I had spent the night at Minute Maid Park celebrating the 100th birthday of the Boy Scouts of America with a few thousand of my fellow Scouters.

At the event, I was given the opportunity to sit on the field — along with some of the council’s top donors. As part of that special experience, I was given a commemorative 100^th anniversary BSA blanket. On the way out of the stadium, though, I ended up giving my blanket to a volunteer who asked for it (even though I kind of wanted to keep it). I only mention this part of the story because I thought my kind act would have granted me some kind of karma-based reward. I was wrong.

By the time I came home, it was 10:30 and I was tired. I quickly pulled into the first parking spot I could find in the apartment’s lot. As I excited the car, my hands full with my coat, a rolled up poster and that day’s mail, I accidently bumped my fat ass into the car parked next too me.

I did not scratch the car, dent it or harm it in anyway besides, perhaps, smudging the dust that covered the car. It was the kind of accident that would have been a no foul, no harm sort of deal — if the car wasn’t currently occupied by some dude talking on his cell phone.

As I closed my door, I could hear the guy begin to curse to the person he was talking to on the phone.

“Some freakin’ idiot just him my car with his door.”

Tired, cranky and a bit in the mood for a fight, I waited for him to roll down his window and (politely) explained to him that I had not, in fact, touched his car with my door. I had only bumped against his side-view mirror with my ass.

Perhaps seeing my pent-up frustration (or just assessing me as someone not worth fighting), he dismissed me with a cautionary warning to “watch myself.”

My exhaustion outweighing any desire to pick a fight, I walked to my apartment, unlocked the door and went inside.

Realizing that the guy I had upset with my butt-bumping was still sitting inside his car and could, if he so wished, beat up my car now that I was out of sight, I raced upstairs to my apartment’s second-floor balcony and crept outside to make sure that my car was safe from any undeserving vigilantism.

I hid in the shadows of my second-floor balcony and watched as the guy eventually left his car and walked to his apartment, without harming my car.

Satisfied, I reached for the sliding door separating my balcony from the inside of my apartment. It wouldn’t budge.

In the few minutes I had been sitting outside spying on a potential vandal, the metal bar that locks my sliding door into place had slipped out of its notch — locking me outside.

In the moments between entering my apartment and stepping out into the balcony, I had emptied my pockets — leaving my keys, my work Blackberry and my iPod sitting on the kitchen counter. I was stuck outside with no way to get back in.

I did, however, have a hope. By some miracle, I had my personal cell phone in my hands.

I dialed my parent’s home number, hoping to catch them while they were still awake. I was in luck! My mom said she would drive over, bring the spare key I had left her with, unlock the front door, come upstairs and let me in from the balcony.

In the meantime, I was stuck outside in the cold — with no entertainment.

As I sat on the balcony, I thought of just how stupid I was and all the ways I could have avoided my current predicament.

One good thing came of the experience, though. While I waited for my mom to arrive, I finally spotted the neighbor who had been letting her tiny dog run free across the apartment lawn and poop on people’s porches. As I sat on the balcony, I started composing the letter I would send to the apartment complex offices in the morning.

When my mom finally arrived, I jumped up and greeted her with glee. She was my rescue! I would have preferred she didn’t see just how messy my bedroom was, but that was a small price to pay for getting inside and into the comfort of my pajamas.

She walked up to the apartment and started to unlock the door. My excitement turned to worry when I didn’t hear the familiar click and squeak of my front door opening. Instead, I heard her fumble with the keys for about 10 seconds.

“Mom?” I asked. “Are you having trouble with the keys?”

“Which way does the key turn?” she asked back. “Something’s wrong. Wait a minute — did you lock the top lock?”
Yes, I realized. I did.

My apartment, like many others, is equipped with two locks on the inside of my front door. Besides the standard, key-operated lock, there is a deadbolt that can only be unlocked from the inside. I had locked that upon entering my apartment.

Frustrated, I began to worry — trying to estimate how much it would cost to repair a broken glass door when I smashed my way back inside.

My mom tried to coax me to jump down from the second-floor balcony. While I wouldn’t be able to get into my apartment that night, I could at least go back to my parents’ house and spend the night — coming back in the morning with a locksmith.

The problem is, as much as I’d like to say I’ve grown out of it, I’m still very much afraid of heights. Unable to bring myself to climb over the edge of my balcony’s rail, let alone jump down, I started to pace — not sure of what exactly I should do.

My mom volunteered to go get a ladder. I dismissed her idea — the family’s ladder was not tall enough to reach the balcony.

She volunteered to wake up my aunt and uncle and borrow their extra-tall ladder.

Once again, I dismissed the idea — that would still leave me with having to break down the front door the next day. I told her to wait in the car where it was warm while I thought for a bit. She told me she was going to go get a ladder.

As she drove off, I started to examine the door. I tried shoving things between the door’s segments, hoping to reach the lock. I tried unscrewing the door off its base using a nail I found on the floor. I even tried shoving and pushing the door — hoping to budge the lock out of resting place. Nothing worked.

I continued to pace the balcony — still dressed in my slacks, dress shirt and tie from the evening’s events.

I saw people come home and enter their apartment — settling in for a comfortable night and perhaps a little television.

I wanted in!

I couldn’t stand it anymore. I built up some momentum and threw myself against the door — and something happened!

The door budged!

It wasn’t much but it was just enough for me to slip my finger through a small crack in between the sliding door segments and unlock the door — just as my mom drove up with a ladder.

I was able to let myself back into the apartment, walk downstairs and open the door to greet my mom.

After reassuring her that I hadn’t broken the door, I thanked her for her efforts and bid her a good night.

I may not have had good karma repaid to me tonight, but I did learn a valuable lesson — I’m never going on my balcony again.

Scales used to be my greatest fear. Nothing was more embarrassing then watching the doctor keep adding more weight to the scale during the annual checkup.

