face would see us back in Ms. Carter's office. This was just another notch on the belt for the Triple S, which was slowly but steadily gaining a reputation on campus as a troupe of oddball trouble makers.  Ms. Carter, who was the dean of student affairs, told us we would not be allowed to leave campus until spring break.  Ms Carter looked an awful lot like Janet Reno and had way too much power for a person with no PHD.  She was a hard lining lesbian and would see to it that we did not leave campus until she said we were good to go.  This would be about the time things started to get really interesting.

Robitussin Disneyland is not your parents idea of a theme park. It is four days in the Smokey Mountains with Day and Joey and Clifford.  And we did not even bring any drugs with us. Spring break was to be a time to recharge the batteries. I was the one with the car, so I got to sleep in the back seat while Day sped down the interstate. We picked Clifford up from Corbin sometime around noon. We made it to Sevierville by two, and had parked the car and started walking by 5. The initial hike was to be six miles, all uphill, to the top of Clingmans Dome.  It was the most dome I would get for the first half of my college experience.

Day would be the leader. After all, he was the oldest, and he had the knowledge of these forests. Clifford was our nickname for Joseph Hurtgen, who was a childhood friend of Day's. I got to name him, and since he reminded me of Martin Short's character from the movie Clifford, he became Clifford.  We call him that to this day.
Four dumb ass boys thinking they know how to navigate the wild is what the Hindu call Avidya, which is "ignorance."  It is also the ego consciousness, which leads to desire, Karma, and rebirth.

Joey had the bright idea to take only two sleeping bags. This would allow the other two individuals to carry other accoutrement's.   We took with us four granola bars, four bananas, four apples (all stolen from the cafeteria, we made do with what we had available as industrious and resourceful college students) two cans of Bush's baked beans, a couple of fruit snacks.  All in all, not a lot for a three day hike of almost 30 miles.

Pubert and Mono did not make the trip with us. This marked the beginning of a new direction for the Triple S. They went to Wisconsin and had sex with girls.   They slowly started drifting away from the Triple S, and we probably considered them the lucky ones for it.  Pubert had Jessica on his mind. Mono fell for the fat girl named Sarah. His excuse, fat bitches need loving just as much as skinny ones. Keep in mind that Mono was a trollish looking outdoors man and would have been the perfect compliment to our outdoor extravaganza. Alas, we would have to make do with what we had.

At any rate, we made it to the top of Clingman's Dome by twilight.  It was still relatively warm at this point, so we pitched a tent and called it a day  This was the worst idea imaginable, as the temperature would drop to near freezing with winds exceeding 30 miles an hour once it was dark.  Our tent barely managed to stay pitched, and we had to put the two sleeping bags together to make one bag for all four of us to huddle together in.  We barely slept at all that night, it was so terribly cold and miserable.  If we had only known that twenty minutes further ahead down the hill was a cozy little campground.  It was where we should have camped.

So day two started extra early as we were ready to get moving and get the blood flowing.  The sun rose and the day gradually heated up to 70 degrees or so.  We separated ourselves by about two minutes each, so we were each walking in solitude for most of the day.  It was so very peaceful.  Being out in the wilderness like that, you don't realize that it is the only time in your life that you don't hear the "sounds of man" in the background, like cars, or televisions, or any of the other things that fill the spaces of silence in our day to day lives.  All you hear is quiet, nature's peace.  You will actually start to fall into a trance and it is magical and it is something that most of us have gotten away from in our modern society.  I will never forget the hike that day and becoming "one" with the Smokeys. 

We walked over ten miles on this day, and set up camp again at the end of the day.  We had eaten through the fruit and granola bars, so it was time to get a fire going and eat the baked beans.  You have no idea how good baked beans are after you have been hiking all day and have had little more than a granola bar and a piece of fruit the entire time.  Sitting there, content in the woods with a fire going, talking about cosmology, existentialism, and women; I can think of nothing better to do on a beautiful spring evening with three of my very best friends.  We fell asleep and slept well that night.

