Life is like one big scavenger hunt. People are always searching for something. Sometimes it’s exciting and sometimes it’s fucking excruciating. Most of the time, it’s boring as shit.

What are we all doing here? It always feels like we’re so close to finding what we’re looking for, but then something awful happens and we’re right back where we started. What if we’re all looking for the wrong thing? What if there isn’t anything to find? Maybe we already have what we’re looking for and we just don’t know it. Maybe it’s all an illusion. Maybe, maybe, maybe. I start thinking about what I am. What I am. What am I. Am I what.

Whenever I start thinking like this, my thoughts inevitably spiral out of control until my mind is engulfed in absolute darkness. It’s almost like, at any moment, I can just fall through a hole in the time-space continuum and disappear forever. I break out into a cold sweat. I can no longer feel my extremities. My mouth feels numb as I grind my teeth. Nevertheless, I can’t stop thinking these thoughts. It’s an infinite circle.

Luckily, my attention span has been drastically limited. With time, I slowly start to calm down. I watch some banal comedy on television. The darkness is still trying to creep in (it’s constantly lingering on the outskirts of my psyche), but I breathe deep, full breaths. I pray to something (I don’t know what) for help, any help. I feel like I’m on the verge of insanity. I begin to spiral downward again. Then I laugh at some stupid joke on the TV and gradually return to my normal state of functioning without even trying. Relieved, I force myself to forget the whole episode.

I think that I think too much.

Bobby walks gracefully through the sliding glass doors. He doesn’t even notice the beep that greets him since he’s heard it so many times before. Though, he is a bit surprised to see a new face behind the counter. He knows everyone who works at all three 7-11’s in the greater Columbus area. This clerk looks both familiar and strange. He can’t quite place where he knows the guy from. However, since he has more pressing matters to deal with, he shrugs his shoulders and heads straight for the Slurpee machine.

Van, meanwhile, is wandering around the parking lot looking for anything black that might be associated with Mr. X. Besides the dirty tar covering the ground, his search is wholly unsuccessful.

Eventually, he struts into the convenience store, where Bobby is filling up his 44 ounce pink cup with Mountain Dew (he hates the fruity flavors) Slurpee.

Bored, Van begins to chat up the clerk. All the while, dropping little hints to see if the guy knows anything about Mr. X.

“So, do you happen to know what ‘ex’ means in Latin?”

“Nope, can’t say I do.”

“My friend Sandy told me it means. . .”

Van is interrupted by Bobby wondering aloud: “Hey, are you new here?”

“Yep, it’s my first day.”

“Well, good to know you, man. My name’s Bobby. I come here a lot. Got me a Slurpee addiction.”

Hoisting his plastic cup, Bobby pauses while he reads the clerk’s handwritten nametag. “Rob, is it?”

“Actually, it’s Bob. That’ll be a dollar seven.” Bob has been working for way too many sober hours. After a long Friday night of dealing with obnoxious drunk college kids, he’s in no mood for a long conversation with a stranger.

“Here you go, Bob. I’ll see ya around.” Bobby clucks his tongue as he hands the clerk a fiver and turns toward the door without waiting for his change.

Van is busy watching one of the other customers, who is looking at the beer selection, in the circular anti-theft mirror.

Wondering what’s taking his companion so long, Bobby spins back around. Assessing the situation, he makes eye contact with the clerk before pointing at the digital clock on the wall and rolling his head in the direction of the customer.

Bob soon picks up on this signal.

“It’s too late to buy liquor,” he bellows toward the customer.

The denied customer throws him a disappointed look and walks gingerly out of the store. Nodding at Bobby appreciatively, Bob can’t fucking believe that he’s now enforcing a law that just yesterday was his Achilles heel.

Charles woke up, just as planned, without the use of an alarm clock. Shedding his CWS-monogrammed pajamas, he put on a fresh suit and carefully made his bed. He then grabbed his toothbrush on his way out the door.

In the bathroom, he’s busy brushing his teeth vigorously when, once again, he hears obscene noises coming out of the large handicap stall. Quickly factoring the probabilities involved, he concludes that it must be Nike. Now is his chance to act. He knocks on the stall door confidently. He recites a Shakespearean sonnet from memory and concludes by whispering, “I love you, Nike Steaminson.”

The toilet flushes loudly. The door slowly opens. A large man exits.

“I love you too, dude,” replies the large man as he punches Charles in the arm, chuckles, and plods out of the bathroom with TP dangling on the sole of his shoe.