While I’ve always struggled with my weight, in recent years I’ve been throwing the fight more often then not. While I haven’t weighed myself in a while, I wouldn’t be surprised if I’m also at my heaviest.

I can make a promise today, though, that I will make a serious change in my lifestyle. Faced with the hereditary threat of diabetes, the embarrassment of being constantly short of breath and a future of forever having sex in the dark, I’m ready to make the changes necessary so that I can live a healthier life.

I’ve come up with a few ideas that will help me improve the quality of my life. Most of the ideas revolve around improving my diet and increasing the frequency of exercise. Other parts of my plan will be pulled from past brushes with a fit life.

When I was in scouting as a youth, I trained one year to attend Philmont Scout Ranch. A massively mountainous backpacking camp nestled in New Mexico, the trip involved months of practice hikes. I would walk around my neighborhood for hours – the entire time carrying around a backpack filled with 60 pounds of encyclopedias.  

It was during that summer of walking endless loops around my neighborhood that I discovered rock and roll.

I would listen to Q 94.5, the local rock station, on a tiny Walkman during my practice hikes. Previously lacking anything resembling knowledge of music, it was during that summer between middle and high school that I discovered Ozzy Osbourne, KISS, Metallica and Led Zeppelin.

Looking back, that summer was one of the bright spots of my youth. Too young to have a job, I spent my days in carefree bliss – daydreaming while I walked the streets of my neighborhood. Even McAllen’s dry heat couldn’t bring me down.

The summer did have it’s own bad spot — an accident of disgusting proportions.

One morning during my third lap around the neighborhood, I began to feel my stomach grumble. Soon, pain was radiating through my gut – causing me to take a break and analyze the situation. I was about a mile from my house and nowhere near any public toilets. And I knew without a doubt that a toilet was what I needed.

Fearing the worst, I began to walk home as fast as my chubby little body could go. Even if I were able to sprint back home without collapsing in an asthmatic heap, you’ll remember I was weighed down by a sixty-pound backpack.

I soon realized that I wasn’t going to make it back home in time and was faced with a decision to make. Stuck in the middle of suburbia, there was no bush to squat behind. I was going to have to poop in public and I could either do it on my own terms or not.

I decided that the best way to handle the situation would be poop my pants a little bit – instead of possibly risking a massive uncontrolled mess. Unfortunately, upon letting a little pressure off of my anus muscles, I discovered that I didn’t just have to poop – I had diarrhea.

Needless to say, there is little in my life that is more embarrassing then being an overweight teenager walking home with a backpack full of encyclopedias with poop running down my leg.

I trained for four more months without having a similar experience. While I was still left huffing and puffing during some of the hike’s steeper climbs, I was in the best shape of my life.

Unfortunately, upon returning home from the camp, my life soon got off track and all the training went down the toilet.

In getting my life back on track, I hope to regain some of that vigor I once possessed. After all, how am I going to be Batman if I have the physical stamina of the Penguin?

Postscript

I wrote that essay on January 15, 2009.

That week, after writing the essay, I did something I had never done before in my life — I followed through on an oath. In the past I’ve made plenty of promises to loose weight in get into better shape. I’ve bought new running shoes or perused the pages of a book about the Atkins diet but nothing has ever stuck. Within a week of any promise I made to myself, I was back to eating whole pizzas and sucking down two-liter soda bottles. This time it was different, though.

Maybe it just took putting the proverbial pen to paper, but something finally clicked in me that I needed to get in better shape. Since January, I have developed better eating habits, adopted a daily exercise routine and, to date, have lost sixty pounds. Thankfully, I have yet to poop myself again. I’m not done loosing weight yet, though, so there’s always a chance.

My dog looks afraid that I'm about to eat her. I'm so heavy, I'm afraid I might try to eat her.

Here I am sixty pounds lighter and no longer in danger of eating my pet.

Part 1 — Summer Loving Happened So Fast

During my last month in College Station, I lived like a gypsy — being kicked out of three apartments in the span of two months. Having to find a new place to live every couple of days, I went from crappy, rundown dwelling to crappy, rundown dwelling — living in places that Danny Boyle makes films set in.

The last place I lived in was a former frat house that was infested with roaches; had uneven, unsettlingly stained floors; and possessed a front door that a third-grader could have kicked open in a fit of juice-fueled sugar-rage.

The last place I lived in College Station was only slightly better then this shack.

One night, after having locked myself into my bedroom and fallen asleep watching episodes of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles on a portable DVD player, I woke up to noises that sounded an awful lot like someone breaking into the house and rummaging through the kitchen. My eyes glued to the locked bedroom doorknob, I remained still in my bed, trying to convince myself that it was nothing but the wind shifting through my cutlery. The next morning I awoke to find the backdoor unlocked and swinging wide open. I don’t know for certain if I was the victim of a home invasion that night but I do know this — going to see The Strangers that next weekend was a very, very bad idea. I spent the rest of my time in that apartment armed with a rape whistle, wishing I hadn’t sent my dog to live with my parents.

When I wasn’t packing and unpacking my belongings with every new move, during the summer of 2008 I passed my time by being involved in three car accidents within the course of three months.

The first accident took place when, after arriving early to a job interview in Dallas, I found myself needing to use a bathroom. Not wanting to potentially ruin an interview by making a stink in the company’s restroom, I decided to drive to a nearby gas station and use a neutral stall.

Unfortunately, not knowing my way around Dallas, I fond myself lost and desperately trying to return to the interview site on time. Driving on a Dallas freeway and simultaneously paying attention to a map I had printed off the computer, I found myself trapped on a curved exit lane, blocked by cars and unable to pass into the next lane. I was driving much too fast to decelerate in time and ended up driving off the side of the freeway, down a grassy hill and over several signs that had already been knocked over by other cars that had apparently made the same mistake I did.

Able to steer my car down the hill and into a nearby parking lot, I assessed the damage. It appeared that the only problem was a flat tire and so, dressed in my business finest, I changed my first flat tire at the age of 23.

