College is supposed to be where people are different. It’s supposed to be a place where people have learned to not act like they’re in high school. Unfortunately, that’s not really the case. Everyone is short-sighted and has the same basic opinions and viewpoints. Everyone wears exactly what is defined as acceptable within their given social group. Everyone is terrified of being different because they don’t know what to do if other people don’t tell them what to do. If you consider breaking up with your girlfriend, you’re worried that you’ll never find anyone who likes you again. It’s okay if she’s a bitch that always asks you to put your own problems on hold, even when she’s in a good mood. If you break up with your boyfriend, you’ll never find someone who’s faithful to you again. It’s ok if he flirts with other girls and occasionally sleeps with them, too.

Seriously, it’s fucking near-impossible to find people who’re different from the rest. People seem to always choose the most attractive person of the opposite sex so long as doing so doesn’t compromise too many of their principles. The desired individual also has to be socially accepted and at least moderately popular to be considered a good option. “She’s cute and funny, but she’s a little awkward? Fuck it, I’ll go for the pretty slut sitting on the couch instead. Maybe I can even get with one of her friends.”

This really is how things work. You know that guy you like, but he always seems to have a girlfriend who’s bitchy and selfish? Or that girl you like who’s always upset because of her boyfriend that you know doesn’t actually care about her, but she still clings to him regardless? (Apologies if I accidentally just described your crush in one sentence.)

You, on the other hand, are different from everyone else. You’re not reading this with crossed legs and you’re not leaning your head on one of your hands. You’re not going to wake up for class on Monday, go to class, do exactly what the teacher says, go back to your dorm room, think that you’re overworked and stressed out, go to sleep, and then repeat the process until Friday. You’re not going to try to hang out with your friends every Friday night and you’re not going to try to remind yourself that you’re not lame. You’re not going to form your initial impressions of people based off of how they look. You’re not going to lie in bed at night and wonder if you’ll ever be truly loved. You’re not going to continue onwards, every day like the rest, until you finish college and get a job. You’re not going to read this and wonder if you’re as guilty of being ordinary and predictable as everyone else.

You could just actually make your own decisions and form your own opinions. I don’t think I’m being too radical. I’m just an advocate of thinking.

Current Interests:

Cigarettes – Marlboro Reds

Drinks – Black Coffee

Music – The Best of Radiohead by Radiohead (Album)

All considered, this is a pretty average weekend morning for me. I like going out and drinking. It’s fantastic fun and is probably the best release I’ve found so far. Before you flip a shit on me for saying that after my last two posts, keep in mind that I don’t drink on weekdays anymore for the most part. Also, Thursday night counts as part of the weekend for the record.

Other than checking out parties I’ve just been hanging out lately. Class work is winding down for the summer so I’ve found myself with way too much free time. I’m finally working on my writing which is something I’ve wanted to do for a very long time, so that’s pretty good. I’m also very, very into music right now- I’d even say that I am into it more-so than usual. If you want to talk to me about alternative, rock, indie, electronic/dance, or even new folk, let me know.

Fast-forward eighteen hours. I’m back from a party again. Tonight, I still remember what happened. What a fantastic night nonetheless. I’m food-coloring painted head to toe and despite that I still consider things to have been a success. If you’re one of my friends from facebook you can see the aftermath. If you’re not, why the fuck haven’t you messaged me yet?

I’m typing away while Dan and my roommate, Rob, are busy discussing music. I think I have to go and interject. Apologies for the shorter than usual post but I figure I owed you all an update after two days.

Current Interests:

Cigarettes – Camel Filters

Drinks – Keystone Light (I had no other options!)

Music – Manners by Passion Pit (Album)

He walked out of the building and into the cold night. A cigarette rode between his two clamped lips, waiting to be lit. He dug one of his hands into his left jean pocket and pulled the hand back out, gripping a silver lighter. He flipped it open and dragged the wheel downwards with his thumb. The lighter flicked cleanly and produced a bright flame, briefly illuminating his features. The circles under his eyes looked like someone had rubbed ash onto his skin. Other than that, his face was neutral. He didn’t like to let people know what was on his mind- He tried to only curve his mouth into a smile if he was ready to share something.

He lit his cigarette and put the lighter back in its home inside his pocket. He took a long drag and exhaled slowly, letting the smoke gather. It formed a roiling cloud, hanging in the air under the street lamp next to him. He wiped off his face with his hand, more so to wake himself up than to clean anything off, and took another drag. The cherry of his cigarette glowed brightly for a few moments before returning to a dim glow. He exhaled again.

