I put on war paint under my right eye in preparation for attacking the final paper of this fall semester. That’s not all i did. I enacted some voodoo power rituals that i’d made up just for the occasion, involving several cryptic tattoos scrawled over my arm and midsection with a black sharpie marker and my trusty precise v7 ballpoint pen. At first I tried hollering at the ancient spirits of my past ancestors, in order to invoke the favor of a few deceased deities I’d learned about through my impulsive studies, but I got embarrassed about yelling at the empty space in my apartment.
Anyway, that was five hours ago. The war paint has been smudged by a constant rubbing of the eyes, and covering of the face, and the careless consumption of coffee, nicotine, and water taken in sporadic intervals. Finals is a time when you allow the mind to be corrupted by the pressure that envelops everyone around you, and I in particular have a very specialized kind of reaction to that kind of pressure. For instance, I never face it alone; there’s always a drug or a friend or a spiritual double to ride out the long struggle onward with. This time, I attempted to reach some guardian angel-like figure I worshipped at a younger date. Did he answer my call? I cannot be certain.
Are all of these dramatics necessary? For an imaginary man such as myself, very much so. That being said, i have yet to determine how helpful they actually are at the end of it all. My mood is really the only thing to be salvaged after a rough patch like this, and i can attest that all of these theatrics truly do encourage my spirit in in the aftermath to continue forward.
You wouldn’t be able to tell from my sombre face in this picture, but about four eyes ago i was truly on fire with brilliance. It’s a great, great feeling to feel like an authority on one subject or another every once in awhile. But it’s costly, my friends, make no mistake about that.
