Always keep the Band-Aids out of sight or your household will suddenly experience an inexplicable rash of injuries, cuts, scrapes, scratches, owies, boo-boos, and general soreness – all almost imperceptible to the naked eye and all of which can only be healed and cured by placing a Band-Aid on the afflicted body part. Note: bandage should be changed every 2 to 3 minutes until you run out of Band-Aids or something fun comes along.
I took a slow drive past the old Stevenson Arms dorm today. Homecoming weekend has been fun, but it’s almost time to head back into the present time. As Tom Petty says, ‘you can look back babe, but it’s best not to stare’. So before I jump in that time machine that brought me back here, I want to reflect a little on life and the time I spent here and the dash of time between then and now.
Homecoming Football game 2011
The first feeling that struck me as I rolled past the backend of the dorm building (which by the way hasn’t changed at all from that perspective, sans the blue instead of maroon door) was what a short time in our lives it was. Though it was a constant stream of students, a teaming bubbling flow of life, it was also a constant shifting of individuals, To a casual observer looking in from outside, that river never changed, but for those of us riding that wave we saw changes.
For me, I was a part of that current for three years. And in that short amount of time, both the dorm and I changed immensely. It was not the same place I had first moved into in the fall of 1990, but I wasn’t the same person anymore either. It’s that time of life. Lots of changes, and they are big ones. In childhood, because you’re growing physically as well as mentally and emotionally, it’s easy to see and expect those big changes, but by seventeen, they kind of take you by surprise, sweep you up and carry you to a new place swiftly and not always smoothly, but almost imperceptibly. I think that’s part of why this place is so dear to me. I did so much growing and learning and becoming who I am there. That’s where my adulthood started, though ‘adult’ might not be the most accurate word I can use to describe what I’ve become, but it’s the best I’ve got right now.
The part that is so difficult to grasp and completely understand is the randomness of chance and coincidence that conspired to bring me what has essentially turned out to be, simply put, my life. I hadn’t planned on attending S.I.U., but once it was decided (three weeks before school began), the dorms were all full. There was one dorm with room. Most years, this was one of the more difficult dorms to get into, freshman/sophomore approved, but off-campus and co-ed floors. Due to a computer malfunction that year, rooms that were normally booked were available. I got in.
I knew almost nobody in Carbondale. The one or two people I did know were older and lived in apartments and townhouses off campus and I really didn’t know them that well. Again chance stepped in and the lady who ran the dorm assigned me to room with the only other seventeen-year-old male in the building. He spent all of five months as my roommate and the last twenty-one years as one of my closest friends.
The old Stevenson Arms 2014
That fall was the first year the University closed the campus and dorms for a week over Halloween and we were sent home. Mike was from Las Vegas, so I brought him to Chicago to stay with my family for the week. There he met his future bride and mother of his children and forged life-long friendships of his own in what I’m sure for him was a most unexpected place.
You see what I mean about the randomness of the whole thing. Fate, God, Luck, Chance, a random roll of the dice brought certain people to this one certain place in this one precise moment in time and set us on a path from which we could never again veer off. That is life, isn’t it? And because of those random chance encounters and unconscious decisions it is what I call ‘My Life’.
I think of the people I met here. Some friendships are the enduring kind, others are people I’ll probably never see again on this Earthly journey, but all of them are with me in that strange, hard-to-describe way. Avion with whom I was a student janitor for two or three months and with whom I went to the shooting range once is still vivid in my memory in a way in which I almost expect to run into him around campus one day when school resumes and neither of us will have changed. The mind plays tricks on you that way as the universe secretly steals time away from you.
Then there are the friends who I talk to every few years or so. Thanks to Facebook we can keep up more often without too much hassle. They are those kinds of friends who, even after ten years of not being in the same room together, after about five minutes it’s as if nothing has changed… as if life hasn’t moved much. Of course it has. It’s the connection, the shared experience of that crucial time in our lives that stays cemented and allows those friendships to pick up where they left off.
And then there are the others. The ones I haven’t seen or spoken to in the better part of sixteen years or more. They are here with me. A part of who I am. I know, it sounds like I’m talking about dead people, but I’m not… at least I hope I’m not. They’re here, somewhere on the Earth following their own path, living out their personal journey one moment to the next somewhere, but I imagine this invisible tether, one we cannot feel nor see. We came from different stations into this one hub for a short time and affected each other, and then like locomotives in the night each branched off in our own direction, each on a separate journey to that final destination that lies, with any luck, in the much distant future. But that tether is there. It’s in a song, a smell, a feeling on the breeze that takes you back for just a fleeting second to that shared place and those people who made it special to you.
And so, here I sit on the edge of Thompson Woods, twenty-one years and two months after I first ventured to this place. I’m waiting for the Student Center to open so I can use the washroom and get a Starbucks for my long ride. The woods here on campus was always a place of reflection for me… a calm, serene escape from homesickness, classroom stress, worry and longing for my girlfriend hundreds of miles away. A venture off the beaten path even if just for a few minutes walking from one class to the next, taking the wooded trail through Thompson instead of across the campus was a respite, a rejuvenation of mind and spirit between lecture halls and lab hours. Much needed because, of course, not all the time I spent here was good. I know I’m looking back at it more romantically than realistically, but isn’t that what the past should be… at least sometimes?
