So today I went back through a lot of my old journal entires. I have never been very good about keeping a journal and this particular notebook of journaling was started back in the summer 0f 2006. I was supposed to be a log for our family trip to the Baltic sea, but it turns out that I only had a few entries. Mostly whining about the bad food on ship, and how I felt like a timid little boy when it came to foreign girls. I guess that it was helpful in that in those few entries I received a flood of memories that I didn't write down and it gave me an idea of where I was mentally. The next time I wrote in this notebook was after my seizure Christmas of 2006. I then kept up with it a bit better and shows a huge transformation in my life from a blundering college frat kid to a deeply conflicted person trying to get back on track and back to the blundering drunkenness, but this time knowing that something was amiss. I was making a considerable effort to make some changes, but the environment of the fraternity and circumstances of being a senior and wanting a last hoora, made it very difficult. Then BANG, huge life altering event.
By taking that golf cart for a joy ride I set into motion a string of events that was well out of my control, and frankly knocked me flat on my face. The next weeks of entries are almost illegible and have lots of questions about what is going on, what went so wrong, and where do I start to rebuild? After a long bout of depression and confusion I am brought out of it finally by my brother and a wonderful trip to Northern California in the Redwoods. So taking probably the darkest and scariest trip I have ever been on I finally came back to.
During this very dark introspective time a read 'Big Sur' by Jack Kerouac. This is really the only, and best, way that I am able to describe the madness and tumult that I felt for the past 2 years. While I had only suffered from this affliction of alcohol and drugs and confusion for a couple of months, Kerouac lived this life for many years and had a considerable heavier nightmarish trip than I did. But my experience was very much the same in many ways, and just as real and terrifying.

But anyway, I came out of it with my head on straight. And that was no minor miracle. And really I have become thankful for my stupidity and the harshness of the county and university, because a brutal blow that sent me crashing down on my most basic beliefs was what I needed. It forced me to remember what it was that I found beautiful in life. It gave me good reason to reevaluate what was happening, and allowed me to make changes and take charge of my life again.

This is one of those things that if you have not been there before you can not truly understand what it means to "take charge" again after you have been on cruise control for a long time. Let me try to explain.
Imagine holding your breath as long as you can underwater, thinking that you can always just go back up for air when you need it, and just when you cant take it anymore and you decide to head to the surface. But you realize that you cant. In your heart you know that if you don't start swimming up that you are going to suffer, but you cannot will yourself to move. The change is far more worrisome in that moment than your lack of air. It has become so easy just to stay where you are, and the movement that it takes for you to get to the surface more effort and corage than you are willing to put out. So it is probably just better to stay where you are, for now and then we will check back in a minute. Anyway i can get back up if I really wanted to. So now you check out and just start to enjoy what is going on again. After a time, you come back to reality and now you are in serious trouble. You have have so little air and energy left that you cant get yourself to move towards the surface. Physically cannot move. 'OK, it is all in my head. I am teh one in control. Now MOVE', but still there is no response. You have become so accustomed to holding your breath and staying still, you don't even know how to will your body to move. By now all of the alarms are going off, and clearly there is something very wrong, but you simply don't know how to move anymore. No matter how hard you try or want to, you cannot save yourself.
So now you start to question yourself 'Did I ever have control?', but that is easily brushed aside. Wait a minute, of course I did. There was nobody else that could have got me here. Your logic tells you that. But now you have opened up the doors of self doubt, and the flood cant be stopped now. Your brain takes the opportunity and runs wild with thoughts, illogical or not, it doesn't matter. All kinds of crazy ideas are coming in and you cant even quite your mind enough to focus on finding a solution to your problem. So what do you do? 'Well maybe it is best if I don't think about this for a little bit, it will come back if I take a break.' But you are still not getting any oxygen, and the muscles wont move, and the doubts continue to run rampant.
The only way that you can get any kind of comfort is by distracting yourself and not think about your problem. By distracting yourself you are forcing yourself to become comfortable with the problem, and trying to continue without ever addressing the fact that you are still not getting any air. But the alarms are still blaring and every time you try to acknowledge you cant focus enough to come up with a solution. So you slip into ignoring the problem, at least then I have some comfort.
Now you have set up a basis and solution for how to deal with problems with out actually having to deal with them, and it comes easier the next time. And with every new problem you start to ignore the harder it becomes to fix any of the problems, because now you have so many thoughts you feel like your head is going to explode. And it is taking everything you have just to not go completely wild and start cussing out everyone and everything, acting like a complete lunatic. But sometimes that is what you really feel like doing, so now it becomes , wow, i am crazy. I have lost touch with reality.' And teh flood gates are fully opened now. So you continue to ignore, suppress, and justify until you can feel some quasi-serenity. But it continues to build and build and build and build until the alarms and crazy thoughts are so loud that you cant cope anymore, and you are institutionalized or you end your own life just so you dont have to listen to those damn alarms or thoughts anymore.

I was lucky enough that by taking the golf cart I got a stiff enough slap in the face that I could break out of the cycle. Through some serious self evaluation, guidance from a very good counselor, and the support of my family and girlfriend, I was able to see the craziness that I had built up to hide my need for 'oxygen' and was able to start breaking them down and get to teh true problem.

So I do not have any great wisdom to share with someone in the battle for their life, except that you are not alone and the battle can be won.