If the fact that I’d never changed a tire in my life before was not already a big giveaway, I’ll admit it: I don’t know a lot about cars. What I thought was merely a flat tire turned out to be a whole lot more damage to the underbelly of the car. In fact, the car would remain in a shop in Dallas for two weeks while I amassed a large credit card bill by renting a car in College Station. My first accident of my life would not be the last accident of the summer though. There would be much more rental car bills to come.

Part 2 — Who’s Going To Drive You Home?

About two weeks after I had gotten my car back from the shop, I found myself involved in another accident.

I was driving down University when the light ahead turned yellow. Deciding I could make the light before it turned red, I sped up — only to be struck from behind by a car that also decided to run the light, making a right turn on a red.

The driver climbed out of his car, red-eyed and twitchy. Now an expert on car accidents and dealing with insurance companies, I informed him that I was going to call the police so we could get a case number for our insurance companies.

He immediately begged me to reconsider, offering to settle the whole thing with cash. I declined, reasoning that since I’ve established that I am an idiot when it comes to judging the damage of a vehicle, I was pretty sure that I would not be able to accurately estimate the money it would take to repair my missing rear bumper and dented side. The other driver explained that he was driving his friend’s car and was not on his insurance ­— even more reason to get the cops involved I reasoned.

As we sat there, waiting for the police to arrive, I grew proud of the calm and rational way I was dealing with my latest accident — a stark contrast to the quivering legged, blubbering mess I had been during my last wreck.

When the police arrived they quickly took statements, processed citations and, to my surprise, arrested the other driver. It seems the real reason my friend had not wanted to get the police involved was due to the fact that he had an outstanding warrant out for his arrest.

When I finally arrived at the apartment I was currently living in, my vehicle’s rear bumper stuffed into the back seat of my car, I plopped myself down on my air mattress and let out a sigh. Surely having experienced two accidents in two months had fulfilled my quota for the immediate future. I hoped that I could look forward to a few years of relative safety on the road now.

I was wrong.

Flash forward a month and I am visiting my parents in Houston. I had gotten my car back from the shop and was looking forward to sleeping on a real bed and eating meals that didn’t come in frozen boxes with the words “hungry” or “man” on them.

When my mom asked me to accompany her on an errand she wanted to run, I agreed — as long as I didn’t have to drive. The two accidents had left me slightly shell-shocked and weary about unnecessarily getting behind the wheel of a car.

We ended up taking my father’s car. Enjoying the chance to be merely a passenger, I decided to lie back in my seat and take in the scenery that only the suburbs can provide.

I even closed my eyes for a bit — which prevented me from seeing a car that sped through a red light and hit the car in the lane to the left of us as it attempted to cross the street. The collision knocked both cars into the lane my mother and I were in — resulting in a three-car collision that totaled my father’s car.

Luckily, my mother and I escaped without injuries. My confidence, on the other hand, was shattered. I now had a feeling that all of my religious jokes had finally upset someone upstairs and I was now on the hit list of a very vengeful God.

Three car accidents in three months seemed to be a sign from above — little did I know that I would soon be seeing real signs — of the burning bush ilk.

Part 3 — I Saw the Sign and It Opened Up My Eyes

I’ve struggled with severe headaches most of my life. A dull throbbing marked with sharp, rhythmic pain-blasts; the headaches are often accompanied with severe nausea, exhaustion and general crankiness. They can be brought on by anything from stress, a missed meal or the dry arid heat of a Texas summer day.

The headaches I experienced last summer were probably caused by stress. Between my multiple accidents, my desperate attempt to escape from my unfulfilling job and the parade of shoddy apartments, each less inviting then the last; I was experiencing a lot of stress.

This time, though, the nausea and exhaustion that normally followed my headaches were accompanied by a new friend — hallucinations.

It’s hard for me to say exactly when the hallucinations started. At first, they seemed almost mundane, impossible to separate from reality. I would see friends’ faces in a crowd or hear my phone ringing when it was powered off.

I initially blamed these occurrences on a lack of sleep. Unable to get comfortable on my air mattress (my real bed had been put into storage until I could find a more permanent dwelling), I was not getting my required eight hours of sleep at night. I was constantly exhausted and figured that phantoms were merely symptoms.

It was the herd of buffalo I saw running alongside my car as I drove home from work one afternoon that made me begin to think that there was something wrong. Soon, my hallucinations began to increase in their frequency as well as the fantastical. I was seeing winged men and women swooping through the sky. Talking heads on the news would turn to the camera and start speaking to me in an alien language. The final straw came when I found I had lost three hours one night, seemingly spent walking around the apartment in a trance — my dinner left uneaten in the microwave.

All of these flights of fantasy were accompanied by severe headaches. While I had never experienced such vivid hallucinations before, I had heard stories of headaches accompanied by phantom sounds and smells. These stories all had the same ending: brain tumors.

So, taking the day off work, I visited my physician, praying that at the end of my visit the doctor would set down his clipboard, remove his glasses and, in a pitch-perfect Schwarzenegger impression, say, “It’s not a tumor.”

 Unfortunately, the only thing the doctor was able to offer me was a referral to an imaging company where I could take an MRI.

I’ve never been one to go to the doctor. I prefer to suffer through my ailments on my own, confident in the fact that my immune system will save the day. Fevers, colds, stomachaches and even a bleeding rectum have all been taken care of with a long nap and plenty of ibuprohpen.

It’s not that I’m afraid of the doctor or even that I don’t trust modern medicine. It’s just that I don’t have the patience to shift through insurance claims or deductibles. Going to the doctor is a headache in it’s own right, necessitating a Dante-esque journey through the hellscape that is medical coverage.

That being said, the thought of a brain tumor being nestled in my cranium, laughing at me as I wasted away into a drooling mass of pain was enough to convert me into a believer. I made my appointment for an MRI.