Which was good because when the morning came, so did the rain.  We had about ten miles to go, so we packed up our stuff and just started hauling ass.  We were ready to get out of nature.  We were getting soaked to the bone, and we were cold, tired and hungry.  About 8 miles into the hike that day we managed to piss Day off and he ran ahead.  This was good because he was able to locate the car and save us some time getting back.  What did we find in the trunk?   A bottle of wine?  We uncorked it and celebrated and drove off, back into civilization. 

We made it to Lake City where we found the first pharmacy available, cleaned out the DXM, and went to Lake Park.  As the cough medicine started kicking in, we decided to run barefoot over the cold soft grass, nimbly avoiding stepping in goose shit.  It was a cross country race, but this time it was full contact.  We plowed into each other over and over, and finished by jumping into the ice cold lake.  One who is Robo-running is less sensitive to physical as well as thermal pain.  In fact, it is quite nice chilling like an ice cube in freezing cold water when you are under DXM's influence.  It was a magical day there at Lake City.

Once we got back to campus, we gathered as much brush and wood as we could find so we could start a camp fire.  Which we did, right in the middle of campus.  Once we had got the fire started campus security told us to put it out.  We told them we were going camping.  They said we needed to put out the fire.  We asked them if they wanted to join us and roast some hot dogs.  They physically came over and stomped out our fire.  There were no further repercussions.  We escaped without any criminal charges, which was a surpirsing first.  Maybe we were starting to wear the establishment down?  The battle may have been won, but the war was far from over.  The established Southern Baptist cadre is like poison ivy.  It is invasive and will take over a countryside.  If you try to navigate through it, you will be touched at some point by one of its toxin covered leaves which will leave you irritated, scratching yourself, and going to the store looking for medication.

Chapter three

The sadness that I felt that evening would eventually subside.  I made it to my classes and to track practice.  I was running about 70 miles a week, nothing too taxing just yet, and I was gearing up for indoor track.  It was the first time in my life that I wasn't the best runner on my team.  Throughout high school I was always the top dog.  I was never pushed very hard by my teammates, and I was rarely tested in races.  That is until it was time for States.  Each year I had my best race at regionals.  Each year I thought I was going to win States.  I don't know if it was the pressure I put on myself that I couldn't handle, or if it was the allergy induced asthma that attacked me each time May rolled around and the flowers started ejaculating pollen into the air that did me in.  Either way you sliced it, I was always coming up short on the big stage, never finishing higher than eighth in the state of Ohio.

What a difference college made.  I was barely the third best runner on the team, and on any given day I was more like the fifth best runner.  Not only did my running seem crappy but so did my social standing. The girls that went to my college didn't seem to be interested in me.  It started getting into my head that I wasn't the man any more. 

I was the "man" in high school, and now I was just a piss ant.   To make things worse I was only attracted to two girls on campus, which is kind of sad, I know, maybe I have unrealistically high standards, who knows.  One of the girls was Lauren Bynum.  She had a boyfriend, who I was somewhat good friends with, and I didn't want to be a home wrecker, so that left Courtney Day.  Courtney, no relation to my boy Day, was a sprinter on the track team and was the spitting image of Melissa Joan Heart from Clarissa Explains it All. 

She was exceptionally fast, and also very smart, which I found incredibly sexy.  I built up the courage to ask her out, and we went to the movies.  It was a comedy that I picked, and maybe I should have let her decide, because she did not laugh the entire time.  She said she didn't get it.  I couldn't understand why she didn't get it when she was so smart otherwise.  Hell, she had better grades than I did.  Granted I didn't study and was only at as many classes that I had to be at to not fail, but that is all beside the point.  She wasn't a good fit if she couldn't enjoy humor, so my options ended that night. 

Which led to a month long episode of Diablo II in my dorm room with Pubert and Mono.  Pubert is a good guy, but he talks an incredible amount of shit.  We started talking about our love affair with the computer RPG Diablo and he said that he had Stones of Jordan and other crazy items that are rarer than rarified crap, and I called bullshit.  He had no way to prove it since he didn't have the computer with him, so we resorted to buying Diablo II and decided to compete to see who could have the better character.  I picked a paladin, and he picked a barbarian.  I know, this is nerdy shit, but it is what it is.