Rubbing his bruising bicep, Charles decides that his parents definitely failed him in this whole co-ed restroom department of life.

“This town is so fucking boring, man!” I declare to Jim as I pass him the red, white, and blue glass bowl packed full of weed. We’re hanging out at his tiny apartment on the south side of campus. Fugazi’s first album is spinning on the turntable.

I was actually starting to get kinda lonely ever since Stan disappeared into the dark anus of the campus computer center, but then I met Jim at my favorite record store (Flat, Black & Circular). We started chatting about bands and totally hit it off.

“Yeah, when I first got here, I didn’t know what to do. These college assholes just seem to suck so much. All they ever do is go to bars, get drunk, and try to hump. Their deepest conversations involve what their majors are. It crushed all of my idealism. Then one day, I met this stoney guy in one of my classes and we started smoking pot together. He’s pretty cool and he’s always got killer green bud. His name’s Van. I should introduce you guys,” exhales Jim as he passes the bowl back to me.

“Seriously, I mean, this is supposed to be like a little utopia here, right? Young people, higher education, and all that shit. But it takes anyone with a brain about ten fucking seconds to realize that it sucks just as much as the rest of the world. The only difference is there’s a lot more pretentious cafés in Columbus. It makes me so nihilistic.”

I emphasize my point by waving the bowl in idle frustration.

“You should hit that shit.”

As Jim nods at the bowl, I comply with his request.

“Not to mention we’re stuck in fucking Ohio of all places! Have you ever noticed that for like eight months of the year, the smell of dung is inescapable around here?” asks Jim as he reaches across the dilapidated couch for the glass bowl.

“That and 99% of the populace can’t manage to express their anger in any manner other than by calling someone a ‘fucking faggot.’” I point out while Jim attempts to get one last hit off the nearly exhausted bowl.

“Fucking O-hi-o!”

We both giggle furiously at Jim’s extended pronunciation of the middle syllable.

“See, that’s why we should start a band, man. That way, we could fuck with the powers that be by creating dangerous magical noise. Loud, abrasive, raw as fuck! Beautiful but uncompromising,” I proclaim as I compose myself.

“I totally fucking agree, man. I betchya I could drum like a motherfucker. When I get pissed I can pound on things like nobody’s business.”

“I always wanted to play guitar. Maybe, I could try to sing a bit too. I’ve already got some ideas for lyrics and shit.”

“But don’t we need at least one more person? To play. . . What’s that thing called? The other kind of guitar that goes ‘boom, boom?’”

“The bass?”

“That’s it. Fucking weed destroying my hippocampus and shit.”

“Yeah well, what’re you gonna do? Anyway, me and Stan used to always talk about starting a band together. So, if he ever reappears, I’m pretty fucking sure that he’d be down to play bass or whatever else we need.”

“So it’s settled then. Now, we just need a killer name.”

“And a place to practice. And some decent equipment. And we all need to learn how to play our instruments. And we could probably use some songs too. But it’s still a fucking great idea. It’ll keep us from getting too depressed while we’re trapped in this shithole of a town. Hey man, you got anything to munch on?”

A few weeks later, Stan finally resurfaced. It was actually kind of cool not having a roommate to worry about all the time. I mean, I could walk around the apartment butt-fucking-naked, not to mention poop with the door open. These are habits I continued to indulge in even after Stan returned, but he didn’t really seem to care one way or the other.

You see, Stan showed up with three large cardboard boxes, all marked “Gateway.” He then proceeded to rearrange his cluttered room so that his desk and ‘puter were the centerpieces (a few weeks later, after a painful visit to the ass doctor, Stan brought home a comfy chair for his “terminal” as he liked to call it {I jokingly told him that he should fasten a bucket to his new chair so that he’d never have to get up again [without looking up from his monitor, he mumbled something about how he’d “look into the matter online”]}). Whenever he chose to speak aloud, which was an increasingly rare occurrence, he’d merely mumble some gibberish about “Java, FORTRAN, COBOL, C++, HTML, or Boolean operations.” Dude was really starting to creep me out.

Then, one day, I managed to corner him while he took a dump and asked him if he wanted to join the band. He wanted to know if we would be doing “a lot of MIDI stuff.” I stared back at him blankly and then told him that he was the bassist and to think of a non-‘puter related name for the group.

