There’s another persona I have, which is Strong Danny. Strong Danny uses his sensitivity as a strength instead of a weakness. Strong Danny observes his feelings objectively and doesn’t let them control him. Strong Danny uses the information his feelings are telling him to take action to address or alleviate those feelings. Strong Danny stands up for himself. Strong Danny takes responsibility for himself. Be like Strong Danny, Danny. You can do it.

The trailer in Florida was a kind of frat house my sibling and his friends inhabited while going to college. They even had a dedicated barf bucket, that’s how committed they all were to drinking. They were drinking tough. When my older brother handed me my first cigarette, he was acting as if it was gonna be too much for me to handle, and giving me rather patronizing instructions on how to inhale it. “You got inhale it all the way into your lungs, don’t just exhale right away.” So in response to him, I took this long, deep, drag. He seemed impressed at my drag. To my surprise, I felt the most light-headed, floaty feeling, like I was hovering above the deck we were all standing on. I wondering if this was what it was like to get stoned and even though I was eager to ask, I kept it in cause I knew my older brother Sean would disapprove.

Some time that night I believe I also took my first shot of whisky. I just remembered how much it burned on the way down, like I was drinking fire. But when it finally entered my belly I experienced this great warm feeling spread from my belly and outward to the other parts of my body. I didn’t take any more shots that night because even that one dose was enough to make me feel completely tipsy.

The house got quiet eventually and when my older brother finally went to bed, I got an invitation from one of the house mates. He popped his head into the doorway of the living-room where I was settling down for bed and said “hey, do you wanna come smoke with us?” In my memory it seemed this dude had a halo of smoke around his head.

I began to feel that excitement again, of doing something new or dangerous and just instinctively said “yes!” I followed him out to the car where there was about 4 others all piled in there. The car was already filled with smoke. I struggled for a bit with the carb, but eventually found my way around the pipe. One of them pulled out a laptop and we started watching those “G.I. Joe” shorts that were all the rave on the internet back in the day. I think we watched the one where the soldier says “Hey kid, I’m a computer” and the children in the video just look at each other confusingly. The glow of the laptop screen in that hazy really sticks out in my mind to this day. It was just such a mystical kind of place to be in.

All the sudden others in the car started asking me, “hey are you ok?” I don’t know why. I was just sitting there silently. And when he asked that question, I didn’t know what to say, I just sat there. And suddenly everybody began to say “he’s too stoned, he’s too stoned, let him out of the car.” Even though I think I would have been just fine continuing to smoke, I think they may have been right in light of what happened next.

I went back inside and had the biggest trip of my life. It seemed that reality was a confounding mystery to me, and I didn’t necessarily know what was real and what was just imagery. Time seemed to slow down and speed up at the same time. I began pacing around inside of the trailer in a perfect circular motion. I went to the fridge, got a glass a water, looked out the window at the smoke-filled car, walked back to the living room, walked back to the kitchen again, got another glass of water, looked out the window at the smoke-filled car, and on and on. I did perhaps a dozen laps, unable to wrap my mind around what was happening. Eventually I found my way to my bed and slept off the stoned feeling. I knew I would never be the same after that.

I scored a 2 out of 40. The narcissistic traits I had, based on this test, were self-sufficiency and exhibitionism. But I scored much lower than the average person, who ranges between 12-15. Celebrities score 18+, and those with Narcissistic Personality Disorder score 20+. So in actual fact, I have a lower than average ego than most people. Now this doesn’t actually surprise me one bit. Although I have confidence in many areas in life, including writing, forming opinions about myself based on inventories of myself, and taste in movies, books, and TV shows, in many other areas of my life I have generally lacked confidence. But more pointedly, I’ve lacked self-esteem.

This whole process of taking an inventory of my ego and my narcissistic traits, however few there may be, has reminded me of a time when I was attempting to enhance my ego. Back in college I had a long term girlfriend who had become my domestic partner. We broke up, and I see now that it was for the best. There were plenty of reasons why we needed to break up, particularly because of the fact that I was a codependent and the relationship itself was not healthy. I remember once having a conversation with her about breaking up a year or so before we went ahead and ended it. I got very emotional during this conversation and said something along the lines of “if we break up, I don’t want to be alive,” or something to that effect. I immediately redacted the statement and said, “no, I didn’t mean that,” but that abusive sentiment of blackmailing someone to stay with me had already been put out into the air, and I could not take it back. I’m not proud of this, not at all. But it’s yet another illustration of having a very low sense of self-esteem, a problem I’d faced in the past and one that I’m continuing to grapple with today.

