Archie's Dump

How often, if ever, do you find yourself on a college campus after you’ve graduated?

It isn’t often for me, but being at the WASHU campus twice within a year for conferences and talks, is enough for me to say that this is now a common occurrence.

It’s very easy to be swayed by historic brick walls and the sight of young people entering them. I graduated only three years ago, but as I scribble my thoughts within Brown Hall, I can’t help but wonder what it would be like.

What would my career look like–my life–if I paid attention in school? What would it look like if I wasn’t dedicated to being a comedian. I suppose one could say that it’s not too late, but I won’t find the same support I had as a teenager if I decided to throw myself into academia again.

Working a dead end job doesn’t help either. I don’t want to keep working in a department that doesn’t fufill my work. I look around at these students and faculty and feel rage to know that, I–at one point–felt the same amount of passion, of love for what I was studying for. Which, I should mention, at that point was to serve my community because compassion oozed from me, my own empathy poisoning my very existence.

Since my work at my current job, it’s only been squandered by talks of money and advancing the institution while leaving employees harmed by the very same institution–injured and forgotten in a mile deep skeleton closet.

The job market certainly isn’t another joy bringer. It should come as a surprise to no one that a profession isn’t paid for unless it profits. I knew this when I started and I knew this as I worked in my field, but however unfufilling it may be, I followed for the niceities offered by corporations. Health insurance, paid time off, a retirement plan, and the promise for stability.

Though stable I have been, happy I have not. The labor is minimal but energy and stamina are drained. All this for what reward? Profit? The same profit that benefits those above me? Surely not.

It is surely so. My brain and ideas are only fascinating so long as they have a price tag. The expectation to pump out ideas and strategies has rotted my brain and led me to a means of self-deprecation. What am if not a cog? And if I dared to jump out of the machine, could I even begin to survive without it?

I know it so deeply and truly to my person that I have something to work towards. I have asked and I have begged my ancestors to guide me, but they grow tired of my misdirection. They tell me that my purpose is under my nose, but I feel as if it’s under my chin–everything I look down to find it, it nestles under the rings of my neck.

If I’m so close, why does it not appear? If it is my purpose, why does it hide from me. I beg until my knees bleed and incense burns, but no one is patient enough to show me anymore. I have lost the opportunity to become, to be–and the sorrows I feel are the penance of my own obliviousness, a purgatory of my own creation, of my own ignorance.

Instead of trying again at the risk of my own humiliation, I’m meant, or rather destined to be, nothing. Perhaps, I should abandon the call towards the grandiose, and give up. That is my lesson.

To leave.

I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.

-Mark Twain