Barley Academy of Higher Conciousness

I knew I was at an important crossroads—I felt like I was on the cusp of something momentous. But I chose to allow myself to sink into depression. I closed myself off from life and remained cocooned in a drug-addled haze. There were so many chances and opportunities for me to grow, to experience life in a genuine way. I chose the path of least resistance almost every time. Vagrant’s was the one exception—it was painful to be there, but I stayed because I knew it had something to teach me.
At the very first, I ran away from opportunities—I crashed at Mark’s place for about a week or so. I mostly just slept. I remember lying down and falling asleep during a jam session a bunch of them were having in his basement. It’s a little fuzzy now, but I felt out of my element, didn’t feel like I belonged in that world.
Mark and his buddy lived in the city, a couple of miles west of campus, right across the street from a party store. It was a run-down neighborhood and I think Mark liked the sense of danger, but it reminded me of Detroit. I wanted to get as far away from Detroit as I could get, physically and emotionally. Mark and his friends would stay up late talking about music, literature art—all the things that really mattered to me. But I couldn’t converse with them—I felt like a fraud, a pretender.
Another friend contacted me because he was trying to sublet his room and I jumped at the chance to move out. Steve’s room was one of eleven rooms in a large, unwieldy house a block away from campus. Something felt wrong about the whole thing from the start—Steve seemed too anxious to get out. But I thought I was doing him a favor and I really needed to get away from Mark’s.
It turned out that Steve had to leave because he was grappling with depression. He would end up being hospitalized by the end of the school year—he would send us all origami cranes from the facility in Indiana. I had gotten the sense that he wanted to escape the house, to stay with friends—I figured it was nothing I couldn’t handle. The house did seem haunted after awhile, but it was haunted by the living as well as the dead.
I would cross paths with Mark through the rest of the spring and we would touch base—I told him of my troubles at Vagrant’s, of my near-catatonic silence. He laughed and pondered my situation—commented when appropriate, but he knew that I had to found my own way out. So many of the guys at Vagrant’s were friends or acquaintances of my friends, but none of that seemed to matter.
Looking back at that spring, I think of the chances that I missed. I went to shows at the Barley Street house or visited whenever I was kicking around town with Mark, but I remained an outsider the whole time. Barley Street became the nexus for the whole East Ottawa crowd and I strolled in and back out like it was nothing to me. Everyone else was discovering music, literature, sexuality, freedom—but I chose to remain a zombie.
It’s ironic that some of those same people still managed to cross paths with me. My wife and I probably brushed past one another at one of the shows in the dank basement on Barley. My friend Ash was good friends with my brother-in-law and he also worked with skateboard legend Eric C. I just met Eric earlier this year and befriended him, but think of the skate sessions we could have had back in the day. Eric was good friends with a number of other skaters and punks and even spent time down in Detroit and Ann Arbor.
I turned my back on all of those associations and experiences eighteen years ago. Now I’ve started skating again and I’ve started writing again, but why did it take me so long to start living? I don’t regret most of the same things people regret. Financial security would be nice, but if I had forced myself to push through, what would I have done? Could I have achieved that on my own terms? The D.I.Y.-ethic still runs through my veins and I’m picking up where I had left off so long ago.