I’ve heard that when someone says something malicious or mean, as I had said to my ex-girlfriend then, it’s not necessarily from a place of direct maliciousness, but a place of weakness. I believe this was the case when I said this to my ex-girlfriend. I said that I couldn’t stand to be alive without her because that’s how desperate I felt inside. I felt that if she had left, there would be no else to come along and love me. This is of course not true. I’ve had many good romantic relationships, friendships, and improved family relationships since this time. And in fact, in many ways, I’ve flourished since this time. In no small part because I’ve been learning to love myself first. It took me going through a similar bout of codependency with the next long term girlfriend I would have to finally realize that I needed to identify myself as codependent, but I did eventually get there. And I can say my life has generally improved since this time.

But at the time of the breakup I felt hurt. Not just because of that desperation feeling I had bound up in my soul since before I could remember, but also because of the fact that my ex-girlfriend admitted that part of the reason she wanted to break up was to explore other partners sexually. In fact, at first she didn’t even want to break up, but instead suggested an “open relationship.” It was truly a messy situation.

Here we were, continuing to live with each other, sleeping in the same bed, but now broken up, while she was off having sexual conquests. Now at this point I do want to clarify something. I want to say that I don’t think there’s anything wrong, in any way, shape, or form, with having the desire to have sex with many partners. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. It’s not what I would choose for myself now, because I know that I am a sensitive person and it is hard for me to open up to someone emotionally enough to the point where I would want to have sex with them. It just isn’t part of how I’m wired. I like to have an emotional connection with someone first.

At the time that this occurred, however, I did feel quite hurt by my ex-girlfriend’s choice. I felt inadequate, worthless, and just very sad. Although I admit the desire to have many sexual conquests is not inherently bad, I do think the way my ex went about it was horribly clunky. Most people who make this kind of decision, I would imagine, would probably do so while living in a different city–let alone a different apartment–from their ex.

This hurt that I felt, combined with my aforementioned desperation resulted in my forming a kind of persona of the “player.” And I admit I really felt almost competitive toward my ex. I felt that these feelings meant that what I should do is follow suit and try and have “sexual conquests” myself. So I began to act like I was the kind of person who pursued this lifestyle. At first this persona was created to kind of give myself a temporary ego boost in order to perhaps literally pursue this lifestyle. But my personality simply disallowed this to happen. I never have had a “sexual conquest”–that is, had sex with someone who I hadn’t formed some kind of emotional connection with first.

I am unfortunately still living with the repercussions of that time to this day.  I sometimes run into people who mistakenly think that I am someone who is some kind “player” because of this persona that I created. And it’s quite strange because people will tell me straight up that they are jealous of me, or say things that imply they know I’m a “player.” They’ll say things like, “did you just ask that waitress her phone number?” or “you’re gonna take that girl home, huh?” or “you’ve got a harem of girls following you.” These are all real things people have said to me. In truth, I’m quite shy and do not have some kind of phenomenal impact on the opposite sex. I’m really just an average dude in many ways. Averagely self-conscious, averagely shy, and with a below average ego.

However there was a good reason why I had evoked these feelings of jealousy in others. And it’s because I had appeared more confident when I was acting in this persona. Appeared is the key word here.  I would drink and I would feel more confident from drinking. And I would intentionally try and carry this confidence forward into my day even after I was no longer intoxicated. And this was the time when I am certain I almost became a truly narcissistic person. If I let my player persona take over my personality, I would have become an egotistical bastard. However, it never got to the point where this temporary inflation of my ego carried over to my day to day life permanently. And I’m extremely glad it didn’t. Even though now I lack confidence, I’d rather build up my ego in a genuine way than project to the world a sense of self that was inauthentic.

During the height of this persona I’d created, I had a creative writing class with my ex-girlfriend and her latest sexual conquest. In the class, I experienced bullying from my ex’s boy-toy. He offered personal insults to me, thinly veiled as criticism of my work. One of the pieces was about a guy who spoke in a British accent to try and throw off someone who wanted to get into a fight with him (this eerily mimics a scene from “Leaving Las Vegas,” in which Nicolas Cage does the same thing. I hadn’t seen “Leaving Las Vegas” at the time). This boy-toy said to me, “if you spoke in a British accent, I would want to punch you in the face.” It was abundantly clear that what he was really saying to me was, “I want to punch you in the face.”

Seeing my ex in the class, dealing with her boy-toy, and struggling to connect to anyone else in the class had taken an emotional toll. I would wake up bitterly crying and then not go to class due to this distress. It was not a class I wanted to take, I even dropped out very briefly because of how upsetting it was. But I had to take the class in order to garner enough credits to graduate on time. I was lonely then. I wanted to make friends with others in the class. But when I reached out to others, they shot me down as well. I was hated in that class. But it was the player persona that people hated. And that was when my player persona ended, in that class, unable to connect to anyone, desperately upset every day I had to go. It has never resurfaced since. The only thing that makes me remorseful is the fact that when my player persona died, my ego and self esteem went back to below normal levels. Now I’m trying to build my self-esteem in a way that is sustainable, in a way that won’t get destroyed with the slightest gust of wind, instead of being built on a foundation of quick sand. I’m now working on a sense of self esteem that isn’t contingent on what others think of me.