Part 4 — Where Is My Mind?

Since you’re reading this blog instead of my obituary, you’re right in assuming that the MRI came back negative for a brain tumor. In fact, the only real news I received during my MRI was the revelation that I hated MRIs.

MRI machines — Now featured on the list of things I hate most in this world!

From the moment I was asked to disrobe in a closet the size of a pygmy port-a-potty to the horrible muzak the technician played in a futile attempt to drown out the deafening drone of the imaging machine, I was in a constant state of discomfort.

I guess I should mention that I have a mild case of claustrophobia. Along with my fear of heights, clowns, dying alone and being killed on the rooftop of a desolate skyscraper by a homicidal clown, I grow more then slightly uneasy whenever I find myself in a small, enclosed area. Even large, over-crowded areas give me the shakes.

This is why, then, I was so uncomfortable during my stay in the sardine can that was the MRI machine. Besides the emotional dread, there were also the physical implications of being a big guy in a small tube. As I lay wedged between the cold walls, my head throbbing with each chirp, wiz and whirl of the machine, I struggled to remain still. I would shift my neck slightly, hoping to combat a growing cramp, and the physician would inform me that I had messed up the readings and she would need to start all over again.

At first, I felt sorry for the technician. I wasn’t only wasting my time every time my weakness for comfort ruined the readings; I was wasting her time. Any sympathy was quickly forgotten, though, when the nurse came to administer a dye injection between tests. During the eternity that I had been crammed inside of the MRI machine during my first test, the only thing I could think of was the joy I would feel when I would be rolled out of the tube between tests and given an opportunity to breathe some fresh air and pop my neck.

Instead of a momentary flirtation with freedom, though, the technician only rolled me halfway out from inside the machine — only far enough so that she could inject my arm with the needle.

If there’s anything worst then being stuck with a needle, it’s being stuck with a needle when you can’t see it. I have no idea how large the needle was or what was inside of it. The only thing I could tell was that I could feel the contents of the needle flowing through my veins as I was shoved back into the MRI machine for the second round of scans. When the entire process was over, I walked away with my very own souvenir — a migraine headache.

A few weeks later, when my physician received the results, he informed me that the only thing wrong was a slightly swollen sinus cavity. He prescribed to me some kind of steroid that I could inhale through my nose.

I was actually kind of disappointed with the results. All of the trauma during the MRI for what? Sinus troubles? I actually kind of hoped that I would be told that there was something bogus going on with one of my glands — something tangible that could be cured and would mean a lifetime free of headaches for me. Instead, in order to learn the headaches were something I would always have to deal with, I had to suffer through one of the most excruciatingly uncomfortable hours of my life.

But life wasn’t all that bad. Later that week, I received the job offer I had been waiting almost two months for.

Part 5 — Take This Job and Gently Push It Away

During the bad apartments, the accidents and the headaches, the bad was made worse by the fact that I was spending 40 hours a week working at a job I hated.

As a technical writer for a large software company, I spent my days parked in front of a computer. Whatever my job description may have been, the job I found myself doing involved taking manuals and build documentation that had already been prepared and written by company engineers and transforming them into HTML.

If you’ve ever coded HTML before, you know it’s a tedious task. I would spend hours of my day typing brackets and backslashes and paragraph breaks, my only relief coming from the hour-long naps I would take in my car during lunch hour.

When I first received the job, I was psyched to learn that I would have my own office. Long accustomed to cubicle dwelling, the thought of not having to hear my co-worker a couple of stalls down talk on the phone would be a relief. Or so I thought.

I soon learned that office life is a lonely life. With a door that was impossible to prop open and strict regulations about where I went in the building and how long I was gone from my desk, I found myself a stranger at my own company.

I didn’t know my co-workers and there would be days that would pass by at the office where I didn’t speak to a single person.

This was not the job I thought I would have when I was a kid playing make-believe.

And so, four months after being hired, I began looking for a new job. After a couple of false-leads and close calls, I finally got the job offer I was looking for. I would go to work for a non-profit youth organization.

As a member of this group for the majority of my youth, I had a lot of experience with the program. The thought of having a fast-paced, ever-changing job with evolving expectations appealed to the side of me that was tired of sitting behind a computer for eight hours a day.

More so, I felt by working for this company, I could finally have a job that I could be proud of. Knowledgeable of the fact that I was spreading the organization’s program to today’s youth, I could go to sleep at night feeling I accomplished something important — a drastic change from the feelings of hollowness I felt after spending an entire day writing out the instructions for how to build a car dealership’s key safe.

The only hitch in the new job would be the fact that I would be moving back home. Well, kind of.

After high school, my father was transferred to a new job in Houston. This meant every time I took a break from college to visit my family I visited them in a house and neighborhood I did not grow up in. Well, kind of.

Deciding not to live in Houston itself, my parents bought a house in Missouri City, the Houston suburb I had lived in before moving to McAllen. While the neighborhood had changed a lot since we moved away eight years before, visiting Missouri City was a constant state of déjà vu. And, by taking this new job that would be serving the Missouri City area, I was facing déjà vu all over again.

Because I did not have a feel for the city or a sizable savings, I took my parents up on their offer to move into their house for a few months. I figured it would be a great chance to slowly ease myself into my new job and save some money to boot.

But, like Thomas Wolfe said, there’s no going back home.

Part 6 — Ike Can’t Stand It Anymore

The first few weeks of living with my parents were a real treat. I enjoyed eating homemade meals, having access to a washer and dryer four feet from my bedroom and having very cheap rent. And yes, before I get called a moocher, I paid rent. I also paid for my share of the cable bill.

Oh, Hurricane Ike. You really know how to show a guy a good time, don't you?

Things were good and it was nice to spend time with my parents again. Unfortunately, an event happened a few months into my return to Houston that quickly proved the existence of too much of a good thing.

