Associate Professor David Sherman was pulling yet
another late night in the office, but it wasn’t out of dedication
to his career. He slouched in his office chair, dress
shirt untucked, stroking his goatee. The first paragraph of
an essay on Nietzsche in the Digital Age lingered on his
computer, and he nursed a glass of cheap Scotch, straight
with no ice. Everyone else had surely checked out by this
hour, so he felt secure in pulling the bottle of rotgut out of
its sanctuary in his file cabinet’s bottom drawer. Secretively
drinking at work wasn’t ideal, he acknowledged, but anything
was better than being home.
Professor Sherman hated himself for having married
Sheila, the French-major-turned-housewife with whom he
was smitten throughout his undergrad years, ever since they
met at a keg party as freshmen. She had no appreciation for
philosophy, the arts, or really anything of intellectual depth.
Hell, she was a straight C student who could barely speak
French even by the time she graduated. But there was something
about that perky, fun-loving brunette he just couldn’t
resist. He fell in love with her because she was a foil to him; whereas
he was the brooding intellectual, she had a light of spirit that seemed
to never go out. She, meanwhile, never got tired of his rudimentary
three-chord acoustic guitar pickings, and figured he’d be pretty accomplished.
She had always wanted to be with somebody who was
going to be great. It was some kind of a Marilyn Monroe complex. So
he married her shortly after they graduated from Arizona State. He
knew this would complicate his dreams of a life of teaching in New
York City, but it seemed like a fair deal at the time.
Now, as he stared at the screen of a PC issued by small,
public North Tacoma University, in a cramped office he shared
with a professor who always checked out before 3 PM, he lamented
nearly every aspect of his life. They say “publish or perish,” but
perishing didn’t seem so bad after all. He was beyond caring about
even the thought of full professorship, and questioned whether
there was anything new to say about 19th Century Weimar classicist
philosophy, anyway. He’d come to see academic writing, especially
in the humanities, as little more than a mill of intellectual regurgitation
to no constructive end. Still, he stared at this infant paper,
as it stood christened “Insert Title Here” as a placeholder, in vain
hope of rediscovering the love he once felt for his chosen field.
The passion died somewhere in between watching students
sleep in his classes, reading term papers which used excessive block
quotes to reach the page limit, listening to the 1000th farfetched
excuse for frequent absenteeism or late work, tuning out Sheila
at the dinner table over her crappy meatloaf, and commuting in
his used Hyundai sedan listening to classic rock radio for lack of a
better idea. But he sat at his desk and attempted to work. Staring
at a blank page here was better than doing it at home, with his wife
rambling about celebrity gossip and the girls at the hair salon, and
that infernal Chihuahua Trixie yapping at him.
The cursor hovered over the Firefox icon on his taskbar,
bridging the paper in progress with the half-dozen or so windows
of pornography he’d left open. Porn used to do something for him,
but now it was just a habit to stare at video clips while sipping his
Scotch. In this way, porn and philosophy had become one and the
same for him. He’d scarcely played his guitar since the time he’d
begun grad school years earlier, but the old thing was in his car
trunk from an open mic night he’d almost attended the previous
evening. An impromptu practice earlier that day proved he still had
it, at least as much as he ever did, but something inside couldn’t let
him take the stage. He missed singing and playing, but he couldn’t
stand the thought of being a star for just a brief set, then rejoining
the reality of his empty career and home life.
The alcohol helped him along, but an inevitable tipping
point had been reached. Sherman made a drastic, impulsive
decision as he finished his drink with a quick swig. He was going
to New York, that night, to live, without so much as a goodbye to
Sheila. He didn’t care that it was the middle of the fall semester
and someone would have to cover his Philosophy 101 sections,
he didn’t care that he’d probably max out a credit card on gas
as he crossed the country in his clunky Hyundai, and he didn’t
care about the acute threat of homelessness. He certainly didn’t
care about his mortgage or how his wife would make do now
that she probably couldn’t coast by on looks anymore at 34. He
was going to start making music again, and hopefully land on
his feet playing gigs. He’d probably wait tables, too, to make
ends meet. Even if shit hit the fan, he’d find a way. The threat of
failure in an unforgiving city was still better than the spiritual
death he was living through every single day. Nothing scared
him anymore--he’d already been to his personal hell. He left the
building wondering what Nietzsche would have to say about all
of it, before acknowledging that he didn’t really give a shit.
On the way out of town, past the exit where hd normally
get off to return to his suburban condo, he stopped for gas and
impulsively bought a pack of Camels and a CD from a bargain
music bin by the counter. It was an old favorite of his, Katy Lied
by Steely Dan. He popped it into the CD player as he made his
way to the interstate and skipped to the ninth track, “Any World
(That I’m Welcome To”), because, he thought, any world he was
welcome to was indeed better than the one he was coming from.
“Insert Title Here” remained open on the office computer,
for how long before they realized he wasn’t coming back, he’d
never know. It was ironically fitting, in that he’d shed the titles of
husband and professor for singer-songwriter, bum, or whatever
else was to come. Life corrupted… would you like to initiate
Auto-Recovery? Life successfully recovered… Insert Title Here.