What stage of life is this? I’m done with college but I still feel like a kid. In a way it’s kind of refreshing, actually. I get to see Juneau with a new set of lenses. It doesn’t seem to be as filled with as many burdening shadows of my past as it did when I left. I’m sleeping on my brother’s floor for now, but at least I have work here. It’s small, but it’s something.

I’ve taken up work at the movie theater, my old high school job. In California I couldn’t find work at all, so I can’t really complain even if it is minimum wage with hours far and few between. I’ve got to keep my head straight, is all. College life seemed so much simpler. My life had a clear purpose and something to forward to. Now my future is dimly lit, not fully known.

I don’t have a convenient schedule of courses to take me on a fascinating journey through material I would never come across on my own. Now the journey is in my hands. Things don’t come as easily to me as they once did and I’m beginning to feel worried.

Back in the fall of 2011 I was in a similar position I am now in terms of employment. After my seasonal Summer office job ended I was just a piece of flotsam adrift between jobs. Under pressure to find work so I could pay the rent I found an office job at my college after only two weeks of unemployment.

At the interview I put on my best smile, cleanest clothes, straightest posture, and most positive mindset. I answered every question without a hitch. At the end of the interview I had my prospective employers grinning. One of them walked up to me and said, “you did very well.”

I had done it. I’d clung on for dear life and made it through the next leg of my journey. I’d adapted and survived. I would make the rent.

Fast forward to today. I got a call from an employer about an interview I’d completed last week over the phone. That one went a little differently. In fact the employer said I did not progress in the recruitment process because I needed to work on my interview skills. I knew it was coming, too. I knew I wouldn’t get that job. I knew it after I answered the very first question of the interview: “could you describe yourself in three words?”

I paused for a second, then answered “Efficient. Self-motivated.” In my head I figured that must have been three words, right? Efficient. Self. Motivated. Bam, three words. I heard a long pause on the other end.

“Uhhh…was there a third word? That was only two.” The interviewer asked.

They wanted another word? Shit. I had to think of something. I hated these kinds of questions. I felt too much pressure; put on the spot. My mind blanked completely. “Uhhh..hh..uh..mm..hmmm…” I said, then, “uh…those are three words? I’m sorry, I can’t think of it.”

“Ok.” The interviewer said, then a long pause. I could hear the fervent scribbling on the evaluation sheet, practically dripping with red ink over the phone.  The rest of the interview I did OK in, but it didn’t matter because I already blew it.

What happened to the old me, who killed at interviews? The one who got a job with just a smile and a crisply pressed white button down shirt underneath a velvety smooth, green, acrylic sweater? What happened to the guy who was forty pounds lighter, who flashed beams of flirtation from the cold, dark circles of my eyes, who danced and laughed and grinned so effectively he could make anyone smile back, and who made his way to his next venture with the prowess of an acrobat, narrowly side-stepping getting put out on the street for lack of rent money?

Well, that version of me dissipated when I went off anti-depressants. The courage and charm I had then was partially founded in the medication I was on, which helped my social anxiety.

After hearing that it was my lack of grace in the interview that prevented me from getting the job I wanted I resolved to go back on the anti-depressant citalopram.

The reason I went off it in the first place, back in the spring of 2012, was because I felt the apathy the drug brought outweighed the benefits. I had grown numb and wanted to feel something, anything, again. And in a few short months after going off of it I was able to feel that holiest of holies again, which was falling in love.

I now think I am long overdue to go back on the medication since I’ve made a few mistakes that have really negatively impacted my quality of life, the interview set-back being just one recent example.

I guess I’ve put off going back on medication this long because I felt the drug had the effect of altering my personality. While I had an easier time making friends on citalopram the friends I already had been close to tended to become more distant after the transition. Likewise, some who got to know me while I was on the medication became estranged once I went off of it.

But living with depression and social anxiety is too troubling. The main quality I lost when on citalopram was my shyness, which some find endearing.

I am hopeful my true loved ones will stick with me through the transition and understand that I am indeed the same person underneath. It is now my duty, though, to seek any method I can to improve my quality of life. In this case that’s getting back on track with employment and making strides in the social anxiety that inhibits my progress.

I had many reasons to move at the time I made the decision. That was a specific time in my life, right around April of 2012, close to my birthday. It makes good sense I would want to leave then. I felt trapped in Juneau at the time. It was the one year anniversary of the break up of my previous relationship, which had lasted over three years. I still wasn’t over it.

