Against These Things - an Insomniac on BYU

"You know that man up there aint goin to let nothin stand forever noway. Not in this world he aint. And it's against that judgment that you got to lay stone. If you goin to lay it at all" -Cormac McCarthy, "The Stonemason"

I wake up and know only that I had dreamed. I stare at the ceiling trying to thwart neurological ants that are carrying away the last fading pieces of that nocturnal narrative. Ants can carry 10-50 times their body weight. Against these roid-thieves my groggy efforts at recollection break like a wave on rocks. I surrender to consciousness and am instantly invited to a round table discussion with my thoughts.

It's 3:00 A.M. I shoot off a few emails, desiring connection against an absence I feel in the early silence. I crawl back into bed. I promptly throw my legs back over the side and dress. There's fog and so I layer accordingly. I grab my paradoxically short-longboard, my backpack and my wallet. Against my better judgment I leave my house into the dark and the fog and the quietude and push my way east towards _________.

I have no destination in mind. I push and turn in sync with my winding thoughts. I come to the stop sign to the right of which you can see Seven Peaks a few blocks down the road. I descend and then make my way towards the entrance of Slot Canyon, huffing and puffing up the long road then gliding like liquid down a favorite hill of longboard enthusiasts. I remember how several months ago I managed to get myself into a "God are you there,? It's me Sam" situation on the mountain behind me. It stands ugly and grey and hard in the obscuring dark. On a cliff on that mountain I had clung to stone mute in its indifference, hypnotized by the dizzying, mortal drop beneath me. After an agonizing wait I was retrieved by a search and rescue team. My education has been both the cliff and rescuer.

My thoughts trundle along further like a low and distant thunder and I reflect on the forever passing present, as sure and fast as the pavement disappearing beneath me. I am 25, single, and an English major. Despite my old age (relative to context) I have a little ways yet. I am growing ripe and heavy and oozing on the vine. While I have seen no statistics I think that I am approaching minority status. My major is predominantly composed of women. I connect and get along well with them. I feel a disconnect with a lot of males in my major as I am not a hipster nor do I dress like an intellectual. I have big, black-rimmed glasses so in vogue at the moment and a cardigan but that's about the extent of it. There is a massive paradigm shift happening in gender identity but I don't see it reaching BYU, yet I feel it. I have women friends and teachers dismayed at the liquidation of the Women's Research Institue. We talk about Carl Jung and the necessity of men integrating a healthy femininity and women masculinity. Jung is by and large disregarded and deemed passe. Against this pressing obsolescence we talk. Against passing.

I carve hard to the left to evade a pot hole, at this hour a mere shadow in shadows. Over my years here at BYU I have had relationships and friendships that have come and gone. I have found that memory is often synonymous with regret. Within the memories of love and loss and opportunity and loss and loss and gain I hear a siren call whose melodious voice too often muffles deeper notes of pain. Against that call I can only study and serve, trying to see the picture entire against the fragments.

Racing downhill I pendulum back and forth, crossing double yellow lines, there and now back, thinking of Karl G. Maeser and the lines which he would not. I am a 25 year old white caucasian male. I have never been incarcerated, convicted of a felony, failed a drug test or been to a BYU football game. I have been ticketed three times for riding my skateboard on campus. I've high-fived Cosmo. I roll into the Smith's parking lot to pick up a few groceries. I pull out my wallet. I look at my picture on my BYU ID behind a clear plastic sheaf and see my face as if it were a reflection in the eye of a beloved. I open my wallet and she weeps silently as she hands over her widow's mite, a 10. I do my best to console her, whispering that I love and accept her for who she is, not for what she has. Comforted, she returns to my pocket, long since reconciled to the knowledge that she won't be entertaining a lot of guests with the direction I'm heading in school. Sometimes she dreams of mechanical engineers, of accountants and surgeons. I don't mind though, because against those thoughts and dreams she presses herself to my leg as if in an embrace, promising loyalty.

I dress and shower and ready myself for class. Having thought things over during my pre-dawn exodus I concluded that obsolescence is a call to renew, rebuild, and rethink, possibility being the shadow absence casts. BYU has some frustrating and admirable idiosyncrasies. In the final analysis I have had some incredible teachers whose mentoring and influence will leave an indelible mark on my life. Written in stone at the entrance to BYU are the words "Enter to learn, go forth to serve." These stones are not indifferent, and to cling to to them is to accept the responsibility and anxious joy of being for the other, the most basic element of our religion and purpose of education. Despite and for everything, I am grateful for BYU.