As luck would have it, while we were looking for a place to play, I met my first serious college crush. She was tall and skinny (but not waif skinny), with crisp blue eyes and spiky blue hair. She worked at the one unpretentious café in Columbus, and she had the most amazing laugh, which could vibrate the very foundation upon which you stood.

In fact, that’s actually how we met. I was trying to staple a flyer (which read: “Selling used musical equipment? Renting a practice place? Please help poor future rockstars!” followed by Jim’s phone number {we used his number since Stan was always online so our number was perpetually busy}) to the bulletin board at her café. However, I’m a total fucking klutz and since I had like twenty flyers in one hand and a staple gun in the other, I inevitably knocked over my fresh cup of coffee, thereby scalding my chest and ruining yet another perfectly good blank T-shirt.

Linda (that’s her name, the one I’ve got tattooed in blue ink on the left side of my chest) laughed at me like I was fucking Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton or something. Once she finished guffawing her ass off, she cleaned up my mess and offered my a free refill. She moved awkwardly, like someone not entirely comfortable with her skin. But I was immediately attracted to her anyway. We spent the rest of the day giggling and shooting staples at one another.

Nike ceased to slide when she saw the cream-colored SUV (is it me or are these big-ass vehicles like the stupidest fucking creations on the face of the planet? I mean, they look like they’re made for hauling herds of dead cattle up mountains or something {each one must consume more fuel than the Exxon Valdez spill} but in practice they’re almost always used to transport yuppies from one suburban mall to another {of course, they’ve replaced the Beamer as the status symbol for the midlife crisis and totally obnoxious asshole crowd [you can even get your marshmallow vehicle equipped with some cheesy brand-name sewn into the upholstery so that when you meet all those strangers in your own fucking car, they’ll be immediately impressed with the fact that not only do you have some completely unnecessary super-car, but that you’re also so filthy rich and hip that Eddie Bauer himself made your leather seats]}; plus, these behemoths leave no room on the road for ordinary cars to function properly {if I have to make one more blind turn because I can’t see shit since there’s a fucking moose-vehicle blocking my line of vision, I’m really going to start raging on the road!}) with the personalized “CWS” plates driving down her street.

“Finally,” she breathed a sigh of relief. “He’s fucking gone.”

After skipping back to her father’s house, Nike tried to ignore the fact that there was a giant goat’s head hanging on the front door with “Go Away Ghosts” written in what appeared to be blood.

She’d grown accustomed to such peculiar sights since she moved back home. However, when she opened the door, she was confronted by an even more disturbing image: her dad seemingly masturbating while kneeling on a ouija board.

Then again, he could’ve been praying. Having been raised agnostic, Nike doesn’t really know what praying looks like. All that she knows about religion, she’s managed to pick up from TV and the movies, most notably Jesus Christ Superstar and The Last Temptation of Christ.

Not wanting to ponder the praying versus masturbation question, especially as it relates to her sick dad, Nike tiptoed up the stairs and back into the solace of her bedroom, where she listened to the first Fugazi album as she quietly cried herself to sleep.

For entertainment, Linda and I liked to do really wholesome activities, like getting ice cream at McDonald’s (for some unexplainable reason {have you ever ingested what those bastards try to pass off as “ice cream?”} every single family in Ohio does this religiously on Sunday afternoons {you should’ve seen the general populace’s reaction to a blue-haired female and a. . . well, me [they never stopped gawking, like we were fucking aliens or something]}) or watching Little League games at the local park (the parents in the stands were always way more competitive than the tykes on the diamond who seemed content to simply kick around the sand and stare at the clouds), and then fuck with the dominant paradigm.

For instance, we’d go to church and light cigarettes off the candles, and then start making out during the “sign of peace.” Or we’d attend PTA meetings dressed in S & M gear to complain about how our “little Billy” wasn’t getting enough sex education at school and then offer our services to bolster the curriculum. One time, we even went to the latest Disney flick at the local cineplex where we removed our clothes and screamed: “Walt Disney was a fucking nazi! Walt Disney is a fucking nazi!”

In other words, we were a constant pain in the people of Ohio’s cumulative ass. Seriously, we were kicked out of public places like we were the plague. Oddly, it always seemed to me like the security guards of the world are the people least likely to keep anything secure. Anyway, we had shitloads of fun.

In fact, our relationship really began to blossom for a while there. We stopped making plans to hang out and started assuming that we’d spend most of our time together. We’d even do that pathetic thing where we’d call the other person right after hanging out just to talk a little bit more. And we’d buy each other these stupid plastic trinkets as presents, like Pez dispensers or plastic Smurfs or the latest indie rock seven inch. It even got to the point where we could fart loudly in front of each other and think it was funny. You know, things were perfect.

