venturing backward: cowboy dan (written December 15, 2014)

a post from my old blog “venturing backward”

It was my first semester at Michigan State. But I lived for Renee and I lived for Rochester.

I didn’t drink a drop. I never went to a party. Not once did I precariously find my way into a bar.

I watched only a couple football games. And I never attended one.

My social life was organized around the next time I’d see Renee. Around the next time I’d talk to Renee. Around the next time I’d go home to Rochester.

And I went home to Rochester at least every other weekend. Sometimes I even went to Rochester on consecutive weekends.

It was easy to spend a good weekend back. Macroeconomics was my only Friday class, and it ended around noon. I could be home before Renee got out of school.

One weekend, Renee didn’t know I was coming home. She thought I was staying in East Lansing.

I pulled into her subdivision that Friday afternoon and called her. She answered the phone. I talked about what I was planning on doing in East Lansing. She talked about her Rochester plans.

I parked in her driveway. Still talking to her, I walked up to her door. Then I told her I had to go – I had run into someone in Case Hall.

Renee was upstairs in her bedroom when her family opened the door.

Her mom hollered up at her that I was here, as did her sister.

“Shut up,” I heard Renee say, with a playful laugh.

“Andrew’s here!” they repeated.

Renee left her bedroom and reached the stairs. She told them to stop messing with her.

Then, just as she began her descent down the steps, she saw me below her in the entryway.

Her eyes widened and her mouth opened. She walked quickly to the door while her mom smiled and laughed. She give out a little cry of excitement. We hugged tightly.

We would drive around in my car on those weekends listening to the Les Miserablessoundtrack. It was an album Renee had given me as a gift after I saw the show in London with my dad.

We would pick up our friend Sarah and go get food together at Max & Erma’s.

If I wasn’t hanging out with Renee, I’d meet up with Chockley and Graham. They were both going to Oakland University, which was located in Rochester. So they still lived at home.

The three of us went to the Taco Bell in Pontiac once. While we sat there drinking soda after our meal, they both told me they hated Oakland. Chockley was already looking to transfer to State.

It made me a bit jealous. Because sometimes I wished I’d gone to Oakland. That way I’d be able to see Renee all the time, just like Graham and Chockley got to see their high school girlfriends all the time.

Graham and I would still go to the Adams football games on Friday nights. Renee was still in color guard, so I could come see her looking cute in her uniform.

There were other vestiges of the Class of 2006 at those games. We were all either addicted to Rochester or stuck there like prisoners – perhaps both. Some people were just home for the weekends to see younger friends; others were students at nearby Oakland University.

Graham had reported to Adams that he was going to Oxford University in England. They printed it in a bunch of our senior materials. So sometimes people would ask Graham about Oxford.

The games would end. Renee and I would get into my car. We’d drive around like I still lived there. Sometimes Sarah would come along.

There were moments in September and October when the magical autumn of 2005 came rushing back. There were Fridays and Saturdays when Renee simply absorbed my life like she had before.

I could be in my basement under the blankets with Renee watching a movie. I could sit in the CVS parking lot with her, eating whoppers and drinking Mountain Dew and listening to Gladiator. I could go get a burger at McDonald’s after making out.

I went to Renee’s Homecoming with her. She wore the cutest dress she ever did to any of our dances. It was a brown one that matched her hair and stopped at the knees. She wore her hair down – and a little curled. Looking at her made me want to faint. Looking at her made me want her to be the last thing I'd see.

We fought about the fact that I didn’t wear a suit to Homecoming. It was the second year in a row I had failed to wear a suit. She hated that I wore that blue blazer and khaki pants when all the other guys were wearing suits.

Even Graham talked to me about it. He told me I needed to wear a suit for Renee.

I knew it was stupid, but I didn’t own a suit and I was afraid to pick one out.

Selfishly, I wore my blue blazer and khakis, just like I had the year before. I hated myself for it.

A fight like that was important. We never really fought at all during our entire first year of dating.

We had other fights about things like that.

