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Date Posted: 13:27:25 10/25/01 Thu
Author: GhostDog
Subject: My Last English Essay

I remember college through the eyes of my English classes. They were the only classes I went to consistently enough. I don't remember the stories, I don't remember the names of my professors. I don't remember the names of the people who sat around me and I don't know what the required reading was. I was in English classes because they were a place to be stimulated by the people and subjects that surrounded me. I would come in to class stinking so strongly of alcohol from the night before that people who sat around me would actually ask if I had been drinking before class.
I remember my metamorphosis through my English classes. Probably because there was a central "English building" and if you were an English major you spent hundreds of hours of your college career walking the halls and sitting in the classrooms. Almost every room I sat in faced the walkways of campus and I tried to always sit near the windows. I could stare out and see friends passing and just keep up with the weather. I miss that so much. Spending time keeping up with the mood of the day and using that to determine what you feel like doing when you get out. Now, I stare out the window and it doesn't matter what I feel like doing in an hour.
I remember just sitting in those classes and hating everyone around me. They were not in love with the language like I was, they weren't crawling in the trenches of sorrow and plucking the rare fruits of madness. They were mechanical and spirited and used up books like whores and threw the bounty of wisdom out the window on their way out. I don't remember much of what I've read. I say that I have a Bachelor's Degree in English and people assume that I know every book they've read. I've haven't read every book I've read.
I rememeber that my professors would try to trip me up in class when they saw I was writing in a notebook. They would ask me questions that they knew I didn't hear the prelude to and make me look foolish. I was busy writing. Of all that I've read, which to be sure is still more substantial than those who majored in business, I have retained more of what I've written myself. I was writing during a time when things within me needed to be written. I treasure the times I spent making love to notebooks because the rest of me could not voice the words that had to made real.
I was creating my own words during an era when my words held weight with me. Now that I'm older and less and less of what I say become what I do, they have gotten lean and decrepit. I have a box full of notebook filled with my adolescence and I would never have filled a one if I had taken direction and not scribbled in them through countless hundreds of hours of boring History classes, communications, business, Theater?, chemistry??? all these classes to make a man well rounded. I write through all of them and guess what...same result. Those hours didn't mean a thing to those who scribbled the notes on the board. I passed the tests as they did, I have a job now as they do. We all have memories of what we've done but mine are captured on a plane in time andcan be made real when called upon to do so.
I don't mean memories of sitting in classes and fooling the professors and being defiant, I mean using the time at my disposal in a way that I deemed fitting. Stacks of notebooks filled with chemical equations can be tossed in the trash at the end of a semester. A notebook full of your heart and soul will be packed and unpacked in boxes forever.

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