venturing backward: the empty slate — wall of skulls (published November 26, 2014)

a post from my 2014 blog

Pretty soon, I was going to be over 80,000 dollars in debt for a Georgetown master’s degree that I wouldn’t even use. I wasn’t applying for a single job in the field.

In fact, I was only applying for one job. I didn’t have a degree even remotely relevant to that job. And if I didn’t get that job, I had no idea what I was going to do after graduating.

I was sitting in my parents’ living room in Rochester – late December, after Christmas, with holiday decorations all around, with the lights still on the tree in the entryway. My grandparents, my parents, my sisters were asleep. The house was dimly lit; through the windows you could only see the familiar Rochester darkness. I was reading one of my gifts: a popular science book.

I was happy because I wasn’t at school. My grades for that semester were all A’s and A-’s. But I read more books in that single Christmas Break – about literature, about religion, about science – than I had in my entire career as a foreign affairs graduate student.

And in the back of my mind I was nervously wondering if I’d be accepted into Teach For America.

I was rocking in a royal red chair. I checked my Blackberry periodically. I waited patiently for my best friend to text me.

At long last, Chockley was home at his mom's house from his job at a restaurant kitchen. I drove through the darkness of the suburban streets. I looked out the windows at those subdivisions. I thought about how haunted they were by teenage memories.

I had fantasies of sneaking out late, hunting for aliens, making out in strangers’ lawns. I lived vicariously through my past self – I was throwing toilet paper on people’s houses; I was meeting up after midnight on playgrounds until the police showed up to clear us out. I was in my car late at night, at an elementary school’s abandoned parking lot, taking off my high school sweetheart’s shirt.

Eastward on Dutton, southbound on Adams, eastward on Tienken…. I didn’t want to go back to DC. I wanted to repeat these nights with Chockley, over and over, as long as I lived.

I didn’t mind thinking back to a long-lost easier life in Rochester. But I knew it was a life that could never again satisfy my need to be existentially fulfilled; it was a life that had no place in my drive to make a difference in the world. And it was a place from which almost all my friends had left, from which we were all just moving on. For so many of us Millennials, that’s how hometowns are.

I got to Chockley’s and we smoked Marlboros in his garage. He would always sit in a plastic chair; I would always stand and pace around. He would tell me about his dream to study neuroscience in Germany. I would tell him cautiously about my goal to teach in Detroit – that goal, after two years of studying at the School of Foreign Service.

Often, Charles – his wonderful, kind-spirited black lab – would be around, just hanging out with us.

I would pour myself out to Chockley. I confessed how pointless every prestigious thing I’d ever signed up for had been. The DC think tank, the State Department, the House of Representatives, Georgetown itself – an employable background from a boy who hadn't made a single dent on Earth.

But I needed to make that dent. And I didn’t even fucking know why.

With Chockley, I mocked all religions and all beliefs in God. And at the same time, I struggled against all odds to construct meaning in a world without God.

I often told him I was terrified of my inevitable non-existence. I didn’t like it; I didn’t want it. I am so scared of it.

We would babble to each other about why we existed; we would talk about how we did not wanteach other to die.

There was no moral or ethical filter to our thoughts when we were alone with each other; anything could be suggested, anything could be imagined. With him, I could effortlessly share the darkest thoughts I'd ever had. The most ridiculous theses about the world, about the nature of life, about reality itself could be proposed, discussed, corrected, refined.

We were, on our own, a whole classroom distinguished by the most shameless academic freedom.

There was a trust in our friendship – a knowledge of one another – that is rare in the universe, that is impossible to duplicate and fruitless to reconstruct.

I would stay with him until three, four, five in the morning.

Sometimes that Christmas break we would head to the Paint Creek Tavern on Main Street. It was a good place with cheap alcohol. We’d always run into someone Chockley knew, because he knows everybody. We’d drink beers and then take smoke breaks out back, in the frigid Michigan winter.

On other nights, we would drive around for a few loops between Rochester Road and Adams Road. The air in the car was saturated with existentially consequential conversation – mixing easily with the smoke from the cigarettes.

On this particular night, we ate some special cookies he had procured. Once they had taken their effect sometime after midnight, we just left his house and walked together for hours. We walked until around three in the morning.

We walked down subdivision roads. We walked down trails between trees. We walked into grassy clearings surrounded by bushes and leaves and trunks. We walked over a bridge crossing a creek. We walked on dirt roads without lights.

We lit up cigarettes. We stared up at the very few stars you could see in the sky. We stopped over a bridge and looked down at the water. If I tried to talk too much during some of these moments, he tried to silence me so I would better savor the experience we shared.

The darkness and the narcotics started to fuck with my head. I thought I saw a knight on a horse, staring at us from deep within the trees.

As I pondered the horseman, Chockley tricked me into believing something was approaching us from the blackness of the bushes. He sprinted suddenly, pretending to be scared; I screamed in terror and jolted after him. He laughed at me.

We are moving ourselves with our feet across this celestial body, he said at one point, breaking a silence.

This truth alone - conceived in the context of millions upon millions of empty miles around us, placed on a timeline of 13 billion years - was remarkable.

I looked down at my feet as they took steps across this rock. I looked up into space and I felt it again.

I touched that infinite blackness that surrounds my life on Earth. I was immersed in that terrible void beyond the atmosphere – with no one looking after me, with no one to pray to, with no one to tell me how to live, with no one to fill me in on what’s good and what's evil. Like everyone, I was on my own.

I was overwhelmed by the definition of death – “the destruction or permanent end of something.”

But I was moving across this celestial body with Chockley. And so I was okay.

When I got back to DC, I did a walk like that alone – during the daytime. One late Saturday morning, I walked out of my apartment in Rosslyn, Virginia. I walked across Key Bridge and then all the way to the Museum of Natural History. It took around an hour and a half.

I went straight to the human evolution section. Chockley had told me about a wall of humanoid skulls there.

When I found it, I could only sit silently and stare for half an hour. There were dozens of these skulls, from tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of years ago. I looked at them all – Homo sapiens, Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis, Homo neanderthalensis.

I felt it again – not the blackness of space. But rather I sensed the unrelieved trauma of the past, the amorality interwoven into existence, the absence of objective moral guidelines. I faced down the godless nightmare of humanity’s freedom. I touched the millions of years before me and ahead of me that existed forever without me. I cowered before the diseases, the wars, the deaths, the extinctions, the struggle for meaning that could end only one way for each of us.

A few days later, I was accepted into Teach For America in Detroit.