I was in a class with my ex, along with her newest fuck buddy. It’s an ugly phrase. Maybe because it sounds like “fuck you, buddy.” It didn’t help that the class was a creative writing workshop, and that this boy-toy was one of those jerks who confused honesty with cruelty in his criticism. He often irritated other people in the class, not just me. But he seemed to discriminate against me especially, insulting my work in particular. Even though he didn’t know who I was in relation to my ex, at least as far as I knew, I still had an urge to tell him, “fuck you, buddy,” almost everyday.

I tried dating at that time but felt nothing. The relationship, if you could call it that, lasted less than a month. I felt completely numb all the time during that period.

I had upped my anti-depressants that spring because I woke up in crying spells and skipped the class with my ex in it frequently. Then I went off the meds near the end of spring because I was afraid of becoming too apathetic. In reality, I didn’t lack emotion at all, but was not ready to date either. I shouldn’t have dragged somebody else into it, but luckily that short relationship ended with relative amicability.

My previous romantic experiences had informed me that a break-up can be an act of kindness when done right. When one person is dissatisfied in a relationship it either has to change dramatically or end completely. And getting dumped taught me that each person in a relationship has the right to end it any time for any reason. I had to be honest with my lack of feelings for this new girlfriend and broke up with her after only a couple weeks. It would have been cruel to keep it going if I had to fake it the whole time.

I entered into the summer months with lingering sadness and ambivalence. I had still not gotten closure from the last serious relationship. In fact her unclaimed possessions still crowded my closet, her cell phone was still attached to my account, and her unrelenting exposure to me in that class still crowded my mind.

It’s ashamed I was still depressed that summer because I was pretty in shape in my body, just not in my emotions. I was unable to pursue romance the whole summer, still aching too much from the spring. Finally in July I cleared the rest of my ex’s things out of my closet and gave them to her mom. Sure I could have burned all of her things in an act of delicious vengeance, but something told me I wouldn’t have gotten much satisfaction from destroying a bunch of photographs, artwork, and school papers from when she was a kid, which was most of what she left behind. That summer she got a separate cell phone plan, too. I was finally materially free from her and I could concentrate on the last leg of the journey, which was to move on mentally.

That fall I had felt what it was like to fall in love again. I thought it would be impossible to experience that again, but luckily I was finally emotionally open enough for it to happen again. She was in the radio club with me and a photography class. I got to see her all the time and we started hanging out outside of school. She had a lot of friends. She spoke honestly about herself and had seemed to have her perspective on things. I did goofy dances around her to impress her, then blushed when she noticed. I found excuses to hang out with her. We went to the bars to people-watch and take pictures. She made me laugh all the time. Friends around me noticed a striking change in my overall attitude. My poster was straighter, my steps were surer, and my smile was wider.

What’s more, she had all the same interests as me: photography, radio, journalism, academia, and creativity. She also shared my sense of humor. Best of all she was supportive of my own interests, too. I met this girl while she was on exchange from California, we started dating, and then she invited me to move there with her. I said yes. Wouldn’t you?

I knew I wanted to move for over a year, but I never knew where I would go. With this invite I could finally solidify a dream I longed for but never had the excuse to fulfill. I did get criticism from family and friends on occasion, who feared my decision was based too heavily on my emotions.

The truth is that this decision is influenced by my emotions, but that is not the only thing that influences it. Rationality and intuition play into the decision as well. I know that there is an emotional side to this decision and that emotions come with risks, but I’m young and I better take risks now while I can still get away with it.

My motives for moving stems from three distinct desires: I desire to be near my girlfriend, to live somewhere with sunshine, and to live somewhere with mobility.

Why do I have to move away from Juneau in order to be more mobile? The reason is that Juneau is an unusually isolated city. It is a population of 30,000 people, stuck between mountain ranges to the east and a series of islands to the west, smack dab in the middle of the Inside Passage, the world’s largest fjord. Juneau is also completely road-locked, which means the only way to get in and out of the city is by boat or plane. It is either the worst or best place to defend against a zombie horde, depending on where the zombies are coming from.

I was born and raised in Juneau and spent my entire adult life there going to college. It is the small town that I must shake the dust on my shoulders off from and explore the world. My family had the right idea. They relocated to Florida before I started college in Juneau. So during my entire college experience I had much fewer opportunities to see them during the holidays than if I had lived in the lower 48. Plane tickets are hard to come by for independent college students, especially those who live in a city in which one airline company has monopolized the market. Lack of mobility is something anyone who has ever lived in Juneau probably understands.

They say something called the optimism bias causes people to over estimate the amount of happiness they are likely to experience from some imagined future event, including something like moving someplace sunny. But those happiness scientists have never lived in Juneau.

You want to imagine what it’s like for a second? Remember rainy days and how much they sucked? Someone even made a song about  it, it’s called “Rain, Rain, Go Away.” Well in Juneau it rains over 200 days a year. And 200 days a year is on the low end.

