Contributor: Sean Crose
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By December's end, it was all over. After drinking your way through New Year's weekend up in Boston, you awoke to the dullness of a wintry wasteland and a complete, total, lack of direction.
“Where to from here?” was the question much on your mind that January.
Unfortunately, you couldn't find an answer. Not in the ten songs you and the guys had recorded. Not in your mother's nagging. Not in your new job at the bakery. Nowhere.
“I'm at a crossroads,” you had uttered to Mom one day during one of your unending stream of arguments.
“You're always at a crossroads,” she replied.
She was right and you knew it. Still, you were helpless to change your situation. You'd have taken the road less traveled, but that road wasn't presenting itself to you. No road was.
Fortunately you got around to finishing the book Jody had let you borrow that night just before Christmas. Remember that night? How it was snowing like hell up there in Springfield and you thought you were going to die from alcohol poisoning?
Funny how you sat there in Jody's kitchen not really caring if you lived or died. Not funny, actually. Scary. There you were, pale, on the verge of dying from drink, and not giving a damn.
That was truly your furthest point away from God.
Yet you somehow remembered to take the book with you once the snow stopped and you figured you were actually going to live to drink another day. When you got around to finishing the book a full month later, you felt like a door had finally opened.
“So this is what I'm going to do,” you said to Mom that Sunday afternoon, minutes after you had read the last sentence.
“Sounds good.”
The fact that her “sounds good” actually came across as genuine pleased you. Let's face it, those words, or , rather, the tone in which they were spoken, made you truly feel like you were on to something.
And so you began the adventure of writing your story, just as the author of your new favorite book had done. Your life was heading in an exciting new direction. The previous year's adventure was over, but so was your old life.
Or so you thought.
Amidst all the preparation and hard work that went into penning an entire book on your rather unusual experiences, a book dealing with hospitals, specialists and brain scans, you were still pretty much yourself.
Oh, you could now go on and on about how nonfiction was the new fiction. You could also walk around serenely confident that you had both the talent and the unusual back story to make yourself interesting to a publisher. Yet you were you.
All that changed, really, were your thoughts. And by thoughts I mean those drunken reveries you'd have down in the den at three in the morning, when the television was off and all was quiet. The subject of the reveries may have changed, but the cause of them remained the same.
Still, the work and new direction served as bricks that would eventually become a rather lengthy wall. For some chosen roads, be they more or less well traveled, extend farther than originally thought.
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Sean Crose is a writer and teacher. He lives in Connecticut with his wife Jen, and Cody, the world's greatest cat.
- -
By December's end, it was all over. After drinking your way through New Year's weekend up in Boston, you awoke to the dullness of a wintry wasteland and a complete, total, lack of direction.
“Where to from here?” was the question much on your mind that January.
Unfortunately, you couldn't find an answer. Not in the ten songs you and the guys had recorded. Not in your mother's nagging. Not in your new job at the bakery. Nowhere.
“I'm at a crossroads,” you had uttered to Mom one day during one of your unending stream of arguments.
“You're always at a crossroads,” she replied.
She was right and you knew it. Still, you were helpless to change your situation. You'd have taken the road less traveled, but that road wasn't presenting itself to you. No road was.
Fortunately you got around to finishing the book Jody had let you borrow that night just before Christmas. Remember that night? How it was snowing like hell up there in Springfield and you thought you were going to die from alcohol poisoning?
Funny how you sat there in Jody's kitchen not really caring if you lived or died. Not funny, actually. Scary. There you were, pale, on the verge of dying from drink, and not giving a damn.
That was truly your furthest point away from God.
Yet you somehow remembered to take the book with you once the snow stopped and you figured you were actually going to live to drink another day. When you got around to finishing the book a full month later, you felt like a door had finally opened.
“So this is what I'm going to do,” you said to Mom that Sunday afternoon, minutes after you had read the last sentence.
“Sounds good.”
The fact that her “sounds good” actually came across as genuine pleased you. Let's face it, those words, or , rather, the tone in which they were spoken, made you truly feel like you were on to something.
And so you began the adventure of writing your story, just as the author of your new favorite book had done. Your life was heading in an exciting new direction. The previous year's adventure was over, but so was your old life.
Or so you thought.
Amidst all the preparation and hard work that went into penning an entire book on your rather unusual experiences, a book dealing with hospitals, specialists and brain scans, you were still pretty much yourself.
Oh, you could now go on and on about how nonfiction was the new fiction. You could also walk around serenely confident that you had both the talent and the unusual back story to make yourself interesting to a publisher. Yet you were you.
All that changed, really, were your thoughts. And by thoughts I mean those drunken reveries you'd have down in the den at three in the morning, when the television was off and all was quiet. The subject of the reveries may have changed, but the cause of them remained the same.
Still, the work and new direction served as bricks that would eventually become a rather lengthy wall. For some chosen roads, be they more or less well traveled, extend farther than originally thought.
- - -
Sean Crose is a writer and teacher. He lives in Connecticut with his wife Jen, and Cody, the world's greatest cat.
Author:
Sean Crose
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