Since I have friends in Galveston and other parts of Houston that came out of Hurricane Ike much worse off then me, I will try to spare you the sob story of what it was like to be stuck in a house with your parents for two weeks without electricity or easy access to gasoline and surviving only on a diet of Spam and canned fruit.

That being said, life for those two weeks sucked … hard.

The power in my parent’s house went out at 6 p.m. the day before Ike made landfall. It did not return until almost two weeks later. In the time between, I experienced the full gamut of emotions. Bitterness, for not having access to the Internet or “The Colbert Report.” Laziness, as I struggled to remain cool as the temperature and humidity gave me a peek at global warming. Restlessness, as I paced around the house trying to think of something to do that would get my mind off of my current situation. And finally annoyance, at my parents for playing the radio 24/7 despite the fact that it was regurgitating the same facts every ten minutes or dragging me to the supermarket to wait in line for an hour in the hopes we would get ice that we did not need or wasting the last drops of my laptop’s battery so that they could watch episodes of “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit,” a show I cannot stand.

A lot of my frustration was born of the fact that I was stuck with my parents all day for several days at a time. With my office being shutdown for the first several days post-Ike and gas supplies severely limited, I could not afford to escape the prison that was my parent’s home. I would have resented any roommates I was stuck with during Ike. I was stuck with my parents, though.

Months after the hurricane has come and gone, trying to describe the frustration I felt during Ike sounds silly. While I can look back and recognize the pettiness behind my craving for television, I did not feel so petty during those two weeks. Constantly drenched in sweat and having to change shirts every two hours were only the tip of my misery iceberg. I couldn’t stand the fact that I would wake up in the morning with the sheets stuck to me like a wet bathing suit or the fact that my days ended at 8 p.m. when the sun went down and I was forced to get ready for bed.

I was tired of being a prisoner of Mission Valley Drive.

When the power finally returned and things began to regain a type of normalcy around the city, I resolved that my life needed change. I needed to branch out and explore my new city. I needed to make friends that were closer to my age. I needed to meet a new girl.

There was no way I was going to do any of these things while I was still living at my parent’s place. As much as I appreciated the opportunity to reconnect with my parents and spend some quality time with them, I needed to find my own place and re-become my own man.

Part 7 — The Day After Yesterday

Which brings us to today.

I’ve been working for my new job for about five months and have really loved it. Definitely the best job I’ve had yet.

A few weeks ago, I moved into a new apartment in Sugar Land. The place is, needless to say, a major improvement from my previous solo dwellings.

I’m happier, healthier and, with the return of my beard, hairier then I was this time last year.

There is still room for improvement, though. And that’s where these blogs come in.

When talking with my sister last week, I made the claim that I don’t believe in New Year’s Resolutions. At the risk of eating a big, heaping bowl of crow, I’m going to say that the fact I decided I needed to write more and the fact that this daily writing exercise started on January 1 is merely a coincidence.

With a mouth full of feathers, I decided to try and force myself to write a page a day in the fear that, in a job that doesn’t require me to use my writing skills often, I could potentially loose said skills much like I lost any artistic or acting abilities I may have once possessed.

I may not post everything I write. Some of it may be embarrassingly private; other pages might be of absolutely no interest to anybody but me.

I’m going to try and post as much of it as I can, though.

Why impose my unedited, half-thought-out brain-leaks on my friends and peers? Because I truly believe there is no point of writing anything unless there will be an audience. So, while I can’t imagine most of you will care about a 500-word essay on why I hate apples, there might be at least one person out there in the world who will take the time to read it — giving purpose to the fifteen minutes a day I plan to spend on this project.

I would like to take the remaining half a page I have left to thank my friends and family for supporting me and being there for the first chunk of my life. I hope that you are each doing well and enjoying the paths you have either chosen or have been forced to tread. Either way, hopefully you are making the most of the journey.

For the friends who I haven’t seen or spoken to in a while, it’s good to know that you are still out there in the world, affecting others like you have affected me. Just because we don’t hang out anymore doesn’t mean I don’t think of you with some degree of emotion. Hate is an emotion right?

I’m mostly kidding.

As I see you update your Facebook statuses, letting the world (and me) know what you are up to, I often find myself feeling an odd mixture of pride and envy at the lives my friends are living. It seems that nearly all of my friends have gone on to great things and interesting lives.

I sure know how to pick ‘em, right?

So, once again, thank you for being my friend. I’ve traveled down the road and back again. Your heart is true, you’re a pal and a confidant. If you threw a party and invited everyone you knew, you would see the biggest gift would be from me and the card attached would say, thank you for being a friend.

Now that’s off my chest: get back to work. Your job doesn’t pay you to surf Facebook. Unless, of course, you are now employeed by Facebook. In that case, surf on.

Since that night, I've never been able to read a Shakespeare play the same way.

It was a good feeling to have finally found my niche in the halls of my school. Everyone from the JROTC department to the principal to the theatre geeks would come to me asking for help when filming or editing a project.

It was nice indeed to be needed.

One day my friend Jon came up to me asking for help with an extra credit project he was working on. His English teacher had assigned him the task of filming a scene out of “Macbeth.” I agreed to help him out not only because he was a friend, but also because I love the play and thought I could really do some interesting things with the scene. It also didn’t hurt that his teacher was also my teacher and she had agreed to give me some points as well.

“You don’t have to plan anything,” Jon told me. “We already have the idea all thought out. All we need is for you to operate the camera and edit the thing together.”

The group was set to film at Garza Park, a tiny playground located next to the local elementary school. I was told to meet at the merry go-round at dusk and to bring my camera.

That afternoon I packed all my equipment and hopped into my parent’s van, heading towards the park.

When I had gotten there, the first thing I noticed was a lack of actors. There was nobody at the park but tiny children playing to their heart’s content at the slides.

I sat down at a picnic table, fiddling with my camera and trying my best not to look like a pedophile cruising for prey.

