The Wilderness Years - Raskolnikov's Blues Pt. 1

I had never seen a more wretched hive of fucking sycophants in my life, it was a well groomed and well fed and well cared for collection of bootlickers and asslickers, this was the future of second-rate academia at it's finest, half-wit and talent-less buffoons in boat shoes with an overweight play write and slutty actress thrown in for good measure, call it a well rounded class, hell i wish i was making it up, i wish i hadn't actually spent money to be trapped in a room with these asshats, apparently my adman-journo degree didn't count for shit with the high and mighty doling out the grants of this esteemed state university English dept., i had wagered as much but looking at these studious bores was like a slap in one nut, not devastating but more that sick feeling where one testicle ascends into you pelvis bringing a strange and nauseous ache, so here i sat paying for it and suddenly all that bright-eyed stoned optimism that took place the previous year at the White Trash Pleasuredome was evaporating faster than cocaine at a strip club...

The first day of graduate level lit class i must have looked like a slack-jawed junkie, sitting in our circle like the good kindergartners we were, waiting for the arrival of our master, i had a head full of nappy dreads and a beat up pair of Vans on, cut off shorts, i could tell that if any of these fucking squares was hip enough to watch Fast Times behind their parents backs on cable back in 8th grade that they'd be clocking me for a certain Mr. J. Spicouli... and that's not to say they would have been entirely wrong except for the accent of course, mine involved a bit more midwestern skateboard slang, fresh off a year of slinging bagels and smoke and another summer on the migrant service worker tourism circuit i had walked back into the hallowed halls of higher education with hope and aspirations, what can i say i was young and though i was of the firm belief that humanity was a gigantic shit-pile i guess one could say i still had this youthful idealism that i thought i could make things better? fuck if i know? like i said i was young, something akin to an optimistic nihilist... but back to the classroom...

The door of the classroom swings open, a bit of stumbling and bumbling and in walks a rather fey, butch lesbian... from the outset one can tell she's not the most confident of sorts but also not cocky or pretentious like some of the profs, she had a PHD in Russian Literature and i'm almost giddy with excitement cuz at the time i was all about the Rooskies and the Frogs, she smiles and welcomes us to grad school and makes a joke about us being real people now (which i will come to find is less of a joke and more of a factual statement among the faculty) and proceeds to pass out the syllabus and state that this semester we would be studying Victorian literature... now you might have heard the yougottabefuckingkiddingme escape from my mouth if not for the shrieks of glee among my fellow classmates who like a gaggle of ADHD kids at Chuck E. Cheese begin chirping and chattering about their love of all things Victorian, in fact when we start circle time and begin introducing ourselves i'm stifling laughter as one after the next, the future of second-rate academia, a group which by my very presence here means i'm contemplating joining, fall all over themselves professing their love, a love they've been cultivating since the time they were in diapers, of Victorian literature...

In a perfect world i would've stood up right at that moment and launched my desk at the window or better yet announced to the class that they were all fucking assholes and that i was leaving for fear of becoming a fucking asshole like them, alas my friend it is not a perfect world and so i stayed in my seat and feigned interest as the time for me to speak crept closer... and when it finally got there, when i finally became the center of circle time, it just sort of came blurting out, i hate Victorian lit, this class is gonna be a nightmare, with all the eras to choose from, with the Russians and French writing things so much more compelling and pertinent and thought provoking... and then i trailed off as i stared into a dozen or so open mouths, my gobsmacked classmates (except for a guy named John) who couldn't believe i could be so blasphemous as to disparage the single greatest era of the written word in their eyes... and hell i know that some scathing social commentary was hidden in the language, still, reading Dickens and Austen and Hardy? it makes me eyes bleed, it's physically painful and i know among the literati i'm in the minority but what can i do? i'd rather eat the book than read it...

And so my career as a professional student was off and running... straight into a wall head first, by the time the leaves were brown and crispy i was losing my mind, i decided to drop acid one day at break just to see if i could make Victorian Lit more interesting, it was my Thursday night class and last of the week, my weekend would be off to a flying start and since i lived and hung out with undergrads it would be a well and good drinking night... of course i had to get through the rest of the class but i figured it would take a bit to kick in and i'd only have half hour tops of winding my way down the rabbit hole, ah those best laid plans, the gear was strong and came on quick and as shit went haywire i attempted to sit and focus just in case i was asked a question, inside my head was like an amusement park and i felt that if called upon i would start spouting gibberish or talking in ye olde English thus tipping my fellow pro-students off to the most definite fact that i was not on the up and up with this advanced degree bullshit.. and of course that night class went five minutes longer cuz what do these fucking squares have to do tonight? go to the library? study group? make some dinner, read, watch a dvd and fret about their paper? i needed a fucking a drink and a bong hit, some female companionship, some good tunes and the damp, cold apartments of my Podunk U. friends...

And yet i had to give it a shot, i'm pig-headed and stubborn and maybe i wanted to show all these well fed and well washed faces that even us derelicts crawling up from the underbelly had some fucking sense and so i put my head down and got on with it, dare i say even excelled in certain areas, there was a writing theory teacher who loved me for my out there approach to teaching and grading and railing against the rest of the class, at one point she even stopped and defended my position one night saying that it was a "highly progressive method but one that had gained approval in certain academic circles", exactly how i would've put it, score another point for the fearless freak, yet i was glad we didn't have to work in groups often cuz when we did you could see the kiddies all trying to get it figured out before they were forced to be with the weirdo, hell a couple of the guys i wanted to just plain throttle, the only one who talked to me at all was a guy named John, now and then we'd meet at the bar and discuss shit, we got to talking books one day and discussing William Burroughs, seemed John had been given the green light on his paper for the semester on Bill, i had all kinds of tapes and articles and books by William S. so i invited him over to look at some things, he asked if you could make some copies and i said sure and we bullshitted some more and he gazed at the book shelf and smiled...

So the days grew shorter and the old house i lived in grew a bit colder, the brilliant color of a Pennsyltucky fall came and went and it was then that i found out that the bankers and gatekeepers and whatever other shadow organization was involved in these types of decisions had not granted me in-state status meaning i was not only a man without a state but a fucking broke man without a state, suddenly that loan i took out slipped like smoke from my account and into Podunk U.'s coffers, my choice being to try and get more money or figure out a way to generate some in order to survive, it felt a bit like strike two, first the naive optimism dissipating as i realized the i was the square peg theory and the fact that they wanted original thinking with references and the last thing i saw coming out of this place was anything close to original fucking thinking... and now second the money was fucked, was it my fault? probably, i'm sure i didn't read the rules close enough but either way i was pissing in the wind and i wasn't about to put myself in any more hock to the man than i already was, i needed a plan...