He wondered to himself if anyone actually liked him. Sometimes he thought that most people only used him to reach certain ends. He’d learned from a very young age that he couldn’t rely on many people. Almost everything he saw and experienced reinforced that, even these days. Once you know to look for something you can’t help but see it everywhere. He couldn’t tell if most people liked him or just wanted to take advantage of him, and he hated himself for not being able to tell the difference sometimes. He knew better than to doubt his close friends and a few family members, but any one else needed to earn his trust.

A pillar of ash extended from the end of his cigarette, threatening to fall on his clothes at a moment’s notice. He flicked the filter with his thumbnail.  The ash cleanly fell off, revealing the red ember beneath again. He continued smoking as he fell back into thought.

As he looked back on his life, he couldn’t help but inwardly laugh at himself. He was eighteen and felt like he was thirty. Sometimes he used to wonder if he’d ever finally break down and not be able to go on anymore. Some days were tougher than others, but he was getting better as time went on. Life hadn’t been as easy as he would’ve hoped, but he knew it was for the best. It’d made him into who he was today, and that was worth the cost. Still, he wondered how he would’ve turned out if he’d had a completely normal, conflict-free life. He almost smiled as he tried imagining himself as an average college freshman- Shallow, impressionable, and completely willing to do anything for acceptance.

He thought of himself as being almost impossible to offend or upset because, simply put, he’d been offended or upset so many times growing up that he’d built a permanent resistance to it. Being hurt badly is like getting chicken pox. It only happens once before you build up a sort of immunity to it. Pointless fights over meaningless words didn’t hold any attraction to him any more.

Sometimes he wondered what other people thought of him. He’d learned to not really care about his social image after years of being a loner, but sometimes his curiosity got the best of him. Did other people see him as a loser? A creep? A normal, if a little eccentric, college student? Did anyone he wasn’t close friends with even really care what he was like? He knew better than to ever ask anyone what their opinion of him was- To do so would be like asking for a neutrally worded definition of an average eighteen year old guy. He thought to himself that everyone was too careful and too willing to sacrifice honesty and their opinions in favor of being well-liked. A little more truth and a few more uncensored talks between people would make the world a better place.

The cigarette finally reached its filter. He’d had a lot to think about and had smoked it to the throat, as usual. The cigarette made a clean upwards arc before a sudden gust of wind carried it away. As he walked back towards the door, he thought about the similarities in the fate of his cigarettes and that of most of his worries- They seemed important right now, but in the end the wind would just carry them away. He opened the door and entered his dorm feeling just a little bit more light-headed and light-hearted than before.

Current Interests:

Cigarettes – Marlboro Reds and Camel Menthol Wides

Drinks – Iced Tea, because I can’t get a ride to buy real drinks

Music – Sleeping with Ghosts by Placebo (Album)

Here’s a simple fact: You will probably not change the world. You probably won’t even be a little blip in your country’s history. You’re going to finish college, fall in love, get married, have kids, raise them, send them off to college, congratulate them when they finish college, then enjoy your senior years. Eventually your kids will repeat the pattern and have children of their own. At some indefinite point, you will die. It’s the unavoidable end for all of us. Let me re-iterate that to help drive the point home: One day, no matter what you do, regardless of who looks up to you and who hates you, you will die. Life will go on. Eventually, everyone you ever met or ever knew will die, too. At this point you’ll be a tombstone and a name in an old census report, nothing more. Given enough time, all records of you ever existing will be lost and even your tombstone will completely erode. All of this leads to me telling you one thing: As far as the world is concerned, you never existed. No one will give a shit a hundred years from now if you jump out the window of your room today or die of old age in seventy years.

Why do people do what they’re told and try to comfortably fit into society and normality, then? Almost everyone wants to be accepted and fit in with the people around them. In a country where we supposedly value freedom of thought, speech, and expression, people suppress their feelings and opinions in favor of clinging to esoteric and unrealistic ideals. Being rich or popular will not make you happy because happiness is always a relative thing. There are rich men out there who look back on their empty, meaningless lives and wish that they had pursued art, not money. Meanwhile, a poor college student with a hundred dollars to his name is celebrating because he’s finally pursuing his passion for writing. Somewhere out there, a nerdy, unpopular college girl is happier than she’s ever been in her entire life because she’s found a boy who loves her for who she is, not who her parents told her to be. At the same time somewhere else in the world, a woman who was a social butterfly in her younger years rolls over in bed and looks at the aging frame of a man she’d married for his looks and wonders where she went wrong in her depressing existence.

