TABULA RASA
The following stories were originally written for an audience of one. They are part of a personal journal I’ve been keeping for nearly twenty years. In high school I had an English teacher who required all of her students to keep a journal, and while I resented this intrusion into my private life, I reluctantly did what she asked. But instead of using the assignment as an opportunity for quiet reflection and introspection as she had intended, I used it to keep track of my latest successes at the local pool hall and the box score of bases stolen on the weekends with my high school sweetheart. The journal was a joke to me and would have most likely continued to remain a joke for the rest of the semester except that was the year that my father died. It seemed school didn’t matter to me anymore so I began to skip classes. My friends couldn’t relate to my experience, my girlfriend couldn’t either and I gradually began to withdraw from everyone. Over the course of the next several months I w...