Breakthrough Writer

25 Years Later the Man Who Has It All Meets a Ghost from the Past

There once was a man in his early twenties. Socially awkward, especially around women, he had never even been on a date. Instead, he withdrew into his college studies, found companionship in books, and grew an unruly beard. Untouched by human warmth, his demeanor was a bit crazed and unsettling. His eyes were cavernous and penetrating.  

One day this young man was on Pier Avenue in Hermosa Beach and he passed a popular hangout, Patrick Malloy’s. It was crowded inside. The young man pressed his bearded face against the glass and looked with longing at the attractive people. They looked so life-affirming and at ease with self-abandonment, laughing, slapping each other’s backs, kissing one another, and sloshing their beers over their glasses’ rims.   

In contrast, the young man was a tightly-wound ball of repressed emotions, in turns angry and melancholy. He felt like a man of 85 trapped in the body of a 21-year old.  

Watching the attractive people enjoying themselves and embracing life with an admirable, insatiable appetite, the young man was convinced he would remain on life’s sidelines, a depressed witness to a life passing him by.  

Convinced of his own futility and fated to a life of loneliness, he went home, curled up into a ball and cried himself to sleep.  

We now travel 25 years into the future and focus on this same man, now in his mid-forties. He has a good job. He has developed social skills, he is well groomed, insouciant, and can conceal his cynicism behind a veil of witty repartee. He’s been married, divorced, remarried. He sits in Patrick Malloy’s with his lovely wife and her lovely friends. Beer is sloshing all around him. He doesn’t drink, save a diet Coke since he’s the designated driver. The music is loud and people are shouting over the music. His ears can’t take much more of this. Worse, an unrelenting boredom has set in and he is no longer listening to any of the several conversations blaring around him.  

He feels it both strange and cruel that earlier in his life he felt excluded from this club of beautiful people and now he is inside its very center, its most inner core, and rather than bathing in the warmth of belonging and popularity he stares at his watch.

While squirming in his seat with utter boredom, he sees a young man outside the club. The man is bearded with the same cavernous eyes and the same look of despair the middle-aged man remembers seeing in his reflection. The young man, a mirror image of the middle-aged one, presses his face against the window and looks into the eyes of his older doppelgänger. 

Feeling helpless to give wisdom to the misguided youth, the older aspiring mentor shakes his head as if to say: "The dividing line between your world and my world is all in your head, little brother. It's all in your head."

 

 

Reading Comprehension Exercise: Find the Thesis or Main Idea from "The Lost College Student"

Could I be a business major? No way. Ninety percent of business majors who get jobs out of college have to do cold-call sales.  There’s no dignity in that. Marketing? Immoral. You spend all your time probing people’s brains so you can manipulate them into buying crap they don’t need. Economics? Are you kidding? It’s the most popular major in America. There’s a glut of econ majors waiting in soup lines. Accounting? Everyone knows accountants have the personalities of house plants. Plus they spend their days holed-up in some cubicle with no human contact. Someone with my anti-social tendencies needs a job that forces me out of my shell. So you can forget accounting. Teaching? Forget about it. You don’t even teach. Ninety percent of it is disciplining morons and doing boring paper work. Not to mention teachers get no respect in this sick society. Social work? Hell no. The average lifespan of that job is two years before social workers get burned out. Those who stay any longer go crazy and can only keep going by taking anti-depressants. Nursing? No way. I hate blood. Positively makes me faint. It’s best I stay out of the medical field altogether.  Engineering? I have no aptitude for it. Besides, it’s an up and down industry. No job security. Police work? That’s a horrible idea. It’s well known that cops have the highest divorce and alcoholism rates of any profession. Someone with my family history of addiction and mental illness should stay away from a job as stressful as law enforcement. Nutritionist? And spend the rest of my life telling pig-faced idiots to eat more fresh fruits and vegetables? Not interested. Counseling? You’ve got to be kidding. I don’t want to talk to people with problems like mine. I won’t make my patients feel better. They’ll just make me feel worse. Now that’s depressing. Journalism? What a joke. The profession is getting smaller and smaller. Newspapers and magazines are being sucked up by giant conglomerates and advertising revenues are being lost as readers prefer free online content. I’m not so stupid as to pursue journalism. Law? And be the butt of evil lawyer jokes? Work a hundred hours a week and be unhappy as most lawyers are? Not on your life.  Culinary school? I’m afraid of knives, open flames, and splattering grease. Plus you have to be screamed at all the time by management and the customers. My fragile self-esteem could never take it. Acting? Ninety-nine percent of all actors don’t act. They wait tables. Interior designer? Can’t. I’m color blind. If you think a guy who thinks peanut butter is bright green can color-coordinate a living room, good luck. Yoga instructor? Lowest paying job in America. Can’t even pay for rent. I’ll be a homeless yoga instructor showing my students how to find inner peace. The peace of poverty. What a fraud. Bioresearch? And spend my life handling the Ebola virus and other lethal microbes? No thanks. Philosophy? I’ll be unemployable. If I’m lucky I’ll get a job at Baskin Robins. That’ll be fun. I’ll have a PhD in Philosophy and I’ll be able to talk about the World’s Great Philosophers with the customers while putting sprinkles and chocolate syrup on their ice cream cones. How about being a garbage man? I can see it now. I’ll be at a cocktail party with a bunch of professionals and some beautiful woman will ask me what kind of job I have and I’ll have to tell her I make my living lifting people’s filth from the gutter. No thanks. How about winning  the ten-million dollar lotto? Can you imagine? I’d lay out on a tropical island all day, drink mango nectar and eat exotic meals made by my personal chef. I’d pull a Hugh Hefner and surround myself with dozens of bikini-clad supermodels. I’d live in a perpetual state of pleasure. Meanwhile, my brain would turn into mush. I would be a complete vegetable. It sounds hideous.