Then, as usual, paradise got fucked.

“Why do you love me?” wonders a prone Nike.

While she stretches out her naked body in his bed, Charles is putting on his monogrammed pajamas. CWS always puts on his PJs after he orgasms because he doesn’t like exposing himself too much. Nike can’t help but laugh at this post-coital habit of her boyfriend’s since his penis is usually still erect after he comes, so it’s quite the entertaining sight watching him try to maneuver his striped pants over his hardened member. When that tricky mission is finally accomplished, Charles crawls back into bed.

“Well, you see, the nervous and endocrine systems release certain chemicals. . .”

“For fuck’s sake, Charles, I didn’t ask for a freaking biology lesson! I asked, ‘Why do you love me?’” interrupts Nike.

“Well then, the simple fact is that these are my college years and I am full of hormonal passion. And you are the first person I met towards whom I could direct this passion. Also, let’s not forget that you possess a beauty that normally only exists in dreams of nocturnal emission.”

“Golly, you’re so fucking romantic, Romeo!” replies Nike as she rolls her eyes.

“C’mon Nike, you’re well aware that my plan was to fall in love during my first year at college and that it was therefore my destiny to meet you in the restroom that day.”

“But, WHY, Charlie?”

“What do you mean, ‘why?’ What kind of question is that? And how many times have I told you that my name is Charles, not Charlie?”

“Fuck me, you never ask yourself the right questions, Charles. Maybe you’re afraid of the answers. . .”

“Afraid? Hah! I scoff at such petty accusations. There’s nothing in this world to fear as long as you have a well thought out plan. As a matter of fact, I must assert that, with a little planning, life is très facile. There’s no need to wonder why, if you already know the answer ahead of time.”

“Spare me, Charlie. I’m not impressed by your plans, or your logic, or even your elementary French. I just wish you’d show some fucking emotion for once in your life, especially when it comes to me.”

“Yo, where’s the party, kiddies? Whoa man! Are those titties I see? I guess I know where the party’s at now, baby. Nice boobies, Nikes!”

As Nike raises her middle finger in salute, Charles’ roommate, Vinnie the party animal (you gotta love OSU’s dorm placement staff for putting these two loveable fellas together {sometimes, I really do think people have a tremendous sense of humor [though, most of the time, I don’t]}) stumbles drunkenly across the room and offers up a high-five.

“Wassup Chuckster? You dawg!”

“Vincent, if you’d refer to the posted schedule, you would, of course, notice that I have reserved the room for this evening.”

His boner still throbbing, Charles calmly rolls out of bed, switches on the lights (this act, of course, irks Nike further since it only serves to illuminate her naked body {she expresses her anger by yelping, “Charlieeeee!”}), grabs the calendar off the wall, and brandishes it at Vinnie.

“Those really are some nice knockers, Nikes. You should be a porn star.”

Nodding at his roomie (who’s studying the calendar), he adds: “Looks like the Chuckster’s dick is totally with me on this one.”

“Why don’t you shut the fuck up for once, Vinnie, you stupid ass,” retorts Nike.

“Feisty tiger.”

“Go fuck yourself, dickhead!”

“See, right here, Friday night has ‘Charles Watson Skinner’ written in the box.”

“So will you do me once you’re done with the dork, Nikes? Or do I have to put that on the schedule too?”

“Sure, I was just thinking about how I really wanted to fuck the world’s stupidest and ugliest asshole.”

Using the monogrammed sheets as a shield, Nike begins to furiously get dressed.

“I’ll take that as a maybe.”

“It’s clearly marked right here, Vincent.”

“Charlie, if you don’t do something about him, I’m fucking leaving!”

“I’ll go with you anywhere, babe.”

“Vincent, you’re not even looking. What good are schedules if you don’t actually follow them?”

As Nike storms out of the room, Vinnie collapses onto his bunk and mumbles, “Shut up, dork boy.”

“Well, it looks like we’re just going to have to have another roommate meeting tomorrow to settle these scheduling difficulties, Vincent.”

“I said, ‘Shut the fuck up, dork boy!’”

“How does six a.m. sound to you? I’ve got an opening before I have to meet my Economics Professor about an extra credit research assignment. . .”

Charles is cut off by a pillow hitting him square in the mouth.