Miami Student

Issue date: 1/30/07 Section: Editorials

Media Credit: Dan Chudzinski

There's a chance you might remember me.

No, not because you took me home from a bar to hook up and instead I vomited in one of your dresser drawers and passed out on your kitchen counter (although, that may also have happened as well).

The truth is I used to write for this little rag, The Miami Student. Once upon a time, I was an editorial editor, drunk with my own power and overwhelming sense of purpose, but then I did something incredibly stupid - I graduated. Now, instead of all that prestige and glory, I'm just some shmuck with a bachelor's degree, who would have an easier time finding a nuclear missile in Iraq than a real job. You might ask yourself, what does a crass, untalented, and (let's face it) effeminate college graduate actually do? The answer is nothing … by which I mean everything.

Less than a week after receiving my diploma from the man who once publicly accused me of rolling back the Enlightenment, I struck out west on a feverish, dizzying eight-month cross-country road trip that left me broke, enlightened, dead and reborn.

More than 12,230 miles, through 29 states and one Canadian province, I scoured the North American continent, dissecting its endless maze of highways, byways, back alleys and seedy bars. I worked as a boat wrangler on a lake in Wyoming. I climbed the second highest mountain on the Teton Range and urinated from the summit. In Vancouver, I ate dinner with a homeless man at four in the morning and heard what it felt like to be in the depths of crack binge. In Portland and Reno, I hunted down childhood friends I hadn't seen in 13 years. I stumbled blindly through a nightclub in Vegas, where women massaged each other in cages and took baths in the middle of the dance floor. In the Arizona desert, I taught a group Navajo high school students about Bruce Springsteen. I slept in my car. I stayed in shady motels where whole families of four lived out of a single room and tired men in shirts soaked with oil pulled the shades closed after returning from work each day. I watched the sun rise in the desert and gazed in awe as a train blasted through the dawn inches from my face. Through the empty miles of New Mexico and Texas, the bayous of Louisiana and Mississippi, the shuttered windows and stray garbage of New Orleans, I drove and drove. I woke up in a hotel room in Jackson without any memory of how I got there and took a stool softener as a recreational drug in Chapel Hill. Through South Carolina and Virginia, Philadelphia and New Jersey, Connecticut and New York, I saw a thousand sights I never before dreamed and met a thousand people whose lives I never before imagined. Then I ran out of money.

Continued...

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