On top of that, the daylight changes in Juneau are so extreme that it is pitch black by 3pm at the height of winter and still light out until 11pm at the height of summer. The result is a mass mood swing in a large portion of the population during the transition from one season to another. This phenomenon is called “Seasonal Affective Disorder” (SAD) and is so common that many offices at the university came equipped with a “SAD light”–a bright florescent light that simulates daylight –available to all students. Users are meant to stare into the light for set portions of time so as to counter act the mood affecting lack of light in winter.

I have a natural proclivity for depression anyway so when someone like me experiences seasonal mood swings they are often extreme, even if I medicated with a SAD light. It seemed like every single year my moods would take me on an agonizing roller coaster ride of emotions.

Generally in the transition to summer in Juneau I had lots of energy, felt optimistic, and was more productive than my winter-time counter part. But what happened to me equally as often is I became frightened of the upward journey. I would get to such emotional heights that I felt out of control. I felt manic.

Every problem I seemed to fuss about in the winter evaporated with the snow each year. But it became too bright, too intense. I would feel invincible, indestructible, and that only good things would happen to me from now on.

And sure enough, time and again, when fall started to roll back around and the light began to diminish I would crash hard. Once I crashed in a ridiculous display of getting black-out drunk, running around with my pants off then puking all over myself and not remembering it, in a cabin in front of all my friends. I would commonly have unaccountable mood swings, angry outbursts, or just have an inability to get out of bed at all once winter was on its way.

I didn’t want to enjoy the summers in Juneau anymore for fear of the unavoidable crash that would accompany it. After a while, it wasn’t simply the diminished sunlight in winter that was making me depressed, but the disparity in moods between summer and winter. That disparity made me feel like I lacked control and the lack of control made me want to stop trying all together.

I didn’t want to be at the mercy of my seasonal mood changes, but they seemed to control my life. In summers I began to try and counter-act the mania by subscribing to pessimism during those months. Then in winter I would sedate myself with booze and over-eating to drown out the strange mix of despair and paranoia that lurched into my thoughts from the winter’s dark shadows. And when adversity got added to the mix the result was dangerous, negatively impacting my relationships, academic life, work, and sometimes all three at once.

This experience is not uncommon to people living in Alaska, I would imagine. It’s not a coincidence that Alaska has the highest suicide rate in the country. In fact, I believe the high suicide rate has something if not everything to do with the isolation and seasonal mood changes that characterized my own experience living there.

However I am aware that regular doses of sunshine is an addition of but one instrument in the ensemble orchestra of well-being.

Nevertheless I got some good reasons to move away from Juneau. After all Juneau requires a particular kind of lifestyle to survive and thrive mentally. I noticed many emotionally resilient people got their happy fix on the slopes of Eagle Crest skiing and snowboarding, or engaged in other extreme sports. As I understand it, those kinds of sports can provide a hugh release of dopamine, a natural chemical in the brain that makes you feel happy. Though I applaud people who invent their own happiness even in the extreme environment of Alaska by using extreme sports as their positive addiction, I never got exposed to that mountain culture.

On the other side of  this declaration of resolve to leave my hometown is a love letter to Juneau. In the months leading up to my departure I began to love Juneau again and free from any hang ups.

The last few months I lived there was pure self-exploration and growth with the support of a strong network of friends. This spring in Juneau ended on the opposite note the spring one year earlier had ended on.

To my great surprise I even got a job that I thought I would never get, working for the public radio station. Walking away from that was the hardest decision I ever had to make because I loved the job immensely. Before that job I had a “nothing to lose” mentality about leaving Juneau, but facing the concreteness of the situation made my resolve even stronger. The pull of a life outside of Juneau was just too strong for me to ignore any longer.

On the one hand I can shake my fists at the Gods of fate for punishing me by making Juneau a pleasant place again, just as I’m about to leave. But on the other hand perhaps it has been a blessing that I got to say goodbye to Juneau with a fondness in my heart. That I can conjure up the magical side of Juneau in my mind as the place I said goodbye to will be a real gift.

I’ll never abandon Juneau completely. As strong as my resolve to move on to other things is, my resolve to always come back to visit is just as strong.

When an asthmatic, sickly child relocates from the city to the rural southwest to breath in the dry, pollution-free air, he does so for his health. I too must change my environment, only I am a sensitive, depression-prone man who has a lack of sunlight affliction and so must move to someplace sunny.

I am moving in part for the positive influence that the sunshine of California can offer, in part to be near the one I love, and in part to have the opportunity to go and do whatever I want whenever I want by way of the inexpensive modes of travel of the lower 48. And the mobility and interconnectedness will help provide an opportunity to grow as a person  and explore possibilities otherwise closed to me if I stayed in Juneau. I have to leave Juneau so that I never have to hate Juneau ever again.