Our old go-to, Kanye West’s Gold Digger, was still going strong at the dance. The DJ played it a couple times. We could dance to it like I was always home.

Our best friends – Lindsay and Graham – were dating now. They were in our group. A parent took a picture of the four of us. In the photograph, we were standing on Renee’s deck getting ready to head out to Homecoming.

As a joke, Renee and Lindsay used to convince people they were cousins. I supported that effort.

Renee and Lindsay also said they were going to go to Michigan State together. I looked forward to the day when she and I could be on campus together.

I liked that Lindsay and Graham were dating. Renee and I went on some double dates with them. I never wanted to go back to Michigan State when the weekends ended; I wanted to stay with her.

But I had to go back.

I was in a residential college called James Madison. All of us freshmen lived together and went to half our classes together in Case Hall.

So I saw them all the time while studying in the lounge together. While sitting around in our dorm rooms playing board games together. While watching The Daily Show after a hard night of reading and writing for class together.

We spent countless hours just sitting in the second-floor Case Hall study area. At the tables, on the chairs, on the sofas. Outlining papers. Arguing about political shit and reading books for class.

I really didn’t care that I missed out on whatever they did when I was gone. I felt like I saw enough of these people. And I'd rather spend time with Renee, especially after not spending enough time with her during the summer.

“I’d like to stay in high school forever, as great as it is here,” I wrote in my LiveJournal on November 2^nd. “I don’t think I could ever make friends as good as the ones I made in high school.”

At night, I spent a lot of time standing in the South Complex courtyard. I’d be out there in the dark between Wonders and Case and Wilson. While chatting with Renee, I would sit on a shadowy bench or walk around in circles.

That feeling of home. Flipping open the phone. Scrolling down to her name. Listening to the other end ring. Finally hearing Renee’s soft, kind, excited voice.

That rush of love. Sitting in my dorm room at my laptop. Hearing the vibration of my cell phone. Seeing her name on the display. Running to the courtyard so I could talk to her with some privacy.

When she left me voicemails, I saved them so I could listen to them again.

If I wasn’t talking to Renee, I’d just listen to music that made me think of Renee.

I’d listen to Your Ex-Lover Is Dead and The Engine Driver and just let them haunt me. I’d listen to Be Still My Heartby the Postal Service and think about how lucky I was to have her. I’d listen to the Les Miserables soundtrack and imagine I was driving around with her in Rochester.

I’d listen to Regina Spektor, one of my favorite singers. And I’d remember how it was Renee that introduced me for the first time to Regina. It was Renee who told me about the song Chemo Limo.

Regina’s new album, Begin to Hope, had come out that summer. Renee and I listened to it together a lot in my car. And now I listened to it without her in my dorm room. So I could think about her.

But I wasn’t allowed to spend the whole day living in my head, thinking of nothing but Rochester and Renee.

The rigorous coursework at James Madison College fought for my attention, too.

I had never done so much reading in my life. Once you combined the Madison coursework with my European History class, I was finishing at least 600 pages a week.

And I was debating ideas in a way I never had before. Because I was reading The Federalist Papers and Democracy in America – while discussing structures of government and civil society. I was reading books about cosmopolitanism, universal human rights, relativism, American immigration reforms, the French welfare state, and European cultural changes brought on by demographic change. For class, I even read a book that semester by fucking Joseph Ratzinger.

I was surrounded by people who were smarter than me. They could talk about countries in Central Asia and Africa that I had literally never heard of. They could describe the detailed views of a Senator or Representative when I didn’t even know that Congressman’s political party.

Sometimes they’d be sitting in the lounge reading The New York Times. I’d never once thought about reading that.

I’d express an opinion about U.S. foreign policy. And then someone would prove I didn’t know shit.

I told people I was a Republican. I even went to a College Republicans meeting one time. A lot of people thought that was pretty funny.

When the midterm elections came, I was so confused. So I just voted a perfect split ticket. 50/50.

To survive at all, I was forced to spend around 6 hours a day just studying. Hours and hours – just sitting on couches and chairs. Just reading and highlighting and taking notes. Just praying all the while that I wouldn’t say something dumb in class.

