Choices

Well, this got some interesting reactions when I posted it on Facebook, and I've decided that they're reactions that I would like to reply to at some length, so I thought I'd do it here. And since I don't want those of you who aren't my friends on Facebook to feel left out, I figured I'd post the original material first. In the next day or so I'll post the reactions and my responses to them.
So here's a rare bit of fiction for you guys.


Xander stared at the two items on his desk, assessing his options. On his left sat a blue and green glass pipe, filled with marijuana. The object on his right was a .50 caliber Mark XIX Desert Eagle, its finish dark and unpolished. Both offered relief, but the variety offered by the Desert Eagle was much less fleeting. Xander sat there, trying to decide whether that sort of finality was what he truly desired.
Things hadn’t always been this way. He hadn’t always been tempted to mute the pain with drugs or orally applied hunks of high velocity metal. His childhood had been wonderful, charmed. He’d gotten pretty much whatever he’d wanted, not because he was spoiled, but because he’d always had realistic expectations and a taste for simplicity. Sure, he’d ask for a new video game console every now and then, but for the most part he was content with a pile of books when Christmas or his birthday rolled around.
He’d always loved to read, to learn. He had an insatiable curiosity, an almost physical need to know as much as he could. It was a non-competitive desire, completely self-fueled. His thirst for knowledge had nothing to do with being at the head of the class or making others feel inferior. He just needed to know things. It was compulsive.
This could have been his social downfall, his ticket to Nerdville and daily swirlies, but his skills on the football field had saved him from that fate. Despite his distinctly brainy bent, he had a love of football and talent to match. He was discovered in 5th grade, during recess. A friend’s father had come to the school to drop off a forgotten bag lunch and witnessed Xander making a diving one-handed catch. True, the ball had been of the spongy variety, but the man, the local high school’s football coach, knew talent when he saw it and quickly sought to mentor him in the subtle art of being a wide receiver.
By the time Xander reached high school his hands were superb, and he quickly earned a spot on the varsity team. His ability to catch anything that came within reach earned him the nickname Super Glue, a moniker he was proud to have earned. By the time he left, he’d set school records for career touchdown catches, yards after catch, and yards per catch. He seemed destined for the NFL, but college, of course, came first. Many universities had courted him, football powerhouses like USC and Texas, but he had decided upon Stanford. He was, after all, a geek at heart.
And that’s when things started to deteriorate for Xander. It’s not that Stanford was bad for him; it was simply that his life had changed drastically, had taken a form that he found unfamiliar and daunting. The first thing to go wrong was football. He played football because he enjoyed it, but high school and college football were different beasts. College football was a ravenous thing, eating up free time, never satiated. There were endless practices, innumerable weight training sessions, and piles of video footage to comb through. The demands on his time began to overwhelm him, destroying Xander’s enjoyment of the game. He quit after one season, a red shirt who never touched the playing field.
This had left him in something of a predicament. He’d foolishly assumed that he’d breeze through college, get drafted by the 49ers and make millions. Now that this was no longer a possibility he was unsure of what to do. Unlike many people, he hadn’t grown up wanting to be a fireman or surgeon. He’d never put much thought into that kind of stuff. It wasn’t as if the football thing had been a lifelong dream. It was simply what he had perceived to be the path of least resistance. Now he’d lost that path, and a new one failed to present itself.
Faced with the sudden necessity of choosing a career, Xander’s mental health had begun to fail. His intellectual strength now felt like a weakness. He honestly believed that he could do whatever he set his mind to, but rather than comfort him this belief brought only despair. The wealth of options before him was too large; it paralyzed him. He fell into a deep depression and began to have such powerful anxiety attacks that he often had trouble leaving his room. He managed to stay in college, eking out mostly Bs with the occasional A, but he flitted from major to major, unable to find something that truly ignited a passion within him. He was stalling and he knew it, but he couldn’t find an answer, couldn’t see a way out.
Having never been much of a drinker, he turned to weed for solace. It calmed his anxiety, and quieted his depression, at least in the short term. But he knew, even if he couldn’t bring himself to admit it, that he was simply masking the pain, not eliminating it. The green was a crutch that he was slowly becoming dependant upon. It was becoming as much of a problem as a solution, but it was all he had, his only path to a moment of peace, and so he limped onward.
After seven years of college, he finally graduated with an anthropology degree. He didn’t really want to be an anthropologist and he had no intention of going on to grad school, but he had decided that he needed something to show for all of the time he’d spent in school. So he got the degree, for all the good that it did him.
And now here he was, an over-educated bookstore clerk making $8.50 an hour, struggling to make ends meet, student loans hanging over his head like the sword of Damocles. He was no closer to a career now than when he had started college. He was still lost, still rudderless in choppy seas. He felt that he was capable of so much more, but he was unable to distinguish what “more” meant.
All he knew was that he was miserable, and that he could see no way out of his predicament. Because the problem, as he saw it, wasn’t just with him. He detested the necessity of money, the struggle to procure enough so that he could live even a modest life. He saw no point to modern life. It felt cold, pointless, and hollow. He despised the rat race. He felt he was running a maze in which cheese was the only prize, and he was lactose intolerant.
And so here he sat with the only two choices that made any kind of sense to him, flawed as they were. He could take the path to the left, smoke his green and find a short-lived and imperfect peace, a numbness more bearable than the existential pain that haunted him. Or he could turn to the right and rush down that short and violent path, whose terminus was shrouded in mystery.
He sighed and picked up the pipe, brought it to his lips and set fire to its contents, inhaling deeply. His body and mind relaxed. His curiosity had been the deciding factor, just as it always was. There was still so much to explore, to learn. But that other path stirred his curiosity as well. It held a macabre allure, and he recognized that one day, if things did not take an unexpected turn for the better, the weight of the world would drag him down, and his curiosity would get the better of him.