As it turned out, Pubert was a very good gamer, and he proved to me that a barbarian is better than a paladin.  Rather than share time on my computer competing against one another, we determined that if we shared a character, and played around the clock, we would be able to level up faster, as the game is practically infinite, and it gets harder and harder to level up the higher one's point total gets.  We picked a sorceress, and got started.  Geekery insued.  If the girls were going to be stuck up and ugly, then we were going to have the best RPG character on campus.

We never went to class and only went out for meals, beer, and of course, track practice.  Since we played nonstop, we had to take turns at the computer.  I would be playing, Pubert would be sleeping.  Pubert would be playing, I would be at Convocation (we couldn't skip all of our classes because Cumberland would fail you if you missed a percentage of your classes.  Convo could only be skipped twice, since it was once a week.)  Sometimes we would play with each other (and not like that, damn it).  The bottom line was, 12 hours plus of gaming for each of us every single day.  We were getting tired.  We needed another.

As luck would have it Mono decided to get in on the fun.  Which meant there was an omnipresent 20 oz Dr. Pepper bottle filled with dip spit on my desk.  We could now take 2 four hour shifts each day.  This was a much nicer arrangement.  We started attending class more regularly, and it was all around better on our personal health and well being.

We never had to worry about my roommate, fortunately, since he never stayed in our room and was always at his girlfriends.  He would occasionally come back and brag about how he was getting laid every night which made all of us very jealous.  "Oh yeah, well do you have a level 83 sorceress? Pubert would ask."

We would  get up, go for our morning run.  Mono would man the computer while we were gone.  Like I said earlier, he was a helluva 800 meter runner, he ran 1:52 in high school, and he didn't ever go to pracitce.  He wasn't at Cumberland for the running.  He was there to stabilize our group.  He had a full beard, and was always having to wipe it clean of tobacco spittle.  He was an outdoorsman, and had an attitude of generally not giving a fuck that resonated quite well with the Triple S mantra.

After playing Diablo II and beating it repeatedly like a bastard step child, we got the expansion pack.  We defeated Baal, and again, and again.  Our sorceress was slowly growing more powerful.  At level 89 we decided to stop.  There was not enough time in the day to get enough points to level up any more, and we realized that the days were getting nicer as the winter was turning to spring.
One night Pubert did manage to round up a couple of hoes.  The plan was to walk out the train tracks, two miles, to a trail in the middle of nowhere that lead to a small cave.  When we got to the cave we planned on starting a fire.  We had already built the logs up earlier that week on a run, which was how we found the place to begin with.  

It was about eight o'clock when we all met up outside of Siler Dorm.  I was in my jeans and hoodie, had some boots on, and a backpack filled with the essentials, several bottles of Robitussin Maximum Strength, a couple of joints I bought from my Rastafarian friend Alain, flashlights, a couple of beers and various snack foods.  Day brought the boom box and the CD's.  Joey brought a case of beers, and Mono, the God of Fire, brought one single match.

The girls showed up with Pubert, all dressed to the nines ready to go to the club.  We all looked at each other like, "did he seriously fail to mention that this was an outdoor adventure?"  The girls bitched the entire time, and rightfully so.  It was freezing cold and they were grossly under dressed.

We started out down the train tracks.  About a half mile out we were already out of town.  We had to cross the Cumberland River which meant we had to traverse a bridge about 150 meters long.  There was a walk way between one side of the tracks and the bridge that was about three feet across, roughly one person width, which meant we had to make a line, and the walk way was rickety as shit, thirty or so feet about the raging water below. 

Once we made it across, Pubert began walking backwards so he could talk to one of the girls, Jessica, who he would eventually marry.  He was trying impress her with these stories of crazy shit he did during high school.  Day and Joey, seeing that Pubert was laying his bait, did their best to sabotage things by saying he was making the stories up. 

