Don't stop if I fall, and don't look back.

Yesterday, I went on a vision quest or journey of sorts. Like Black Flag, who'se famous mindset I am beginning to resemble more and more every day, I just had to get away from this campus or life. Perhaps both. Maybe it was the misplaced urge to start a band and never take another backward glance, or maybe it was just the desire to do something different, no matter what and how.

Also like Black Flag, who's view of 7-11 was a light in a dark, dark world, so I have Dairy Queen. I will explain. It has one thing I like tremendously, soft serve ice cream. Lots of it. For cheap. One cannot get soft serve ice cream on campus, and every time I pass Dairy Queen on the way out to the highway, I've always wanted to go. Unfortunately, there isn't a way to get there with intersections and stoplights. One must have a car. It has mocked me for the last 2 and a half years, advertising its wares, and I haven't had an excuse to go with a group of people who actually have cars.

I have told myself for about as long that I could probably walk to Dairy Queen if I tried, but never took those first steps. I don't know what snapped. But it was after my political science class about propaganda (Did you know that the United States and the British were the founders of it?) and political persuasion that I decided I needed to take a walk. This is after, of course, I get invited into someone's house for a cup of hot chocolate, since it was bitter cold. I don't know what possessed me. But I knew, at that moment, I had to get away.

So. The idea germinated as I walked away from a presumably bewildered friend, that I should also go to the bank. When I got to the bank and after doing my business, I realized that, hey, I was already close enough to downtown, I could at least try to make it to the bridge that separates the town from the road to the highway. So, I walked by the abandoned now renovated movie theater, the liquor store, the McDonalds, Subway, auto body shops and Taco Bell/KFC to get to the highway, where, for whatever reason, there is a pedestrian walkway on the side of the bridge, to get to the strip mall at the other side.

I made it across thinking, This isn't so bad. Sure it's cold, but it's the middle of January, and for that, I've lived through much worse, and even as the cars are driving about 6 inches away from me, there's a clarity to my thought process. For Henry Rollins, it was the walking around the town before shows, and feeling like he was finally free of the prying eyes and claws of fans where he found his clarity. I felt the same way, except I don't have fans. It was a brutal coldness that enveloped me, wrapping itself around my thoughts like a blanket, shielding my brain and thoughts from surprised motorists. Unlike Henry Rollins, I didn't have to go back to the venue and have my testicles lit on fire by people who claimed to be fans. For some people, that sounds crazy, why would you go back to that? For Henry Rollins, it was because that was the only outlet for his neuroses. There was danger in that, of course, it was a hardcore punk rock show. For me, it's the cold and anonymity. I am no one. I am nothing. I am simply passing. I don't want to talk to you. It felt good.

After stumbling by some roadside artwork, falling into a stream and getting my socks wet all by the fading light of day, I made it to Dairy Queen, where I ordered a Blizzard, mumbled some words on life to myself, and it got dark. I smiled, knowing this is where it gets hard.

In retrospect, eating roughly 14 ounces of ice cream and then walking back for a half hour, and then walking back to campus in below freezing weather was not, medically speaking, one of my better decisions. As if to say, "next time, James, less fuck the world attitude and more distance from yourself, okay?" my body got colder and more frigid as I walked back past the stream and cars each not a yard from me on either side.

So, I did what I always do in these trying times: Queue Strike Anywhere on my iPod on set the volume at "eardrum rending" and got to work. And by work, I mean, walk in a straight line in the horrible cold for a half hour as cars, people and small woodland creatures passed me.

As I walked over the train tracks on the edge of town, I came to the conclusion that what Mr. Rollins found was the secret that, truly, you don't need anyone else to survive, but to live, you need some kind of human contact. It is a powerful misanthropy that I hope I can unlearn understanding. Striding, with some amount of pride, back up the hill to the dorm, I collapse in my chair, wondering exactly what I am going to with the Blizzard cup and with the last two or three hours of my life.

Zach prods me a couple times to update and after class, I write this. I wait for an ending to come to me. And then, I hear the Gaslight Anthem's "Wherefore Art Thou, Elvis?" and the lyric hits me.

I've got a fever and a beaker and a shot in the dark.