The camera body

is my body–my eye–

to peer out of this cloudy

and torn, gray sky.

*click*

A tiny mirror–my shield–flips

up, exposing emulsion in

unending luminescence.

The memory snaps and reels back.

Chemicals stain my hands

like liver spots in old age.

My mind sees what’s to come

in dark, windowless dreams.

Images of light

paint the night

like frost spreading on a windshield.

Underneath the stop bath, an image faintly yields.

Darkness floods the paper,

an ink plume under water.

Trees appear and a blanket of snow, a face;

the soft caress of a familiar place.

green, lush mountainsides,

a home with smell of rhubarb pie.

I am from my Mom, my Dad,

adventurers in an open land

who found love in a snow covered cabin.

I am from a line of painters on both sides.

My Dad was afraid of Van Gogh’s loneliness so he

quit art and became a physicist.

My Mom’s brother liked to paint, too.

He used his brain to challenge his three siblings in chess.

Watercolor scenes allowed his mind to rest.

His mind  didn’t like to take breaks.

When his body was done his mind would escape.

He saw things he couldn’t explain and heard voices of hate and distress.

Men in white coats took him away,

put electrodes on his brain.

The treatment made him weak with pain.

When I met him he couldn’t walk,

he couldn’t sit or talk right.

No matter what he could still paint.

My parents hid from their families.

In Juneau they created life

and forgot their past tragedies.

They found the spirit of bumble bees, forests,

and black bear islands

to heal the violence of their silence.

I am from a forgotten memory.

I am from a lucid dream.

I am from a cloud of pigment

in a pollen powdered stream.

I flip through the pages of the hymn book and look for anything to curb the nausea of boredom that comes with a long, drawn-out church service. There’s nothing. So I raise my hands, sway back and forth, and pretend something called the Holy Ghost is surging through me–like my fingertips are antennae and I’m receiving a signal from God. I just pretend, but part of me really thinks that if I just try hard enough some supernatural force may one day actually touch me.

Mom gets the Holy Ghost all the time. She listens to her cassette tapes with rock operas like “Godspell” and “Jesus-Christ Super Star,” and shakes from the Holy Spirit. She also laughs from the Holy Ghost.

I don’t mind the rock operas, but my favorite is when she plays “Break On Through (To the Other Side)” by The Doors. She can get the Holy Ghost from classic rock. She still plays the cool stuff every once in a while, a remnant of her hippy days. Of course I’m also influenced by my 5 older brothers’ taste in music, which ranges from David Bowie to Public Enemy.

The bawdy, faux-“Pearl Jam” christian rock that floods the church is simply unacceptable though. My older brother Sean certainly isn’t enjoying it. And neither of us are getting the Holy Ghost either. Of course Mom is clapping her hands, dancing, laughing and shaking as she always does. I have to admit, it looks like fun.

Meanwhile Dad stands peacefully beside her with his hands up, grinning up at the ceiling. Nothing too fancy, but praising Him in his own way.

Sean glances over to me to see if I’m still standing in praise. He sits down and whispers to me, propositioning an escape. Sneaking out without causing too much attention is always a challenge. Sean likes to call his little espionage adventures his “missions.”

“Danny,” he whispers. I ignore him. “Danny,” he says again. “Mission: go to Breeze-Inn, undetected.”

“No. I don’t wanna get in trouble,” I tell him

“I’ll buy you a slushy if you come with,” he says.

“Ok, I’m pretty bored,” I whisper back.

“Alright good. Listen,” he puts his hand on my shoulder, signaling me to lean in closer. I lean in. “I will pretend to go to the bathroom. After a minute or two, you get up and go to the bathroom, too. Just tell Mom and Dad that you really have to go.”

“What if they don’t believe me?” I ask.

“Don’t worry, they will. Just squeeze your legs together really tight until they let you go,” he says.

“Ok” I say, giddy at the prospect of doing something bad.

Sean clears his throat and turns to Mom and Dad. “I gotta pee,” he says.

Mom comes out of her dancing trance and clings to his shirt as he begins to stand, pleading him to stay. “No don’t, just sit right here honey,” she says.

“C’mon S,” Dad says. “Just stay, will ya? For me?”

I get the feeling they suspect something about our escape.

Sean eludes them, though, and goes to the bathroom. I stand for a few minutes, just raising my hands and waiting to see if that Holy Ghost thing is gonna stop me. But I can’t concentrate on that right now, I have a mission to complete. I turn to Mom and Dad and tell them I have to go to the bathroom, too.

“Danny, no!” pleads Dad.

“Danny, sheesh, you are just gonna sneak out aren’t ya?” Mom asks.