The minutes whisked by and I grew more and more agitated at the lack of any thespians waiting to be filmed. I did not have a phone and could not call Jon so, instead, I continued to sit on the picnic table and watch the sun slowly set.

The day’s light was fading and it was becoming more and more obvious that filming was going to soon be impossible baring the usage of a powerful headlight.

As dusk finally settled in I noticed my friend walking my way. On his head sat a cardboard Burger King crown; a sheet was tied around his neck.

Jon sauntered over to where I was sitting and plopped down next to me.

“Sorry I’m late,” he said.

His parents had refused to drive him to the park so he had to walk. The rest of the group would be arriving soon. He may have said some more but to be quite honest, I wasn’t listening too hard. Instead, I was staring in shock at his excuse for a costume.

Now, the films I had done during high school were not known for their professional appearance, I’ll be the first to admit that – but wow, he was doing Shakespeare!

Couldn’t he have found something more slightly royal to wear then the trash perched on his head? Even Jughead Jones wore a more distinguished looking crown.

I dreaded to see the costumes the rest of his group would be wearing.

“We can’t film right now,” I told him. “There’s no light. The camera’s not going to pick up anything.”

“Don’t worry about that,” he responded. “We’re going to use fire.”

At that point, I took notice of the bag he had hauled over his shoulder. He reached inside and pulled out a stack of newspapers, a plastic gas canister and a Bic lighter.

I was already pissed off about having been kept waiting and seeing the unprofessional nature of my friend’s costume so you’ll have to excuse me if my spider-sense didn’t go off when Jon suggested we should light a scene with a miniature bonfire.

I merely shrugged and began setting up my equipment.

Soon enough, the rest of the team had arrived.

There was the creepy girl who sat in the library reading encyclopedias during lunch. She now wore a plastic trash bag as a cloak.

There was the asshole that used to date my friend and made fun of me during junior high. He had on his letterman jacket.

The other girl I didn’t recognize, but she was dressed in cutoff shorts and a tube top, clutching a baby doll and a bottle of ketchup.

Shakespeare in the Park, this was not.

While they set up their “props” and rehearsed their lines, Jon started the fire.

He placed the newspapers in a barbeque pit and poured some gasoline over the stack, lighting it with his Bic. The light the gas-fueled inferno radiated was certainly bright, but the smell was almost unbearable.

I no longer cared, though. I strapped my camera to its tripod and checked the battery.

Soon, the cast was crowded around the pit and ready to begin their scene.

Jon was supposed to play Macbeth, facing the three crones who would reveal his destiny to him through elaborate symbolism and visions.

What I filmed was a group of high school students butchering Shakespeare as they awkwardly read their lines off of a sheet of paper and occasionally held up a prop that would heavy-handedly signify a part of Macbeth’s dark future.

The light of the fire was fading rapidly as the gasoline burnt up. My camera’s LCD screen was showing me that the picture was quickly becoming grainy.

Jon called for a break as he and I assessed how to get the fire going again. As he hemmed and hawed about proper safety precautions, I grew agitated with the time that he was wasting; time that could have been spent watching TV.

I grabbed the gas can from his hands and splashed some of its contents onto the flames.

“Look! How hard was that? Instant fire,” I sarcastically quipped.

Wait … something’s not right. Why do my hands feel so … hot? I looked down to see that that some of the fiery gasoline had splashed back toward the canister that I was now holding. The chunk of plastic in my hands had now become a flaming chunk of plastic.

I dropped the canister onto the ground and shook my arms, desperately trying to relieve myself of what I was sure were fiery hands.

It was only once I confirmed that my immediate person was not engulfed in flames that I attempted to assess the situation.

The gas container was now sitting on the ground, the fire burning brightly and spreading to the notoriously dry Rio Grande Valley grass. The barbeque pit itself was an inferno. I could feel the heat emanating from the dual fires as they started to tickle my arm hairs.

I panicked and quickly scanned the surroundings for any other troubles that I would have to consider – mainly, police. I wasn’t positive but something told me that lighting a city park on fire was illegal.

While the park itself was empty, next door was a public library with a parking lot full of cars.

Okay, I’ll admit it.

I didn’t know what to do so I panicked and ran off.

I ran like a little girl and hid behind a car in the parking lot.

This fire was not my problem. This was not my project.

Let Macbeth and his crones take care of this.

As I sat crouching behind a car, attempting to catch my breath and trying my best to calm my beating heart, I noticed a lack of weight hanging around my neck. My camera! I had left my camera back at the picnic table. I had to go back and get it.

As I ran back towards the quickly growing flames, I saw Jon, still standing in front of the barbeque pit. He looked at me in surprise and asked me where I had gone.

I lied and told him I had gone to search for a water hose or something. While lying, I noticed Jon and his partners hadn’t made much progress in containing the fire.

The two girls had run off to hide in their cars, leaving me feeling slightly better about my actions.

The other guy was scrounging around in his truck looking for something to put the fire out with while Jon danced around the flames, his face growing more and more frightened by the moment.

As Jon hopped around, I spotted the sheet he had used as his cape that was now lying on the floor. I quickly picked it up and threw it upon the fire, hoping to smother it.

Instead of smothering it, the sheet only became additional fuel to an ever-growing fire.

Jon panicked at the site of his mother’s bed sheet going up in flames and I panicked at the sight of the fire consuming the sheet and continuing to spread.

The other guy, decidedly calm, ran up from his car wielding a McDonald’s Styrofoam cup. He doused the fire with day old coffee and jumped back when the drink ignited mid-air.

The fire had taken on a life of its own. We had to stop it before it took our lives.

We tried everything to put the fire out. I tired to smother a portion of it with my foot before my shoelace ignited. The other guy tried kicking dirt on it. Finally Jon saw the proverbial light bulb over his head and ran to the playground, grabbing a bunch of play pebbles from under the slide.