Does a man who only has four friends and works at a steel plant feel love any less vividly than an actress featured on the covers of magazines? Is the thrill of kissing someone you love for the first time any less important if they’re poor? The thing I’m trying to leave you with is that money and popularity are completely and totally meaningless. Just do your own thing and you’ll find people who like what you like and who like you for who you are, not for your social image. Trust me, I’ve been around almost every social scene possible. If you go for popularity, you’ll get the girl you told yourself that you wanted then realize she’s so different from you that you can’t even stand her. If you want to love someone, they have to work for you as hard as you work for them. Otherwise you’ll only find disappointment and heartbreak.

As long as you think for yourself in all aspects of your life and make sure not to hurt others through your actions, you’re already more successful than the people you were raised to look up to. Things might suck right now but you’ll go on. One day, you’ll pity the people who went for popularity and money when their lives suck in the end. It’s better to have a rough start with a good finish than a clean takeoff that ends in a crash.

Here’s the bottom line for all of you: If you want to study hard, make sure you’re doing it because you love what you’re studying and not because you’ve been told that at some point down the road it’ll pay off. If you want to work hard, do it because you love your line of work and not because you love your paycheck. If you want to go out to parties every night, do it because you love parties and not because you want to be more popular with people who really, at the end of the day, don’t care about you. If you want to stay in your room writing all night, go for it. If you just be yourself, people will come to you.

Current Interests:

Cigarettes – Marlboro Reds with matches

Drinks – Iced Coffee (Frappuccino)

Music – Approaching Normal by Blue October (Album)

Lower doses of Salvia (Around 40x to 100x) seem to pretty uniformly produce discomfort and distorted perceptions. My previous trip on 40x involved me telling people that I was in “Funkytown” (I have no idea what the fuck…) and slowly sinking into a couch that seemed to have transformed into quicksand. Andy had a story about how at one point he’d been chased by imaginary crazed dwarves while he was on Salvia, but I assumed that wasn’t typical and chalked it up to “Bad trips”. Conveniently enough, “Bad trips” turn out to pretty much encompass almost all high-strength salvia doses. We decided to go with a plan of parking Dan’s car in front of a lake, smoking the Salvia, then exiting the car and calmly sitting on the grass. We didn’t really even make it out of the car.

The thing we didn’t realize is that you don’t really “Try out” 400x Salvia. In retrospect, that’s basically like saying you’re going to “Try out” falling into one of the nine depths of Hell. I remember one puff, two puffs, and then flying out through the car window into outer space, laws of physics be damned. I vaguely remember divulging all of my, Dan’s, and Andy’s secrets to an alien somewhere off in the depths of space before I even realized that I was having a trip of epic, terrible proportions. Ten minutes of conversing with this alien passed by instantly in my head. I knew it was a bad trip- I had an overwhelming sense of being socially violated. For some reason, with nothing to gain from it, I had decided to tell an alien what may as well have been national security secrets. My solution to escaping the trip I had become trapped in was to move my head to the left, because apparently that would pull me back in from outer space (again, no idea what the fuck I was thinking). I then, apparently, decided to repeat myself over and over, “Wait, was I just talking to you guys?” for five minutes straight before I realized that I was being retarded.

Andy, on the other hand, was completely silent lying in the backseat of the car. He’d smoked his hits while I was off being a space cadet and they’d had ample time to set in. As I finally started to come back to reality from my trip, he just suddenly started weaving his head back and forth towards the front of the car. As it turns out, his trip involved him basically melting into the back seat of the car to the point where he saw the individual fibers of the seat. He was weaving his head so that he wouldn’t hit any of the fibers on his way out. It was an elegant solution to a complicated problem.

In the meantime, Dan had been laughing his ass off thinking Andy and I were being idiots. He then proceeded to smoke his portion of the Salvia and barely managed to put the bowl down before total madness set in. He immediately looked around with complete confusion and panic, then suddenly went bat-shit insane and started ripping the center console off of his car with his bare hands. This guy straight-up lost his shit. He decided to rev the engine as hard as possible (We were parked, thank God), tried to open his door from the handle rather than the actual lever, then managed to somehow successfully exit the car and promptly assumed the Mecca prayer position next to the car. He also started expressing a deep desire to go wander into some tall grass nearby. Andy and I were able to convince him that it would be a really shitty idea to do that.

As we finally started to collectively fully regain our senses, confusion set in once again. What had I exactly told that alien? Had I said it out loud, and did Andy and Dan know what I’d said? If I hadn’t said it out loud, did that mean I had telepathically communicated with an imaginary alien? I didn’t even know what I’d exactly said. Likewise, Andy was deep in thought about his trip and what it was like to become the back seat of a car. Dan had no idea what had happened. I was a little curious why he’d decided to convert to Islam on the fly during a Salvia trip.