At about the halfway point Pubert fell out of sight.  He had tripped over a dead bloated sheep.
How the sheep got there on the train tracks, we will never know.  Pubert, who now smelled like rotting sheep carcass would not be deterred.  Of course the drugs were kicking in and we still hadn't made it to the fire site.

Finally we got off of the tracks and down the path that would lead to the firewood, and we put Mono to work.  It is dark and cold.  One of the girls, Alexis, who was loud and obnoxious and was tripping on cough medicine decided that we had brought the girls out to this spot to rape them.  She began getting very hysterical.  Day told her that yes, in fact, we had taken them out here to rape them.  He was joking but she didn't get the memo.  Mono got the fire started, but Alexis needed to get out of there.

"This bitch is ruining our fire experience," Day said.  We have to get her home.  Pubert was off trying to get his dick wet.  Joey was getting a little messy drunk and Mono was working his magic on the fire, which was starting to grow despite the condensation covering all of the wood.  "St. Louis, you get to take Alexis back," Day informed me.

So I did.  We started heading back and I lit up a joint. Not only did Alexis go but also a large girl named Sarah decided to come back with us.  We headed back down the train tracks and got to the bridge which crossed the river.  Just as we were halfway across, we heard the train in the distance.  "We better hurry," I said. "This walkway isn't far away from the tracks.  If there is a wire or something hanging off of the side of one of the cars, it will cut right through us.

Alexis started crying, as did Sarah.  It was so dark, but the light of the oncoming train was so bright that it almost made my eyes hurt looking at it as it rushed towards us.  I threw down the joint and pushed the girls in front of me. "Go!  Stop your crying and move!  We have to get off of this bridge!"

The spastic girls were so incredibly slow and the train was coming closer and closer, horn blaring behind us.

Trains are incredibly loud if you are ever very close to them, especially when they blow their horns.  Just as we got off of the bridge the train bulldozed past us with a tremendous gush of wind blowing off into our faces.  We had made it off just in time.  I decided that I did not need to listen to the girls bitching anymore, and as soon as we got back to campus, I went back to my dorm and started playing Diablo.

The next day in the cafeteria we are all sitting at the table eating our food and bullshitting about this and that.  Alexis comes stoming over to our table and starts screaming at us.  Day told her to shut up and go back to her seat. 

"You were going to rape me!  How dare you!  You wanted to take me into the woods and rape me!"

"Bitch, you are flattering yourself.  I would rather have had sex with that deat sheep than rape your ugly ass."

"Don't you say that about me!  I will get my dad to come here and he will beat your ass!"

The spat continued back and forth, until Day had enough, at which point he calmly picked up the lasagna that was on his plate and shoved it into Alexis' face.  The next day he would have to meet with the Dean of Student Affairs.

chapter Two

Twelve shiny red little pills rolled around in Day’s hand.  “Take these.”

                “What in the heck are they?”

                “Don’t ask any questions, just take them.  We are going to Kenya.”

                "Kenya," the top of a mountain about five miles out of town, is a plateau with shrubs and dirt and gravel trails that looked like it could have been a scene straight out of the Great Rift Valley.   It was one of my favorite trails to run.  I loved the feeling of being miles away from the rest of the world running my legs into a pulp.

                We were an excellent program for a small liberal arts school of 1600 individuals.  We competed with the best D1 schools we faced, beating many of them, and we trained like savages, logging 70-90 miles easily on any given week. 

                But ours was a very tiny school number wise, in a small rural community, a town not many would refer to as college friendly.  So we had a very different undergraduate experience than most.

                A few of us had a certain predilection to finding trouble in between classes, practices, and races.

                I had managed to go all throughout high school without drinking or partying whatsoever.  I was too closely guarded by my parents in my small and very quiet home town, and I was also too busy training for cross country, track, and maintaining my A plus average.  And then there was Latin Club, Quiz Bowl, 4-H, piano lessons, marching band, and sometimes garage band singing duties.  Not to mention, I was an altar boy.  And yes, my priest did come on to me several times and I was too naïve to realize it, which is beside the point.  I was a “good” kid.  I certainly wasn’t  projecting towards failure. 