Throwing them on the fire, he showed us that they were our best weapon in our war against the fire.

All too eager to follow the lead of somebody else in this nightmare, I was soon working overtime to smother the fire with the pebbles.

We finished the barbeque pit posthaste before we moved on to the gasoline fire. The gas had been burned out so we no longer had to worry about containing it, merely dowsing it.

We were almost finished putting the fire out when a couple of kids sauntered over our way.

“Dude… where did that fire come from?” one of them asked.

I was not in the mood to explain the situation to two potential witnesses so I tried to shoo them away. If that did not work, I would probably need to quiet them permanently.

“I’m not sure,” I replied. “I just found it here. You should go away.”

As I weighed the likelihood of the playground pebbles effectively smothering the two kids, one of them took a joint out of his jacket and bent over the fire.

“Got a light?” he asked, laughing as he lit his cigarette.

I felt like kicking what was left of the fire into his face.

He stood up, puffing away.

As Jon and I watched the two kids saunter away, I told him that I would not be available for filming for the rest of the evening. Perhaps he would like to reschedule?

We eventually finished filming at a different park, many miles away from our arson adventure.

The next time I picked up the camera, though, I made sure that there was plenty of light in the sky. We would not be playing with fire again.

The end footage was crap, fire or no fire, but I managed to edit something together that got my friend a B in his class.

A week later, I went back to the park.

Nothing was left of the gas can or the sheet, but there was a sign reading, “Arson is a crime. Any reports leading to the arrest of offenders will lead to a substantial reward.”

Realizing that I, a criminal, was returning to the scene of my crime, I quickly turned around and walked away — keeping an eye out for two stoners who may have been able to identify me and already wondering how much it would take to bribe them.

I wish I was an emoticon.

As a teenager, I was even scored lower in a summer job review because of the fact that I wore a frown more often then a grin.

My aversion towards saying “cheese” is not intentional, though. I do not choose to go through life with a furrowed brow and a grimace. That’s just the way my face naturally rests. Unless I am actively commanding myself to smile or grin, my mouth instinctively turns downward and my expression hardens. It’s an autonomic behavior that more often then not leaves me looking like a man with the weight of the world on his shoulders.

Atlas, though, I am not.

While I struggled with my fair share of depression in my youth — and what teenager doesn’t? — I currently consider myself a pretty happy guy. When I’m not getting into car accidents, living in rat hole apartments or having hallucinatory headaches, that is.

My job is good. I have some solid friendships. My relationship with my family is top-notch. Throw in some good tunes and I’m practically beaming with contentment — on the inside. On the outside, I look like I’m about to mug somebody.

I really do try to throw on a smile every now and then. As I go through the day, I’ll periodically remind myself to grin at the world —creeping out, perhaps, the people around me with an out-of-nowhere smirk.

They say it takes more muscles to frown then it does to smile but, for me, it takes less work. If my mind is racing and I have enough items on my plate, I’ll forget to remind myself that it’s smile time and soon enough I’ll go back to my natural worried expression.

I think my reflex-induced frowning can be traced back to high school.

As part of an effort to impress my classmates, I sought to create and nurture a persona for myself. Since I was not the athletic one or the smart one, I thought I would try my hand at being the deep one.

I bought some black t-shirts (not enough to look like one of those lame goth kids, though — even I had my standards) and I spent my days in the classroom looking pensive and remorseful – as if I were covering up some dark and secret past.

Instead of becoming my school’s version of a “Twilight” vampire, though, I found myself adopting my own made-up persona a bit too well.

Soon, my attempts to affect a depressed, sullen persona actually led to me becoming a depressed, sullen teenager. The bright and chipper Robert that had scampered through the halls of junior high was replaced by the mope who hung his head while shuffling through the halls of high school. I was such a dork.

Unfortunately, I didn’t put any stock into the old wives’ tale about making faces. Unfortunate because now, even as a reasonably well-adjusted adult, I find myself still slipping into the facial patterns of a teenage goth-lite douche bag.

If it takes work to smile, though, I’m willing to put in the effort just so I don’t catch myself in the mirror and become reminded of what a pitty-party I used to be in high school.

I’ll plaster on a Chesire Cat grin, throw some sparkles in my eyes and walk around looking like I escaped a television Christmas special if it means separating who I’ve become from who I used to be.

My best friend in the world as a kid

While I’m filled with my fair share of wanderlust and I’m perpetually looking forward to my next road trip, nothing feels better then coming home after being away for a few days. From opening your mailbox to find an overflow of coupons and bills to peaking into your refrigerator only to realize you forgot to throw away the milk, everything about a homecoming is exciting.

Since being introduced to the wonders of a DVR, catching up on my missed “stories” has become a post-trip ritual for me.

As much as I’m a fan of movies, I’m an even bigger fan of television. As my past as an overweight child may have suggested, I grew up on a steady diet of television.

As a kid, I would devour anything on TV – usually with a giant bowl of junk food sitting on my lap. It didn’t matter what was showing, I would watch it.

I would watch TV until I got sick – my muscles starting to ache from not being used all day and my stomach rebelling against the fifth glass of soda I had fed it.

As I got older and my schedule started to fill up with school activities and the burgeoning existence of a social life – as stunted as it may have been – I discovered that I didn’t have the time to watch as much television as I used to.

Faced with the prospect of ending my relationship with my boob tube buddy, I did what any self-respecting television junkie would do – I bought a VCR.

After saving enough allowance for a new VCR, I quickly started hording up on blank VHS tapes. While my friends where experimenting with sex, drugs and rock and roll; I was experimenting with which recording speed maximized tape length and quality.

I recorded everything I had previously watched and more. On Sunday mornings I would pounce on the newspaper, rip out the TV Guide and read every page like most people read the sports section. I actually started to highlight the shows that I wanted to watch, making a planning calendar for my television consumption.

If you haven’t noticed by now, I was a troubled child with an addictive personality.