I had a center-right, tobacco-smoking professor from Sweden presiding over my public affairs recitation. I worked really hard and he gave me pretty good grades.

I wrote a paper for him in which I argued that, without God, there could be no human rights.

Our rights were divine. That is why no government had any business taking them away from us.

Rights could not exist in an atheist world. They were not physical. They had nothing to do with protons and electrons. So they could have no plausible biological origin; they could not evolve. There was only one reality that made universal human rights real in any sense.

They existed because God had proclaimed them for us. And because He would ultimately enforce them in the long run. And they could be real because they existed in a spiritual realm, not in the physical and biological world.

I told Renee about that paper. We both believed in God. So she could agree with that concept.

My professor gave me a 3.8 on that one. I felt pretty good about it.

But I also read Moby Dick in my writing class.

Some said that Captain Ahab was a maniac and a villain. I argued in a paper that he was a hero.

Ahab said that an external force causes all events – both human and non-human.

That external force was God. All the objects around us, both animate and inanimate, were to Ahab just masks covering this spiritual reality beyond. Including the vicious whale that Ahab sought to kill, all objects were tools for a sovereign God working behind them.

The implication was that we could know the nature of God by observing how events in the world unfold.

Captain Ahab directly accused God of controlling the world in a manner whereby good, innocent people are killed. He viewed the whale as one of the objects by which God accomplished this.

By killing the whale, Ahab sought to reachthrough the mask and rebel against God Himself. Ahab would bring justice to an unjust world by striking at the one who controlled that unjust world.

But God controlled all objects. And so God also controlled Ahab. The Captain himself admitted he was driven by a desire over which he had no control. The same God against whom he rebelled controlled Ahab’s appetite for righteous rebellion – and used it for His own ends.

So God drove Ahab to pursue the whale regardless of the dangers. God drove Ahab into a situation that resulted in the death of nearly his entire crew.

“For Melville,” I wrote that autumn, “humans are ultimately the pawns of a malicious, evil God who uses their good to do evil and can never be defeated.”

I wrote that during the same month in which I argued for a God who secured human rights.

I was listening to a lot of Modest Mouse that November, too.

I processed lyrics like the one in the song Bukowski– “If God takes life, he’s an Indian giver / So tell me now why, you’ll tell me never / Who would wanna be? / Who would wanna be such a control freak?”

And then a few lines later in the same song: “If God controls the land and disease / Keeps a watchful eye on me / If He’s really so damn Mighty / My problem is I can’t see / Well who would wanna be? / Who would wanna be such a control freak?”

Just one track later came the song This Devil’s Workday. It was a song about a nihilist just doing whatever he wanted, regardless of standard ethics and morality. “Gonna take this sack of puppies," he sang, “Gonna set it out to freeze.”

It concluded with a maniacal declaration: “I could buy myself a reason / I could sell myself a job / I could hang myself for treason / Well I am my own damn God / HA HA HA HA!”

These lyrics had a pull on me. I would play the song over again.

And then I’d listen to their song 3^rdPlanet. I’d memorize sentences like “the 3^rd planet is sure that it’s being watched / by an Eye in the Sky that can’t be stopped.”

I’d finish a night of drafting my Captain Ahab paper. And then I’d turn on the song Cowboy Dan.The lyrics made my hair stand up: “He goes to the desert / Fires his rifle in the sky / And says ‘God if I have to die you will have to die.'"

For a good chunk of my childhood, fundamentalist Christianity had left me terrified of God. So lyrics like these simultaneously scared and thrilled me.

It was empowering to sit around listening to Modest Mouse for a few hours.

I was afraid I might be an agnostic.

But I wouldn’t tell anyone yet. I didn’t like what it implied regarding the stability of my future with Renee. There were many days when I wanted to marry her and have a family together. Often, I thought that outcome was destiny.

And yet, I never went with her anymore to St. John’s Lutheran Church.

There was a night when I was home. My mom was worried by my lack of religious devotion. She asked me point-blank what I was.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m figuring it out.”