                But I never necessarily wanted to be this kid; it wasn’t even really my choice, in fact.  A lot of people would have killed to have been in my spot.  I definitely took it all for granted.

                So when I got to college, I was definitely a candidate for “letting loose” a little bit, which is precisely what I would end up doing.

                It started out simple enough, a couple of beers here and there, nothing before or leading up to races.  I was a freshman, of course, so I didn’t immediately fit right in with the upperclassmen like Day, Joey, and Pubert.  But they did invite me to drink with them on occasion, mostly due to the fact that they couldn’t recruit any girls to hang out with them.  This was the conundrum at Cumberland College.  The girls were completely stuck up.  Either that or they were ugly, or fat, or football groupies, or wrestling team “cum dumpsters.”  So it was hang out with me or nothing at all.

                They also picked up another freshman runner.  “Mono,” named as such for having mononucleosis the very first week of school, was a high school state champion 800 meter runner.  Mono was built like a small bear, not the type of person who you would expect to be a very good middle distance runner, but what he lacked in height he made up for in “retard strength,” speed, and explosion. 

                Mono was never without a bottle in his hand and a dip in his gums.

                The five of us comprised a group called the Triple-S, which was short for Secret Sausage Society.  It was a suiting moniker for five horny and undersexed college students. 

                We started spending all of our time together after Nationals, where (as a team with no seniors, one junior, five sophomores, and myself) we finished 7^th out of 28 teams.

                This was the time in my life when I was introduced to Dextromethorphan Hydrobromide, or DXM, a dissociative frequently found in cough medicine.

                DXM just happens to be the active ingredient in the red pills Day handed to me on this Sunday afternoon after brunch. 

                Skeptical at first, but always somehow convinced through Day’s and Joey’s relentless and devastatingly logical peer pressure, what would I do?  I ingested every single one of them fuckers.

                One hour later, I was on a “level” that I could not possibly ever have imagined, in a place so beautiful that I knew without a shadow of a doubt that God existed, and that my fellow Triple S, Day, Joey, Pubert, Tiny Tim, and Mono were all with me, in a spiritual moment of “pseudo-enlightenment.”

                It was in this moment that I realized that my entire life I had only seen the very surface, but now there was such depth in every single thing.  I had never experienced such a glorious feeling of understanding before until this point.

                The significance of the trip can be summarized in a lecture I had heard from my favorite professor, Dr. Hancock.  The lecture was about string theory, and he explained that the ten or eleven dimensional world we live in as like a goldfish living in a Koi pond.  The fish understands the world in two dimensions, left and right, and forwards and backwards.   And then one day one fish postulated that another dimension might exist, a so called hidden up and down dimension to go along with the other two.  This would be the way Koi fish might explain the natural phenomena of rainfall on the Koi pond, because rain coming from above adds new realities that must be taken into account.  The rainfall is like unexplainable things here in our three dimensional world, such as gravity.  As such we can imagine gravity as possibly existing in a different dimension in nature.   The bottom line, just because the fish can only experience two dimensions does not suggest that other dimensions do not in fact exist.

                That afternoon my three dimensional world turned into an eleven dimensional world.  No words can really describe the beauty, wholeness, and euphoria that I felt.  It was the best day of my life.

                It was the best day, because it was the penultimate experience of my nineteen year old life, and it reinvigorated a sense of awe and wonder into the world that I had lost over time.  It was not just a singular, “self” moment.  It was out of self.  It was as if Heaven was making direct contact with me.  I felt “special,” and blessed by God's grace.               

                Coming down from the mountain, and also coming down from the high which lasted all afternoon, I recall telling Day that I felt as though I was part of God for the first time in my life, as opposed to something entirely separate.

                I had no idea that this ineffable feeling would be a turning point of sorts.  Because, when looked at in a much different context, I can also say that this was the worst day of my life.  But how can it be both?  If you consider that every single time I have consumed drugs since, it was in search of this feeling that I felt in Kenya, then it is an experience I would have much preferred I had never known to begin with.   It is this reason and this reason alone that I would never encourage someone to try cough medicine, or any other drugs for that matter.  