“No, of course not! I really gotta go!” I tell them, as if I didn’t care about consequences.

Sure enough Sean emerges from the bathroom when I arrive at the lobby. “Ok, let’s go,” he says.

We walk to the Breeze-Inn, about three blocks away, on a typically gray, rainy Sunday morning. We enter the store and aimlessly wander around for a few minutes. When we reach the slushy machine I become overcome with guilt. I can’t even concentrate on what size I want, I just stare into the empty cups. There’s a man in a white t-shirt with a dirty smear of a beard that walks by and I can just tell from my peripheral vision that he knows I’m going to hell. I can’t stand it any longer, I ask my brother, “are we gonna go to hell?”

“Of course not, we’re gonna be millionaires, see?” Sean says and points to the sign above the slushy machine where an orange and blue ad promises a hefty fortune to the one in ten-thousand winner of a sweepstakes. The boy in a Hawaiian shirt, with sleek sunglasses, and slicked back hair, has everything to his heart’s content in the poster. Standing on the cruise ship with luscious bikini-clad ladies, and gargantuan ATVs that rove on impossible dirt tracks on the boat’s deck, the boy is visibly elated.

“But I thought rich people go to hell. Like it’s harder for a rich person to make it into heaven than it is to find a camel in a hay stack, or something,” I say.

“No, no, Danny. The saying goes: it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich person to go to heaven. That’s Matthew 19:24.

“But really, it’s the other way around. Money is just like good deeds: the more you have, the better your chances are,” he explains as he pours his cup full of what looks like lava, the kind of burning lava that would surely bury me once I arrive at hell. Well if I’m going to hell, I might as well enjoy a slushy now.

I pour myself a large slushy and stare into the thick, red and white mixture, and wonder what it is like to swim around in lava for all eternity. Would I burn once, disintegrate, and then feel it on my soul for the rest of eternity? Or would my body be constantly regenerating like Wolverine?

The woman at the cash register peers at us through thick-brimmed bottle-cap glasses. With cherry slushies in hand, we leave to make our way back toward the church and our no doubt pissed-off parents. It’s not a pleasant thing to look forward to, knowing a spanking is waiting at home. I take a long, hard sip and the cold beverage saturates my mouth with a film of sugar. With a belly full of slushy, I begin to feel a bit melancholy at the thought of having done something bad.

My brother peels away the sweepstakes stub attached to his cup. “I didn’t win anything,” he says. “If your cup wins the million dollars, I’ll split it with you since I bought the slushy.” He grabs my cup, peels away the stub, and takes a look. His eyes widen, his jaw drops. “Danny,” he says, “I don’t believe it but, but–”

“What?” I ask urgently.

“Danny, you’ve won! We’re going to be rich!” He says.

“Not-uh, lemme see,” I say in disbelief.

“Ok, here you go,” he says and starts to hand it over to me. He lets go of it right before it reaches my hand and it falls into a gutter directly below us on the ground. “Oh no! I’m so sorry Danny, my hand slipped!” I just stare at the gutter on the gray ground that trickles with rain water.

I wonder whether he’s telling the truth about the ticket, about his hand slipping, about rich people getting into heaven, or if he’s just pulling my leg.  I wish I could shrink myself down and follow the stub into the narrow sewer drain to retrieve it so I could at least know for sure.

It would have been really nice to get all that money. Maybe then it wouldn’t matter to Mom and Dad if I skipped church once if it resulted in buying the whole family a new house, for instance. The fact remains: I lied, I skipped church, and I didn’t even win a million dollars. I really am going to hell now and just for a stupid slushy.

“Everything’s gonna be ok,” she said and took my hand.

I watched in the rear-view mirror as the cop got out of his car and walked toward me, flashlight in hand. Was I going to get away with this?

Stigma and public disincentive to drunk driving is there for a good reason. Drunk driving can kill people and you can get seriously injured or killed yourself if you do it. In other words, I understand why the laws are there. I understand why I was considered to have broken the law when I was caught drunk driving a few months ago.

Each and every crime that’s ever been committed is never completely black and white.  I admit guilt to the crime, but it was the Friday of the end of the semester of my final year of undergrad education and I was out celebrating with my girlfriend. I couldn’t get a ride home, so I decided to drive. I didn’t swerve or anything, I got pulled over for driving too slow. I failed the field sobriety test and then blew a 0.084 on the breathalyzer.

My blood alcohol content (BAC) probably would have been under the limit if I was, say, 30 pounds heavier. “Barely over the limit” was a phrase I heard over and over again. Every time I heard that phrase was like nails on a chalk board to me. The cop who pulled me over said it, the judge at the arraignment said it, the prosecutor at the hearing said it, my public defender said it, pretty much everybody involved kept repeating it over and over again. It was nauseating to be constantly reminded that I was perhaps a mere drink over the limit.

