One thing about having had my experiences at Tech is that I'm able to regale other people in meetings with my exploit as a drunk on campus. I always leave out the part about suffering consequences, as all drunks do, but usually that's because the consequences were bad. In my case, there usually weren't any. Okay, so I drank a lot of water, had a really bad headache, had to take an Advil, and spent most of the next morning parked on a couch in front of a TV. I couldn't even handle the flicker from a computer monitor so I really got not much done at all.

Those were my consequences. And that's just fine. If the effects were small, it fit neatly in other aspects of an equally unimpressive life. You see, from my point of view, I'm just a little nobody. I really am. An inconsequential collection of proteins that decided to start typing.

But I'm always consistently amazed and what I've been able to accomplish given a) my short time span on earth and b) my limited ability set. Seriously. Very rarely am I ever the smartest guy in the room. And without my intelligence, I am really at a loss for any other aspect of my persona that can be considered redeeming. Let's see, am I ever the friendliest guy in the room? No, I can be a cold-hearted bitch sometimes, and I can hold long grudges like other boys hold long crushes. I guess I can hold long crushes, too, but, no, that's never happened, not me, nope. And I have so little to offer. I mean, for all my attempts to be generous in gesture and deed, anyone else with the same means as I would surely do the same. Don't compare me in any capacity, or you'll discover what I've known all along: someone else can do it better.

I'm a quintessence of dust, a group of particles all governed by a wavefunction that somehow led me here. Mathematically speaking, what the fuck? How did I find myself in my bathrobe on a bright, warm Sunday afternoon on my backyard patio, fielding a phone call from an old buddy from furlough, him telling me about the exploits of other ex-cons? So and so is an halfway house, so and so has a warrant for his arrest, so and so works at Ralphs. How am I able to tell the same Ditch Day story over and over again, three hours on some idle weekday in 1998 condensed into five minutes, to different groups of people who all manage to relate?

I'm the kind of guy that wonders if heaven is measured in square feet. Will you care about acreage then? And so me, as small and minor as I am, finding absurdity in numbers and figures in a life that will only temporarily be mine, am simply awed at how connected I feel when I speak to a group of my history as a drunk. There is no size in that. One and zero are the only numbers I appreciate. It registers; it doesn't register-- that sort of philosophy. And so even if the story is part bravado, part comedy, I never get tired of the story, because every time I tell it, for me something activates. Zero becomes one; the proteins start typing away, and I start upon the path of self-discovery once more.

It turns out that I really did have consequences, and when I tell a familiar story, I've succeeded in drawing blood from stone, creating value from something that transpired that was supposed o be a disposable snippet of life. We were just goofing off, us kids, and while we were always in control, it felt nice that, for a small time, in our small space, our insignificance didn't matter, so therefore everything mattered. I use my experiences in Ditch Day, not only as a way to fit in with the problem drinkers who have real horror stories, but also as a way to find credence to the idea that I might actually be a contributing member to society. If I can recycle my past and turn it into something else, however small, but singularly bright, then isn't that always going to be worthwhile? If you took a random set of memory and experience and transformed it into something useful and productive, couldn't you classify that as fantastic?

There was a point on that day, in the springtime of my youth when I awoke at the foot of the largest tree in the universe, on the most comfortable spot in Pasadena, and my friends ate and joked and smiled in the sun. I called out their names to prove how sober I was and crept back to my cradle.