                Once you open up that Pandora’s box of consciousness altering, you can never, ever go back.  Because you will be chasing a bird that will lead you into the Devil’s Hand itself.

The Next Day.

                I remember waking up that morning.  I had missed my morning run for the first time ever because I was so worn out from the previous day.  I should have been getting ready for class, but I couldn’t seem to get out of bed. I wasn’t sick, or even particularly tired. but I felt a huge emptiness inside of me that I hadn’t felt before.  The emptiness was overpowering.  It was as if waves of negativity were crashing against my chest, swallowing up my heart. 

                In my head I knew that I was not supposed to do drugs.  I knew it was wrong, that drugs were bad, and could only lead to bad things.  At least this is what my DARE officer told me in high school.  And I believed what he told me on some level because I felt very guilty for having allowing myself to do what I did. 

                In this moment of sadness, I remember thinking to myself; my life is never going to be the same.

Chapter one

                I sit in my bathtub naked and beaten down.  I am so thoroughly exhausted from fighting with my wife, Rachel, that I can barely bring the bottle of Sailor Jerry to my mouth.  I drink Sailor Jerry because it is higher proof, and because I am a sailor myself.   I don’t really want to be one; however I did get the idea from Rachel.  And I am not really a sailor, but rather a corpsman.  Maybe that is the problem, that I have no idea who I am.  Anyhow, a corpsman is a sailor who provides medical assistance to Marines.  We are kind of a hybrid like that.  But like I said, I never really wanted this position.  And my troubles aren’t even war related, since I haven’t even seen combat.  At least not the kind of combat you would ordinarily associate with the military.

                I sink my head down into the tub water.  It will all be over soon enough.  I try to hold my breath for as long as I can, to see if I can pass out.  A minute or so passes and my lungs are screaming at my brain, begging it to make the executive call to surface for air.  I don’t listen to it.  I have always been a glutton for pain.  Another minute passes and I slowly feel the pain turning into a tingling sensation all about my body.  If I continue much longer I will probably pass out and inhale water.

                Just as I am about to fade into oblivion, I jerk my body up and gasp for air.  I didn’t figure it would work, and I laugh out loud because it is a little funny when I think about everything that has happened in my life leading up to this point.  After all, they say that your life flashes before your eyes when you die. 

                 The blade came from one of my shavers.  It wasn’t really hard to break open, and my fingers are pretty strong anyhow, so I don’t think it is any indication of just how cheap these products are being made these days.  I slide my finger across the blade and draw several beads of blood.  At least they make sharp razors, even if the rest of the shaver is a plastic piece of crap.

                My psychologist gave me Klonopin for my anxiety.  I lied to her and told her I was not an alcoholic.  Anyhow, do not mix the two.  Or you will end up like this. 

                I decided a long time ago it was going to be me or her.  I cannot live with this woman that I married.  I do not want to face the fact that I made the wrong choice and that I am quite possibly the stupidest motherfucker on the planet.  And I am not a murderer, although I have thought very long and hard about how I could kill her without getting in trouble.  After all, she would be better off dead.  She told me herself.  All I ever wanted to do was help her.  Why does she have to be such a bitch to me?  When I am the one that is actually on her side?

                I am married to depression.   So I inherited this mess fair enough, and I do not blame anyone but myself.   My life is a series of bad decisions.  And here I go again, making the ultimate bad decision.  Physical pain is something that I have never been bothered by too much, so it doesn’t hurt as I rake this blade over my wrist several times, trying to hit pay dirt.  Psychological pain is much worse.  It is actually a relief in a lot of ways, slicing my wrists like this.  Blood pours out of my arm as the bathwater starts to turn pink.  I dig the razor into my other wrist.  Let’s get this right.

                I think about Rachel as the booze and the drugs and the bleeding all come together in perfect synchronicity.  I see her little brother and sister, who I love more than words.  They are the ONLY reason why I have stayed so long.  And she has used them against me just like her mother uses them against their father.  Such a mind game they play the Stafford family.  I thought I was a gamer, able to psychologically fix this person.  I went to school for psychology.  And I had lived a happy life.  I thought that it would rub off on her.  Little did I know that she would rub off on me?