Just like the first time I ran into trouble with the weed when I was a teenager, if I had been less honest I probably would have gotten away with it.  When the cop asked how many drinks I’d had, I said something like “five, but only one drink per hour for the past five hours,” which was true, but really naive.

Something else that was similar to that first, weed-related charge, from around 6 years ago: it had been the culmination of acting unnaturally that night. The whole idea of going out was contrived. I had suggested to my girlfriend that we go out to the bars to celebrate the end of the semester, even though the evening originally started as just going out to bowling with friends. I insisted that we go out downtown, instead of going home like the rest of our friends. I didn’t have any good reason to do so or a clear-cut plan to get back home. Going out downtown had been hastily conceived, which probably contributed to the nervous way I was talking to the cop when I got pulled over.

If there is one thing I learned from all of this, it’s that DUIs are probably one of the most preventable crimes. I could have left it at the bowling ally and suggested we go home instead, as was the more natural course of the evening for many of our peers. We’d gone solo with the flimsy excuse of celebrating the end of the semester, instead of simply sticking with our buddies.

Even as I got behind the wheel, I had a distinct gut feeling that something was amiss. When I offered to drive myself and my girlfriend home after we missed our friend’s ride and the taxis wouldn’t take our card, the words came out of my mouth “I think I can drive home.” Something in the back of my mind was nagging me not to drive and I should have listened.

But despite the strange feeling, I honestly felt that I was sober enough to drive. Just to be cautious, before we left downtown, we stopped at a gas station and sat in the car for about twenty minutes and I drank a Redbull.

The cop pulled me over at about 3am for driving especially slow. I wasn’t driving slower than the minimum speed limit, though, and I was in the slow lane and within the lines. I was driving slowly because my tires were low on air that day; the gas station’s air pump was out of order. Plus, it was raining that night and I wasn’t sure if it was going to make the roads icy. He also pulled me over for having foggy windows; he probably thought I was hot boxing my car. My windows were foggy because I didn’t have a heater in my car.

Unfortunately that Redbull gave me horrible cotton mouth, too, which translated to “slurred speech” on the police report. When I got out of the car, it was difficult to find my footing in the darkness because I had been temporarily blinded by the police officer’s flashlight. All of these factors were the nails in the coffin to my sentence. There would be no point in even doing the field sobriety test, but he made me do it anyway.

I passed every part perfectly, except for the last test. I failed the field sobriety test because I had to count backwards by 3 from 76 to 43, or something like that. I counted backwards in perfect increments, but forgot what the ultimate number I was supposed to land on. So I asked the cop “what number am I supposed to stop on, again?”

Less than 12 hours after the cuffs were removed, the red rings across my wrists were still visible.

“At this point, I’m going to have to put you under arrest for driving under the influence,” he said. That’s when he put the cuffs on me. I later asked the cop what the number was I had to stop on, he couldn’t remember.

He pushed me down on the hood of the my car as he secured the bracelets. I looked up and through the windshield saw my girlfriend’s grief-stricken face. My heart sank.

He pushed on the top of my head with his hand into the backseat of the cop car. I asked the cop if I could still go on a vacation with my girlfriend, we were set to leave within the week for California. He just said, “maybe, you’ll have to ask the judge.” Once I heard that, I spent the rest of the night weeping uncontrollably.

I feel in love with this girl at a time in my life when I thought I could never fall in love again. It wasn’t just a vacation, it was everything to me. She lived in California and was moving back there, I was going to go with her for winter break and then move back. At that point, we were still deciding what to do with our relationship once we lived in different cities.

And now this happened, I was going to be torn away from her because of this stupid and preventable incident. I felt trapped in this small town, the place that had dragged me down once before for some flaky charge. It wasn’t fair. The cops were getting too bored.

The time spent getting processed meant I wouldn’t go home until 6am. I had opted in to the blood test, which meant I had to go to the hospital. It took forever. My BAC for that test was 0.083.

After the hospital, I spent my mandatory hour stay in jail. It was basically the entryway of the jail. The little interim cell had a metal bed, bars, a view of the guards cocooned in a bullet proof glass office on one end, and a heavily secured front door, with a window, on the other.  I continued crying the whole time, in deep, yelping sobs. They finally took the cuffs off after a half hour of listening to my cries. I think my crying annoyed the shift supervisor because I’m pretty sure I got out 10 or 15 minutes sooner than I was supposed to.

I called a really good friend to come pick me up after it was over. I signed the paperwork for release, the gates opened, and I wandered out into the blackness of early morning. I scanned the parking lot frantically for the car that would get me out of this nightmare. It was a relief to see the recognition on his face when our eyes met.

I went home to my girlfriend, who had stayed up all night to see me. I laid in bed with her all morning and didn’t let go.