A Catch in the Current

Every so often, a little speck of grey mold comes out of the water cooler in the shop and enters my bottle as I fill it. It looks like dust, but dust when wet doesn’t stay all one whole fleck, so I think it’s mold. Usually when this happens, my water bottle is too full to empty it down the drain, because, well, the world is running out of water, so why should I waste it? At least that’s how I see it from taking Kay Williams Conservation of Natural Resources 108 in Rolland 200 a few years back. No one liked that class—prof. was pretty old-fashioned—but I got something out of it, like to flush the toilet less and shower quicker.

Sometimes I try to drink the water all the way down to the last sip without ingesting the mold. Sometimes I don’t care and slurp it down as soon as possible to decimate the agonizing worry that I might drink down the mold. I guess it depends on my mood, or rather my degree of apathy. Apathy is a funny word for me; it signifies relaxation and a sense of calm, yet also represents a piece of me that didn’t really appear until my college years.

I mellowed out a lot when I settled for my second college choice, a Pa. state school that was cheaper than the privet St. Joe’s U. in Philadelphia, where my heart and mind truly fancied. Everyone knows this story, and it's not that I'm complaining or I regret the decision, it's just 100 percent a part of who I am now, kinda like the crown on my front chipped tooth or my squinty left eye. 

I fell in with some West Philly hood rats my first year away, (they were familiar and they talked like me,) and learned how to roll my first blunt, but still maintained Dean’s list… for the first 3 semesters.

Then came the apathy, for reasons none of your business, but it was every sign of depression shy of extreme disparity, and I left that spring for home, my car crammed with lamps and trashcans and comforters and the like. I left behind my apathy though, and brought home a new major, a new outlook, a new start.

From then on I was back—I was motivated to get involved, I kicked aside the regret of that dropped class sophomore year; I took it as a learning experience. 

I rode the high though this past summer, the summer after graduation, applying for what few jobs were available in my career path, while working part-time with my uncle at as a secretary at an auto body shop.

Now I’m panicking as tens of thousands of dollars loom over me darker than any cloud I’ve ever seen, even darker than that blockbuster Twister picture, with Helen Hunt? Or was that Jodie Foster…

Who cares? The summer's over, and I took back my old job at the mall to help with bills. I drink spirits just about every single night, and I drank the mold the other day without a second thought.