                Slowly I fade into oblivion and with golden rods and cut scenes I am hurled into a vortex of conscious unconsciousness.

                The strange thing is that ten years ago I was Graysville’s golden child.

                Oh, how the tides they turn.  No one saw me going into left field, but a whole lot of people noticed when I came back and wasn’t the same.  And they pretty much turned their backs, which suited me just fine, I don’t harbor any animosity towards them. 

                Not any longer, that is because I did.  I had a lot of anger, but all of that is gone now.

                This is the truth.  That is what you will be getting here, the truth.  After all, we are all searching for truth in some form or fashion.

                My name is Conrad Saint Louis.  Everyone would eventually come to know me as St. Louis.  This is a name I much prefer to any of the other ones that have been applied to me over the years.

                As a school boy I did exactly what I was told by my parents, and it worked. 

                Study hard. Check

                Get good grades. Check.

Run your ass off, because you suck at swimming, your shot is iffy, and you can’t throw.  You are good at something, and that something is going hard on the track. 

                I inherited running honestly, because running was just what my father was good at, and so I had a role model.  I had a coach.

                He always encouraged me to run with him when I was younger and so I did.  I would go run for a mile.   And then I would go run for two miles.  And by the time I was six I was able to run 4-5 miles at once, no problem at all.

                I entered every single race that came through the area and usually finished among the top in my age group.  I wasn’t exceptionally talented, but I wasn’t slow.  I did have a motor though, which caused me to run 70 mile weeks in high school, and eventually grow into a State caliber runner.

                And I was drilled on spelling words.  And I had no video games so I read encyclopedias for fun.   I got good grades.  I wasn’t exceptionally smart.  I was just smart enough, and had some gusto.  Just so happens that this is enough to include you in the 95th percentile in your class in Graysville.

                So heads did turn.  I didn’t ever think I was better than anyone.  I felt lucky to be honest, that my family was stable enough to give me such a foundation to grow and flourish.

                Running took me to Cumberland College.  This is in the middle of the Appalachian Mountains.  I chose to go here because the running program was strong for a small college, and there were plenty of rolling hills with a plethora of paths zigzagging through the Cumberland Gap.  And they were paying my tuition, which is the single biggest reason for going there.

                Jesus saves was the writing on the wall. Literally.  It was spray painted on a bridge you could see from the interstate heading south from Ohio.

                It was everywhere.  This liberal arts college also happened to be affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention.  The money trail was obvious; the SBC funded this cadre of educators.   And they programmed every Southern Baptist kid in a 200 mile radius with their bullshit.

                I once saw our school’s president, Dr.  Taylor, carry several boxes of whiskey into the college’s hotel.  I worked there, and it was the same night as a big party he and his wife were throwing.

                Did I mention that Cumberland College is in the driest region of southern Appalachia?  That means alcohol is a no-no.  Not only was our community dry, but also it was outlined in our student handbook over and over that any student attending Cumberland was not to drink alcohol, regardless of age.

                Needless to say, I was given very mixed messages.   Desperately wanting not to conform with these idiots, I decided to become Atheist. 

                I remember the exact place where it happened.  It was on the football field, that was inside the track that I would run around a million and a half times for the next 6 years.  It wasn’t a rash decision made right there on the spot.  My rational thinking mind had been bugging me for years about inconsistencies in the church, but this was the tipping point.

                We were playing ultimate Frisbee.  All it took was one like minded individual in this sea of southern righteousness.  His name was Joey, and he was also a member of my cross country team.  He said he didn’t buy into the baloney the school was feeding him.  I was engrossed from the very beginning.  I do not believe in God.

                What was developing right in front of me was a beast of a situation that would send my life in directions once unimagineable.

                Because I was “exceptional” in high school, in a manner of speaking, it was all the more difficult to watch myself slide into nothingness.  I got to live this debacle, so I can only imagine what it looked like from the outside looking in.