Martian Reverie

A rosecolor freshman evening I tagged along with some dormmates across the campus to meet up with other unknowing Baphomet worshippers — their devotion shown through a liquor bottle display, credit card cocaine and finalized by our eventual destination: the clothed (at least one could hope, some of the grimy patrons are better clothed) orgy of most college bars.

Entering the lobby linked to otherwise sterile concrete white and brick halls, standard 20 pound wooden dorm doors and two barely cushioned seats no one ever obviously sits in because it requires a keycode to even be in this lobby but our insider popped it open after my dormmate dialed it in. They were the first door on the hall to the right, which made me pause and wonder how likely this is, or how do we even know these people, and these are definitely faces I’ll never see again, but we filed into the clowncar of a room with the two bunks that you could touch both standing in the middle. Toward the entrance, up against the closet, they popped a foldable desk open, already littered with red cups and speckles of the funny dust my dormmate was so excited to snort.

Now, you may imagine this continues, with all of us getting well inebriated and fidgety to then gorge upon the night, but everything turned.

I only surveyed the room for a minute or less before we heard a rather heavyhanded, doom rhythmic knock. Everyone looked around wide eyed and the owner of the dorm quickly swiped away all the fairy powder or licked it and the sweating, delayed panic swallowed the room.

Carefully he pulled the door open, sticking out only his head, and the RA demanded, “Inspections. Everyone out of the room.” How surprised I was to see a thin-frame woman, masking as something hoydenish despite her clear maiden constitution, probably of the swimmer team, and a mild guilt mixed with dread seeing she was scowling. She couldn’t stand the double bass pop music and the screaming after each crumple of straw, coupled with complaints of the other residents. It was only naturally we met with fate.

The dormitory circus continued its act with each head, all hung, shuffling out of the room. It must have been at least twelve young men now in the lobby, and I took it upon myself to finally use one of these mostly abandoned beyond decoration seats. Soon after the RA sauntered out with an open whiskey bottle and shook her head most likely wondering why no one else allocates a proper time and joins a normal club, tries some squash if tennis proves too much, or maybe track and field for the more masochistic amongst the sorry lot. Alas, she, fulfilling her duty most mechanically, so demanded, “IDs please. Now. This is going on your record.”

It was upon these words that made me wonder why I was alive, or in this place, with people I wouldn’t talk to beyond five minutes and they tell me how they’ll up their game, they’re gonna hit it tonight, yeah — it was upon these words that I felt most cheated of not only a simple night out, but of a more idyllic college life as I only go out every few fortnights. But you are who you hang around, after all…

After the humiliating patting to fetch one’s wallet for an ID and how she snatched it from my hands with pure disgust and if only I could plea, please, I am not supposed to be here, but I’m sure any eyerolling jury nods indifferently, and my RA executioner needs to demonize me in order to file her injunction: to cement a second class existence, a hooligan stamp upon my forehead persistence.

After the writeup was over, and she reprimanded each through a silent stare with a delayed let-go of the ID as one helplessly tugs back to regain a humanity, so she finished with, “You all will get an email on next steps” and swaggered away, her frame fading the same as the rest of one’s aspirations, dreams. A ticket to a slot in the global hierarchy.

Making the most of it so the ringleaders suggested we press on into the night but halfway through the walk I felt so dejected and condemned to Hell that I tapped my dormmate’s shoulder and told him I’ll sit this one out.

Now, my dormmate, good fellow he was, did feel a slight guilt ringing me into this more rowdy bunch and thus permanently scarring both my future and my demeanor, so he took it upon himself to take the blame for the evening after further talks with the administration. He did this, though with one condition — that there was a paper to write to which one needs to demonstrate reflection, and thus we formed a deal I’ll write on his behalf.

I happily obliged, and talks progressed, and the week eventually came: my record was clear, my step reclaimed a characteristic bounce before the corporate world would later slash my Achilles, and I popped open Word to begin. True to a bureaucratic tune, it was already sophomore year.

The prompt was a methodical word after another in the plainest to state why alcohol is a no-no. Maybe it included other drugs within its prompt, but this was an alcoholic incident so it was only natural to assume the form of any Alcoholic — especially those attending Anonymous — which is, of course, a constant guilt, an insatiable ability to ever control this disease. Essentially ruined and only God shall make right of you.

Or not. I began methodical, selected the three points and listed them at the end of the first paragraph to the approval of my third grade teacher on basic exposition. Whatever those points were, so I snatched one, pasted it within the first sentence of the next clump, and continued… or so one would hope.

