In order for you to understand why I’m 32 and still working towards my Bachelor’s degree I must tell you the ironic story of how I came to despise college and then fell in love with it.
Though I always hated school I looked at the world in a very philosophical, intellectual way. For example, my friends and I used to debate the existence of God. We also liked to debate the question of what makes art “good” or “bad.” My mom often remarked that if I directed just some of the thought and energy I invested in questions about God and art into school work I would get good grades.
But alas, my mother’s wisdom was ignored. I evaded homework so diligently that it earned me an F in Math when I was in fifth grade. I did bring the grade up to a C+ the next marking period and won an award for “most significant improvement” which was good enough for me. Getting C’s and B’s would be my tepid academic aspiration throughout middle school and high school.
In 2004 I enrolled at Kean University to study English, hoping to hone my craft as a writer. Outside of class I spent a lot of time studying a variety of writers. Among them, Jack Kerouac was the one I related to the most. Though I sped through his novel “On The Road” and contemplated it deeply I wasn’t getting any college credit for it.
Coursework was to me what Louise is to the speaker in Bob Dylan’s “Visions of Johanna”: “She’s all right, she’s just near.”
Ah, but Kerouac! In his novel “On The Road” a guy named Sal Paradise takes a series of road trips across the United States, experiments with a variety of drugs, has long, “intellectual” conversations and writes in between it all. Sal made the nomadic, minimalist, debauched approach to life appear romantic and absolutely necessary.
I contemplated dropping out of college to travel the country like Kerouac however my father managed to change my mind. He suggested I transfer to a college someplace I would like to travel. This way I could do something both practical and adventurous. So the next semester I transferred to Florida Gulf Coast University.
The campus was stunning. There were hundreds of acres of wetlands and marshes and boardwalks passing through them. Palm trees were ubiquitous and alligators- so exotic to my eyes- swam and walked around. The novelty of it all was certainly enough to inspire a young poet. Unfortunately school itself was still a bore. Even the electives couldn’t compete with my growing infatuation with Allen Ginsberg, Arthur Rimbaud and Bob Dylan.
I had come to believe college was a waste of time because all this so called “knowledge” they were teaching us really amounted to nothing more than fascist attempts to turn me into a boring, thoughtless robot.
Regardless of that, I actually didn’t think whether or not I was in college was up to me anyway. As Bob Dylan put it: “sooner or later one of us must know/ You just did what you’re supposed to do.” If fate would have me stay in college, something would compel me to stay, yet nothing did. Instead, I assumed it was likely my fate that I would soon became a rich and famous poet.
While I was waiting for fame to just find me, I succumbed to a combination of severe, nihilism induced depression, and audacious cockiness. One English professor, who disliked the obscenities packed in some of my poems, called me a “little punk.” Well, I didn’t need that close-minded criticism because I knew better than anyone, except maybe Dylan, what was what.
It was time, I thought, to escape the monotony of college.
At one point in my new life as a college dropout I ended up living at a hostel in Tampa and was almost homeless. While at the hostel, despite the fact that my funds were limited, for the most part I evaded the need to get a job. Even when I did not evade it, I did nothing to woo employers. In one interview I landed for a job as a busboy at a restaurant a few blocks away, the man conducting it took one look at me and said, “Come back shaved, with a haircut and a nice shirt. Then I’ll interview you.”
But I could not afford a “nice shirt,” and to hell with him if he was going to make me shave my beard and cut my hair to please corporate America. I thought this guy was as close-minded as the English professor at Florida Gulf Coast University who called me a “punk.”
Nobody was going to tell me what to do! Never mind the fact that my obstinance would come at the cost of another self-made poverty spell, like when I was in South Beach half a year earlier and sometimes had only spoons full of peanut butter for food, and a few gulps from a jug of water to hydrate. I was doing it again. One day at the hostel it got so bad that I had to sell my own clothes to someone for extra cash so I could buy ramen noodles at the nearby Asian market.
Eventually I ran out money and could no longer afford to stay at the hostel. Since I was not on speaking terms with anyone in my family at this point and my friendships were not in fantastic shape, I had no one to turn to for a loan and no roof I could afford to sleep under. Were it not for the kindness of the man who owned the hostel and let me stay, I would have lived on the streets. That fact is forever embedded in my mind, though it failed to teach me anything for years.
I did address relationship problems I had with my family and made it back to New Jersey where I spent seven years working as a cashier. Scanning items and asking customers if they have their shoppers’ club card over and over, while trying to contemplate what I deemed to be much more important (some issue of epistemology or the political state of America), started causing panic attacks.
I felt as if my intellectual thoughts were locked in a safe of steel, each one like a jellyfish tentacle trying to burst through the thick, impenetrable walls. This caused my heart to race, the sides of my head to feel pressed in a vice, my body to start sweating, my hands to shake and this was all accompanied with the very paranoid conviction that I must be on the verge of an aneurysm or a stroke.
Customers often looked like they were in a rush, expecting their items to be scanned and bagged quickly and did not notice. It got so unbearable that I’d ask to go to the bathroom where I could have my nervous breakdown in private. Sometimes, after I started to feel confident I wasn’t about to die, I would pray to God and beg for a better job, one in which I would be permitted to use my mind for intellectual, rather than monotonous, purposes.
When I was not miserably scanning and bagging items I was trying to establish myself as a public intellectual and artist. I tried self-publishing a book, blogging on philosophy and politics, making Youtube videos and running for public office. All that came of it was endemic failure.
I was in a long-term relationship with the woman who would become my wife and she and I discussed my career struggles. We jointly reasoned that the fact is it’s hard to get by without a college degree (something friends and family members insisted to me for years!). If I wanted to advance in life, either politically or as a writer, college would increase the odds of my success.
Though I knew returning to college was the right thing to improve my life economically, my heart was not in it at first. I was still preoccupied with my blog and Youtube Channel. But then something interesting happened. I spent less time worrying about becoming famous as soon as possible and more time trying to prove to myself I could be competent academically. This meant I had to invest a lot of time in studying.
In the midst of all this studying I realized I wasn’t just memorizing trivial stuff. I was learning how to cite textual evidence to support a point of view. This became my bliss and gave me a budding sense of self confidence. I discovered that college is not an institution of fascist brainwashing but rather a sanctuary of knowledge empowering individuals to “change the world” and make it a better place.
Now I am 32 years old, and I am still in pursuit of my bachelor’s degree. Although it doesn’t bother me that my wife is the breadwinner (It’s the twenty-first century and I’m thrilled to see women thriving economically) the fact is I do wish I was getting along with my career about now.
There is some consolation though. As much as I wish I was a professor already, with numerous books published, at least I am in my ideal environment: college. Here my intellectual inclinations, now tempered with humility and patience, are free to develop, and I finally understand what John Lennon meant in his song “Mother” when he sang: “Children don’t do what I have done/I couldn’t walk when I tried to run.”