Realizing that I didn’t have enough time in my nights and weekends to watch everything I was taping, I even managed to convince my ninth grade history teacher to let me watch my recorded television after I had finished my daily assignments. At the time, I thought I was so cool – getting away with watching TV in class. Looking back, I realize that she probably saw me for the screwed-up little kid I was and took pity on me.

Now, as a responsible adult with a full-time job, I don’t have the time to watch as much TV as I used to. I still DVR an insane amount of programming – often reaching my hard drive’s capacity level on a weekly basis – but I don’t often watch what I record. I only make the time for the shows that consistently keep me entertained. And when I do watch TV, I limit myself to hour-long intervals – making sure to get up and do something physical after every program.

I still read the TV Guide as if it was my Bible, though.

Let sleeping dogs lie.

I’m always ready for a nap.

During high school, I would sneak into the auditorium during lunch periods, find a nice quiet spot on the stage behind the curtains, put on my headphones and fall asleep. I knew it was time to wake up when I heard the noise of the next period’s students begin to shuffle into the theater department for their afternoon classes.

My habit for daytime sleep indulgence did not dissipate when I went to college. My freshmen year, I was saddled with an eight o’clock class every morning Monday through Friday but I would always make a point to find time for a nap before my next class. When I couldn’t go back to my dorm room because of time limitations, I would explore the campus in search of a solitary location to rest my eyes.

I became the master of finding unused classrooms with soft seats, comfortable couches in out-of-the-way locations and even bathrooms where I could sit on a clean toilet and take a quick snooze.

From the couches of Rudder Hall to the hidden balcony of the MSC to even underneath my desk in the Battalion offices, I took my afternoon naps wherever I could find them.

My favorite spot, though, was the West Campus library.

With soft chairs that you could sink into, a quiet atmosphere perfect for undisturbed slumber and a convenient distance from the majority of my classes, the WCL became my nap destination of choice.

Between classes I would find myself a nice chair, take out a textbook from my backpack so it looked like I was studying and set my cell phone to vibrate an alarm ten minutes before my next lecture. These short breaks were like manna from the sky as far as I’m concerned.

Unfortunately, there was the issue of talking in my sleep.

Since I was a child, I’ve been told I spout uncontrollable monologues during the night. From short bursts of nonsense gibberish to soft moans, I make all sorts of noises while I sleep — not the least of which is snoring.

Most of the time, naps didn’t put me in such a deep sleep to illicit nocturnal admissions but if I was coming off of a particularly sleepless night all bets were off.

I first noticed my bad habit forming when I began to groan in the middle of lectures. Even with my naps, I always had a hard time staying awake during some of the more tedious of subjects. I once slept through an entire semester’s worth of economics classes.

During one particularly un-inspiring accounting course, I woke to find that I had been making soft moans from the back of the auditorium. Awaking mid-moan, I opened my eyes to see several of my classmates staring at me with a mixture of surprise, humor and annoyance. The embarrassment I felt for the rest of the class period didn’t add up to the shame that came later.

One morning as I slept in the library, I found myself having a particular dream about ordering deli meat from a deaf butcher. As you can guess, this story can only have one ending.

I awoke in the library screaming at the top of my voice two words: “Roast Beef.”

I quickly gathered my books and left the library without looking at the faces of my fellow Aggies. I didn’t need to see the shocked expressions to know every student trying to study had heard my deli meat battle cry.

Read more stories of my time in college

In which accidents happen

I sit on a bench and watch the rain fall. The dirt turns to mud as my stomach churns in pain.

I have been sitting on this bench for thirty minutes and nobody has come. I walked the five miles to this bench in order to learn how to identify three types of squirrels. I also came to hear the dirty jokes that the counselor always starts the class off with; mostly, though, it was for the squirrels.

I sit on the bench and hear the rain thump on the tarp over my head. The noise develops into a rhythmic pattern as I sit there, waiting for the counselor to show up.

I begin to relax and … crap, I just farted.

My stomach churns again, emitting a gurgle that travels though my intestinal track and escapes from my rear — reminding me of what will happen if I lose control.

I shouldn’t have eaten that chicken last night. My buddy told me that it didn’t look good. He showed me the pink part and told me all about salmonella. I told him that I agreed; it needed to cook a bit longer.

I was hungry though and I’m a jerk and I ate the chicken.

My stomach sloshes around and I regret ignoring the threat of food poisoning. I chuckle at my little rhyme (oh, it’s there) as I emit another fart. The rhyming stanza was off and my stomach hurts. What’s knocking at my back door wants out.

I look around for the nearest bathroom stall and the only thing I see are trees. I take out my map and I realize that the nearest bathroom is three miles back at the trading post.

My intestinal tract perform “Rhythm of the Night” and I fart again.

I casually look through my backpack for my toilet paper and find a note from my buddy. He borrowed my toilet paper, MY TOILET PAPER, to replace the missing roll at the outhouse back at base camp. I look through my backpack frantically for a scrap of paper, willing to accept anything at this point. I find my homework from yesterday. I look around and see no counselor to give my homework to. I look at my homework again and I fart again.

I grab my homework and I run into the woods. I frantically search the woods for a suitable tree to sacrifice my offering to. I find a creek. It will do. The rain has cleared up and the creek is running downhill. I try to remember if it is more environmentally safe to take a dump in a creak or on a tree. As I think, I fart.

I pull down my pants and squat into the creek, my butt immersed in water. I breathe a sigh of relief as I fart one last time and everything comes out.

I breathe another sigh of relief and I hear a twig snap.

“The North American Grey Squirrel has been known to sometimes take a swim in shallow creeks, much like the one ahead.”

I pause from wiping my butt with my homework to glance over my shoulder. My counselor stands behind me, open mouthed. My classmates stand behind him, cameras drawn.

The first flash goes off and I ask if any of them happens to have any toilet paper.

Read more stories of my youth