I’m not sure where I begun this habit, but seeing this occurred well into the second year of college, so one can speculate the lead up. I had a room to myself by then, even with three roommates in a Proper Apartment off-campus, though in the characteristic modern age I rarely talked to them, they rarely talked to me, we all stared at our screens. Sometimes I would hear the Announcer from League of Legends through the centralized A/C, or a trail of ganja to follow with a door movement stanza: doorbell, room door open, foot patter patter, apartment open, “thank you, here, thanks,” close and clicked, click to close, Papa John’s.

What is often depicted as a gathering of arms, a symposium of my fellow citizens, so naturally fades into the faceless online school attendance, expansive halls, faces to follow and fade and how are we in the same class or nothing to say, long dusk walks with a streetlight endless: before I knew it I already became a hermit.

In this hermit state, though at times coyly dragged out for a study session by whatever number exchanged from a shared class before we ghost with semester end; or, on happenstance, those benevolent enough to endure communications with me when I was catatonic half the time stuck in daydream. Yes, Daydream and excruciating amounts of anime, forumposting (to later delete, of course) — never YouTube, though the corporate world broke me to try later.

Toward this eventual slide off into second-year obscurity within my, to those striving for credentials even if all colleges are now flattened in an autodidact world, simple state college, it was then that I started to adopt mannerisms unbefitting of a well-adjusted budding student and future worker bee. My inner monologue would tie itself around my neck and I’d see three abysses on any given day until absolutely delighted by the order of the books fourth library floor, trudging back through the frat and sorority corridor to which I’d often hear the sobs from some woman in illegally hiked up shorts and a tanktop sculpting her deteriorating body still formed, sporting a cigarette and a little slurring indicative of a breakup.

It was here, by this point, that I no longer attended college, but instead I attended some secret world elsewhere, and the cellophane draped onto everything, even my roommates, who sometimes could manage a muffle in the translucent reverb, in the perpetual vertigo and high-pitch flash grenade scenery to each day end and beginning. As the bona fide martian I hunched upon my uncomfortable apartment provided wooden stained chair. A gargoyle form, to complete our long overdue dormmate contract.

Point there, touch up here, reorder, cut, and smudge together at least something on the screen. Though as I began to write more so the habit starts: I start to submerge. To forget this even was a prompt, or a favor, and that this was going to some administrator hoping for a dry ritualistic admission of guilt. No, I began to descend, as I always do, as I continue to do. I veered into an existentialistic lens, pleaded my case that alcohol restricts a freedom innate, a gall to do more than a liquid courage could ever insist, some authentic appeal Mr. Wallace would perhaps nod while marking the rest of the page and suggesting I should drop out of his class.

I was quite satisfied with myself, slightly giggling as I reached the end. Scrolling over to Outlook and typing my prior dormmate’s name for email autocomplete so I attached and sent it off. A chime echoed assent that I did, finally, complete my duty.

It was only after a few days that I get a call from my dormmate. He had a little laughing and I laughed nervously to follow before he asked, in his laughter, “What the fuck is this?”

I was, of course, perplexed, so I asked, “Oh, what do you mean?”

“I have no clue what’s going on in this essay. Is this some sort of joke?” he replied, words exact — he did wonder if I was joking.

It was at this point I realized that, well, I guess it was a joke, because on reflection I realized I did nothing other than rearrange words toward some ideal the same as an asylum inmate scratching his walls of thesis on how he receives direct psycho-sonic beams from someone within the U.S. Department of Energy.

I laughed, recovering this failure in my mask slipping, and affirmed, “yes, it was a joke. Let me fix it up and I’ll send it over,” and I even said this with a smile, even though I didn’t realize at the time this was, perhaps, solidifying my departure into someone incapable of understanding what sounds reasonable, normal, anything.

Instead I write vaguely and haphazardly perhaps as a reflection of my deteriorating sense of reality. The worse part is, is how I can delude myself into believing that it’s adding up, it’s all coming together, making much sense of some asunder world and it even seems to sport a tame jingle.

My dormmate was one of the last persons to shake me from this martian reverie I often find myself in. I am stuck in this reverie almost perpetually, and it was only after reading through some other blogs today so I come to my senses and, glancing over once more, I wonder why do mine suddenly feel so fucked in the head, or second-take fruitless, or just outright strange and almost sickening, of unreality somewhere — it was here I realized well, yeah, I already know why.

I did it in college.