Having successfully raised more questions than we answered during a supposedly enlightening Salvia trip, we decided to call it a day and saved the remaining half of the bag for some other hapless experimentalists to try.

So kids, what did we learn? That 400x Salvia will violate your mind in ways you never thought possible. You’ll also feel pretty uncomfortable for the rest of the day.

Current Interests:

Cigarettes – Marlboro Menthols

Drinks – Black Coffee

Music – Feel. Love. Thinking Of. by Faunts (Album)

I just haven’t enjoyed life in so long that when things are finally looking up I can’t let myself get dragged down again. High school was about maintaining an appearance that things were alright while the world burned down around me at home. The best approach to handling drunk parents during a divorce is really simple- Just ignore them and make it clear that you don’t like them, then go into school the next day and pretend that things are alright. It sounds a little brutal but you sort of have to be there to understand. When screaming doesn’t work, silence is the answer.

As soon as I finished high school I became very sick with a certain (non-communicable) condition that I’d rather not name. I spent most of last summer sleeping 16-20 hours a day and trying to hold down food. I ended up going to the hospital and the doctors told me that in my state I had a decent chance of dying without surgery. I’m not trying to be overly dramatic here. I had a decent chance of not walking out. People were shaking their heads but it’s not like someone was reading me my last rites.

The decision was simple for me- I decided against getting surgery and wanted to try my luck. I turned 18 in the hospital and had a right to choose to refuse an operation. There are certain organs you can live without but would have little desire to actually live without.

I ended up making a nearly-full recovery without any surgery. The doctors didn’t really know what the fuck happened and I’m smart enough to not question it. I’m currently significantly healthier and have an extremely low chance of having to ever visit a hospital for related reasons again.

What I learned from my hospital trip is that humans are extremely fragile and could, with very little notice, drop dead. Enjoy life because you could die at any moment, even if you’re perfectly healthy and young. Would it really matter at that point what your grades are, how fast you can throw a baseball, or how many people you’ve slept with?

So, the end result of what I’ve outlined between high school and last summer forms a solid definition of me. I know better than to get upset about the small shit because things can always be worse. People are people, people are dumb, and people can be more vicious than animals. People can also be wonderful and exciting. The only constant is that you have to be patient with people in order to not go bat-shit insane. I’m also living life to the fullest now because I’m aware that there could be no tomorrow. Like I said, I made an almost full recovery, but even at my best health-wise I rapidly came closer to dying than I would’ve liked. There’s a lot to see and experience out there in the world and if you limit yourself you’ll only see less of it than you could’ve before you’re gone.

Do I wish that things had gone differently? Fuck no. Everything I’ve experienced has made me who I am. The good, the bad, and the seemingly-meaningless have all blended together to create me.  I’m enjoying myself and alive, and that’s all that matters. I’m not looking for sympathy here. I’m telling you to go out and have fun before you’re six feet under. I’ve got a few secrets left in my head to share, but I think this post is more than enough for today.

That finally brings us to why I made this blog. I need to get some things off my chest that I’ve kept too close to my heart for too long. A couple of my friends said they’d at least read a few posts and that’s enough to get me started. I do like writing and would like to get better at it so I’m going to do my best to sticking to making major posts at least every three days or so. If you don’t like my blog, it’s cool- Just don’t read it. If you like what I’m writing, let me know so I have more reason to continue. This is the line in the sand that I’m drawing for how personal I’m willing to get with my writing. Anything’s fair game that doesn’t reveal too much about my friends. This post is a little more grim than what I have planned for the future so don’t let all the talk of death and depression turn you off. I just felt a need to explain myself.

Current Interests:

Cigarettes – Marlboro Reds

Drinks – Orange Soda

Music – Lungs by Florence + The Machine (The album)

I like writing but hate having people read what I’ve written so the internet seemed like an appropriately anonymous medium to post my writing on. I plan on making decent-sized posts or short stories every 2-3 days so check back often if you’re a fan. My tastes in smokes, drinks, and music change wildly from week to week so I’m planning on including what I’m currently into at the bottom of every major post. Also, I’m pretty open to criticism so if I write something shitty or otherwise boring please go ahead and shred me so I don’t do it again. Likewise, if I write something actually worth reading I’d love positive feedback. I don’t expect many people to read this blog but it’d be good to know when I’m not alone. Finally, if you want me to write about anything in particular, just let me know.

Current Interests:

Cigarettes – Marlboro Reds

Drinks – Heineken Mini-kegs

Music – Sigh No More by Mumford & Sons (The album)