theblackdostoyevsky

If you could go back in time and give your younger self advice, what would it be?

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I swear I answered this, like, a month and a half ago.

Ah, well. I gotta get this workout in either way, so let’s get to it.

Staring out of the window at the waking world, I’m trying to decide how young I want to go here. Elementary age wouldn’t understand or retain any advice I was trying to give him. Middle school age would be too insecure about body odor and hiding his random erections to pay attention to what I was saying. High school? I remember high school. I remember Mrs. Pittman, the English teacher who followed me for three years, teaching me how to read literature. I remember the football program. I remember the courtyard and a few of the more attractive girls. I don’t remember the hallways much, or whether or not we used the lockers. I remember that was when we all started wearing clothes three and four sizes too big, emulating duffle bag boys and pushers off the corner. I remember chopped and screwed blaring from open hand-me-down car windows. I remember the leather couch I fell asleep on nearly every day at my best friend’s house. Advice though, I don’t remember any.

University, I was too full of myself to hear what anybody was talking about. College operates as a vacuum for wisdom. Take a small rural city where the land is cheap and fill it with Victorian-style buildings and dormitories and mess halls and places for lounging and surround it with predatory fast-food franchises and gas station corner stores, keeping the grocery store a few miles away, and invite fifty thousand 17-24 years olds to live in that rural city along with a smattering of adult supervision from eight to eight, and that’s college life. Right now, I can’t think of a single wise word spoken to me by any person while I was standing on a college campus that didn’t come from a book. I imagine I heard some wise words during those years, but they were spoken far from campus, I assure you.

So, the advice would have to come from my adult self to my adult self. Off top, the advice I want to give is to take that internship at Marathon Oil in Houston. Financially, that would have been the wisest move of my life. Had I continued on that path, I’d have a career and plenty money, judging from the trajectories of everyone else I know who graduated from that program. Of course, I can’t guarantee that, but maybe, having gotten away from A&M sooner than I did I wouldn’t have developed an alcohol problem. Maybe it wouldn’t have made a difference, but I certainly wouldn’t have courted my now wife and we wouldn’t have these four beautiful children. I can’t imagine my life without the five other people in my house right now. So no, I wouldn’t give that advice.

If I wait to give the advice until after I’d graduated from A&M, in 2011, I’d have been back at home, living on my sister’s couch after my DWI. Ripe time for advice. I spent my days then playing 2k and drinking four or five Four Lokos every day, back when they had caffeine in them. I remember one of my homeboys passed out in the hallway after his third one. Should’ve realized something was wrong then. That shouldn’t happen at only 14% alcohol. But I digress. Nonetheless, that’s probably along the lines of the advice I’d give my younger self: stop drinking. In fact, I’d have to rewind a little further back to my twenty-first birthday, then, when it all started.

My junior year of college I went out to TGIFriday’s to celebrate my birthday with a few of my closest college friends. My intention was to drink for the first time. I ordered the spicy shrimp and chicken pasta they’ve got there and a Long Island Iced Tea. At that point, right when the waitress (or waiter) walks up to take the order, my future self would show up.

“Don’t order that drink. Get a water. Just listen to me, Bryan. That first sip will be enough to ruin the next two decades of your life. Trust me, I’m living them.”

Maybe it’ll be the gray in his beard that’ll convince me. Maybe the faded, sagging skin on his face. Maybe it’ll be that rheumy, faraway look in his eyes, like he’s always on the verge of tears. Maybe it’ll be those tattoos he keeps trying to cover up like a bellied-man always tugging at the hem of his shirt. Maybe it’ll be his dress, casually unkempt, like a man who stopped caring how he showed up in public years ago. Or maybe the yellowed teeth and blackened gums. Either way, being twenty-one, I can’t think of anything other than my own vanity that would have persuaded me not to take that drink. What I do know is that after I took that first drink the next twenty years of my life was a steady train of admonitions to put way something I felt I had no control over. I’ve lost jobs, been kicked out of churches, abandoned relationships, had relations abandon me, gone broke, compromised my health, and spent my days shaking my fists at heaven for reasons I still don’t fully understand, all in the interest of numbing myself from being forced to spend the next sixty years in a rat race I knew I’d never be able to avoid. What can I say, I need the money. We all do. I added addictions to the addiction and dug myself into a deeper hole. Some nights, high out of my mind, I thought I’d found some clarity, only for it to disappear by the time I woke up the next morning, dehydrated and terrified to check my phone.

Yeah. Don’t take that first sip.