Reading Comprehension Exercise: Find the Thesis or Main Idea from "The Most Cynical Dude at Walteria High School"

I can’t read people’s minds or get inside people’s hearts, but I’d bet good money I’m the most cynical student at Walteria High. One of my cynical, or what I would call realistic, beliefs is that ninety-nine percent of human beings waste their lives on the most lame things. I mean really waste their lives, like in ruin them. 

Take falling in love, for example. I’m totally cool with people discovering love for another human being and being committed to one person and having romantic feelings and feeling inspired to compose beautiful songs and all that. I’m not so stupid as to not want to fall completely in love someday. So falling in love isn’t my problem. My problem is people don’t really fall in love with the person they think they’re in love with. They’re in love with their own stupid, immature, and usually dangerous idea of what it means to be in love. In other words, they’re delusional. 

Man, could I ever give you an example of this. There was this cute girl last year. Her name is Sue Mumma. I barely knew her. But out of the blue, she had this scary crush on me. I was like, “Whoa, get back Sue Mumma. You’re a cutie-pie and seem really sweet and everything, but this is just weird.” I mean one day we’re complete strangers and the next day her eyes are glued to me like I’m some sort of demigod ripped from the cover of a harlequin romance novel.  I was like, “Sue Mumma, your worshipping the ground I walk on is making me very uncomfortable. You’re putting way too much pressure on me and you’re creating expectations I can never live up to.” I didn’t exactly say those words. In fact, I never even spoke a word to her,  but I should have because my silent cold-shoulder treatment didn’t stop her from pursuing me. She’d sit next to me in the cafeteria, ask me to go to the dance, pretend to need my help for her geometry homework. And then things got real freaky on the night of one of our home football games. She hung around me in the bleachers and after the game and it was raining like crazy and she ran toward me in the rain and fell in this patch of mud. And I just left her there, lying face down in the mud. 

God, I can be insensitive sometimes, maybe even cruel, to the point that I sometimes feel like slapping myself. I don’t blame you if you want to condemn me for how I handled the situation, how I just left her lying in the mud the way I did, but the bottom-line is she got the message that I wasn’t in the mood or in the position to return her affections and like a week later she had forgotten all about me. In my place, she had a boyfriend, this tall skinny pimple-faced dude named Tom Webster. Don’t get me wrong. Tom Webster is a super nice guy, a very decent guy as far as I can tell. But let’s be clear. He is butt-ugly. I’m talking coke-bottle glasses, giant pits in his neck from acne scars. His mouth is always puckered like he just ate a lemon. Let’s not mince words here. The dude is so ugly the only way a cutie like Sue Mumma could be in love with him is if she was blinded by her own fantasy of being in love. Tom Webster is just a lucky passenger on Sue Mumma’s fantasy ride. You get what I’m saying?