My father watched from behind the truck as I liberated a quart of Hershey’s chocolate milk onto the pavement of the Maine Mall parking lot. The puddle was about three feet across and almost entirely made of liquid. It was a prodigious effort. I wiped my mouth and looked up at my father. He looked back at me.
“Are you done?” Even as he asked the question, I knew the answer.
“But wait!” I said. “There’s more.”
I deposited the contents of my dinner, New England-style clam chowder, consumed that day some considerable time before the chocolate milk. Combined, the results of my effort looked to my weary young eyes like an egg white and yolk or, if you will, a giant purple areola with a white and pink nipple floating in the center.
The reason I was spewing perfectly good food in the mall parking lot, holding up a perfectly good trip to LensCrafters and Eastern Mountain Sports, was that I was steeling myself for a break up, and I knew it would be messy. It was the first long-term relationship I’d been in. Also, my parents were getting divorced, and I was working a hellish job washing dishes in the bowels of a local hotel.
It was the gnarliest period of my early childhood, and the stress, in addition to an affinity for carbonated beverages, resulted in a classic case of Acid Reflux Disorder–or, as I referred to it, “The Puce.” As in, “Hang on dad, I’m going to puce,” which was usually good for a laugh. Which brings me to the point of all this.
Even as a young boy, you see, I was brilliant. I understood that even as the world conspired to drive me batshit, it was ultimately my choice to take it on with some class, with some joie de vivre, or to let it get to me, as you people probably would, and to let myself be reduced to a whining and insufferable little bitch. And any of you who have had the pleasure of meeting me knows that if nothing else, I have a lot of class.
So, being the perspicacious young talent that I was and still am, I soldiered on because I have a lot of things I want to do with my life, and whining isn’t one of them. I couldn’t help that it felt like someone was bathing my esophagus with diesel fuel. It wasn’t my fault that no one told me that drinking a two-liter bottle of soda would confound my digestive system to the point of near-meltdown. (No wonder I slept three hours a night back then …) Never mind that. The point is that I had a sense of humor about the situation even though it sucked.
And if any of you try to pipe in with that lemons-from-lemonade schtick, I must remind you that as a writer, it is my job to avoid cliches. It is also my job to avoid painfully and depressingly obvious platitudes.
I’m not talking about pretending problems away or even making the best of them. I’m saying that to a small extent you can choose the attitude with which you take on your problems. If you submit to the urge to get depressed, you will start listening to emo music and authoring tormented poetry. The next step is getting trashed and tearfully proposing to your ex-girlfriend over the phone 4 a.m on a Wednesday morning. After that, you’re done for. Don’t even talk to me about it.
As we cruise into finals week, I know a lot of you are caving under the workload. I’ve seen you, with your nails all bitten, furtively chain-smoking and compulsively masturbating when you think the rest of us aren’t looking. The important thing to remember is that stress and the attendant depression are temporary conditions. The sun will set and rise again, and by their nature, crises are rooted in time.
An excessive workload at the end of a semester is particularly galling, because as we prioritize our assignments in frantic late-night strategy sessions, we obsess over increasingly smaller units of time.
I know a lot of people at USM work their way through college, and those that don’t are probably worried about disappointing whoever’s footing the bill, but remember: this is USM. This is liberal arts school in the United States. Relative to a lot of people in the world, we have it pretty goddamn cushy. Not totally cushy, but relatively speaking. I mean, c’mon.
Because I reckon things never have really been okay, I’m not saying everything is okay now. But I urge you not to take the Kurt Cobain route as your bile rises this month. Nor do I subscribe to the Andrea Yates philosophy of stress management. Besides, I’m not saying you should do anything I tell you to do. These people all rock, I know, but even as we emulate those we admire, we should be conscious of their shortcomings as well.