I think this is what I gained from reading 'Big Sur', that I was not by myself in my woes. And that can make all of the difference.

So I am coming up on the 1 month mark since the start of my house arrest. Time hasn't slowed any. Although I cant wait to be done and have a sense of freedom that I am now deprived of. I am glad that this has happened because being able to follow my desires will taste so sweet when it is all said and done. But I have set to a strict schedule of self improvement, and not moping around while I am incarcerated.

So what is it that I want out of life? I think it is some pleasure and satisfaction out of what I do. Pretty much what any living human wants, but with no easy answer. I have long idealized the 'dirt bag' who is , to the outside observer, flying by the seat of his pants but is doing exactly what he wants and has no qualms about who he is. I want to dedicate my life to running free in the outdoors and be able to have a broad knowledge base that I can be of help in ANY situation.

No doubt those are high aspirations, but I am up to the challenge. I have overcome some massive obstacles, and their are plenty more on the way. anyway.

I think i need to allow some of my creative juice out a bit more often. I am not particularly talented in writing, I dont make a note of music- but I have a great appreciation for both. I want to be creating visually stunning pieces. Photography is a good start, but motion is the essence of any outdoor adventure, so I think that film may be the way to go. Use the stills for a taste of the scenery and the personalities of the people, but motion picture of their deeds. I already have a long list of songs that I want to create videos for.

Why I ever decided to study geology is probably the greatest mystery of them all. Now it is easy to give reasons, but at the time I am not sure that it was thought out at all. I might have been better suited with the photojournalism. But i am certainly not too hard on myself for that blunder because that is only a consequence of the many stumbles leading up to that, some of my doing others well out of my control. All of it is a darker period that I now associate with my time at college. I am only a few months out from the madness and confusion, so it has not all been set in my mind, but this probably the best time to really investigate what happened. For now I have arrived at the conclusion that I was too quick to follow the 'right' thing to do, and not even try to get in touch with my gut about the situation. By the time I realized my folly I was already deeply buried and it was all too easy to rationalize it and provide myself with any reason in the world. So in ignoring myself I latched on to some questionable friends. Now don't get me wrong, they are decent people, but I let them lead me blindly into some situations that I never wanted to find myself in. I am in no means blaming them for their actions, they did what was right by them. I was the one that allowed myself to be lured into a life of self abuse that was not what I wanted.

Life in my fraternity was, and still is to the best of my knowledge, one of unbelievable negligence and self destruction. Many individuals have been able to balance the life of partying and having scholastic success. Where the fault comes in that they create a wild party persona that becomes so well known and loved by their peers that it devours who they really are and what aspirations they might have in their heart. This persona is best accessed through excessive substance abuse and it becomes readily apparent how this can, and in many cases does play out. As with any falsity it eventually comes to the surface that this is made up personality, and in general people don't like people who are fake. So as a remedy the persona is again altered, usually with more substance of choice. And it soon spirals out of control. I had spent many parties wandering around aimlessly hoping that someone would stop me. On many occasions I would retreat to my room and sit in the dark just to get away from everyone, wondering what is wrong with me that I need to hide away and pray for some kind of relief. I now realize that it was my guts way of saying that something is not right.

Many have started to consider college as a grounds for binge abuse, which is by no means un-true. But they often say this trend is a way of letting loose with a new found freedom. For a freshman, Yes, this could be the case but it is quick and easy to see that this is destructive behavior. Many come to that conclusion themselves when they wake up the next morning. I know that anyone who has gotten drunk has woken up and said "I will never do that again." But it has become such an excepted practice to go get wasted and have the next day be ruled by your hangover, that it is what people do so that they can fit in.

I believe that this stems for a overwhelming feeling in me that I was inadequate as an individual and needed to have some kind of group to conform to for comfort. I have no inclination where all of this stemmed from, but I think lack of a true inner self-confidence is the modern plague of the college age generation. At least I know this to be true about my own life.

As is often the common warning in medicine, we must not continue to treat symptoms because then we will never get to the cause. College aged substance abuse, on a large scale, is a symptom. Education on the dangers of drinking is simply a treatment of the symptom, and no change in the behavior can be expected by this treatment. Any teenager knows that drinking is bad for your health, but that doesn't not deter them. There is a deeper root, and it is going to take a lot of harsh self inspection on a national level for the cause to show its head. This is not just an issue of the kids, this is everyone.

This may seem all far fetched, but I have just been through the whole experience and have been bluntly forced out of my ways. This has allowed me to come to these new conclusions with out a large gap of time from my experience of the situation.

Well, that was not where I thought this post was going to go.

Enough with the public service statements for now.

Prologue

For some time I have wanted to start a blog, but never felt as I have anything worth talking about for sustained postings. There is no great overall theme that I want to explore. I am adamantly against long raves, although I am sure that I will slip into a few, but I don't want this to be a list of what irks me today. I am going to be using this blog as a bit of a journal. A way for me to remember the everyday happenings of my life, and also to share with others. I find that all of the greatest pleasures are often the ones that are hardest to explain and tie to others experiences. I think that is what makes a normal pleasure into a great pleasure, the personal uniqueness. It is an American thing to say that we should all revel in our own individuality and celebrate ourselves. But I think it is better to appreciate ourselves and celebrate others, so that we can better contrast our own life against the world. So allow me to try and project my life onto the blank sheet and may you gain some insight, revelation, or just entertainment from the small amazing things of my life.