From a more recent trip 2014
I’m grateful to have this place to visit. I’m grateful to have had the chance to visit this place with Mike again, and with his daughter and her friends. It’s kind of like being suspended between two places in time. But the thing about this journey we’re on is: the changes keep coming. They should keep coming. I feel I have just recently awoken from a decades long sleep… a fear induced walking comatose state. I’m awake now, and for the first time in a very, very long time I feel alive, and new, and ready to tackle those things I had previously allowed fear to keep from me. No more. So many lost moments and so many lost opportunities to become the ‘me’ I always wished I were. I feel a little like Dorothy coming to the realization that I had the power to get what I’ve wanted the entire time. Maybe I had to go through it all to get to this place, but I’m glad I’m finally here. So in a way, today as I leave S.I.U. again, I do so to face an uncertain but wide-open future of possibilities, but this time I’ll do it awake. And as I do, I take with me this place, this place that has given me enduring friendships, chance encounters that touched and changed my heart, and some of the most precious memories of my life… we are all tethered together by that force of nature that by chance brought us together and gave us this invisible link that lies within us and that force that set us on our way.
I thank God for that randomness of chance. It is the unplanned and unexpected moments of my life that have changed it and shaped it the most. Go ahead, keep making your plans, just don’t fight the current.
Starbucks is open. Time to hit the open road.
Brian Schnoor
Campus of Southern Illinois University at Carbondale
Carbondale, IL
October 16, 2011
From my favorite Carbondale bar, Sidetracks
Someone once told me ‘there is no hangover from good Scotch.’
That someone was a liar.
My goal was to publish a new blog post at least once a week. I missed last week, and here I sit on Monday night with nothing written yet for this week, light on topics, and short on time. And so, I’ve decided that in such a circumstance, rather than tell you about my thoughts on the Skeleton Twins (it’s great btw), I figured I’d tackle the nature of mankind. Specifically the question of whether human beings are inherently good or evil.
I know, I know, everyone from Plato to Carrot Top has weighed in on this one, but I haven’t and really how can I leave this world one day without having shared with the eternal webosphere my thoughts on this subject.
Is man (of course meaning men, women, children, LBGT, etc, etc.) inherently good or evil. Religion tends to adopt one of three doctrines depending on the sect, that of total depravity, limited depravity, or restored doctrine of atonement. Think about that for a second. Your spiritual leaders think you are either completely and totally depraved, just kinda-sorta depraved but definitely depraved, or are born good will become depraved but will find redemption from your depravity. “You were created in God’s image, you depraved little monkey!”
Shame on us all. Of course, that is the business of our religious leaders, isn’t it? Shame us, then show us how to overcome the shame through prayer, penance, and Bingo every Tuesday night? Anyhoo… I digress.
Philosophers have philosophized about this very question since time began. I could tell you all about Plato’s take on Ethics (I studied that for a semester in an attempt to avoid math. Instead I learned that Philosophy is simply a mathematical way of thinking about non-numeric ideas. Should’ve taken Algebra II), but I won’t. You’ll have to look it up for yourself. (No cheating)
Instead, I’m going to give you my take on the whole shebang right here. Is man inherently good? No. Is man inherently evil? No. We’re all capable of both good and evil. What man is, is inherently selfish. We are all selfish, and by necessity. It’s survival. It is us at our most basic level. Strip away all else and what have you got??? Selfish. Survival. Me making it to see another day. Goes right back to primitive man and it is ingrained in our DNA.
It is a person’s ability to control that selfishness that dictates whether the bulk of his deeds are good or evil.
Mother Theresa was selfish. Adolf Hitler was selfish. Mother Theresa was able to control the natural instinct to be selfish and, through selflessness, the bulk of her deeds were good. She is in line for Sainthood, to go down in the annals of history as one of the most giving and caring people there ever was. Adolf Hitler on the other hand, had very little control over his selfishness. As a direct result, his actions were vile and millions of people lost their lives. He was evil personified. He became one of the most reviled and despised people to ever walk the face of the Earth.
Is that because one was born evil and one good? No. They were both born with the capacity for both, not either-or, but both, and like most of us, I’m sure they, to some degree, each engaged in both. Nobody is perfect. Nobody is perfectly good, and nobody is perfectly evil. Did Mother Theresa ever lose her temper or become annoyed? The mere fact that she is human would suggest that of course she did. Did Hitler ever respond to a sneeze with a considerate gesundheit? Probably.
What made all the difference in the world between these two extreme examples was the desire and ability to control naturally inherent selfishness.
Of course, these are extreme examples. None of us are Mother Theresa, yet none of us are Hitler, though there’s seems to be no shortage of people looking to unseat him as the most evil of modern times. For most of us, we do both a little good and a little bad everyday, often without knowing it since we’re so wrapped up in our own objectives to notice the effect we have outside ourselves. Looking back on one’s life, you can see monumental moments when you know you did something, if not quiet evil, at least certainly wrong. And you can see monumental moments when you know you done good kid.
You see, we want to be able to say, “Deep down, I’m a good person, I just made a mistake.” And we like to look at the mongrels of the human race, the two-legged rats and say “They’re simply born evil.” Neither is true. We were all born selfish and we can’t just do away with selfishness completely. We need to keep a little of it to survive, but not so much that we’re blind to any moral obligation to our fellow man.
Suppress the selfishness. Look outward as well as inward. Keep your moral compass pointed to true north which is kindness and caring for others. It goes back to one religious tenant, the golden rule. “treat others as you’d like to be treated”. In other words, you’re friggin’ selfish. To be good, realize other people matter too, and feed their selfishness as you’d feed your own and in the end, you’ll come out pretty much even on the good-evil scale. Guess religion knew this, they just let something obscure this beautiful Ethic of Reciprocity with all that depravity talk. Wonder what that something was. Oh well, I can’t answer every question tonight.
With that said, I believe it is time for me to put all of this nonsense about mankind away and do something good – for me.
oh brother, here we go again 