I still lived at home with my parents and they remained loving as ever. However it's obvious now that my life seemed to have gone off track. This wasn't the future I had envisioned for myself as a boy. I was working with former convicts and druggies in the rain. Nature, which I had always admired on family hikes, was now an omnipresent force in my life. The wetness now permeated my soul. I'd leave for work at 7AM, arrive and have to listen to my workmates talk about the affairs they were having, the drugs they were doing, the scams that they were pulling and ever was my rain gear dripping with rainwater.
That year a workmate, put a book in my hands. It wasn't the Bible or a self help book. It was a novel. It was Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut. It was a book about a guy going crazy. The subject was relevant because after all, half the guys I worked with seemed to be crazy and I felt that if I stayed there long enough I would end up like them. Something else about the book stood out to me. The way it was written. It was humorous. The sentences were short yet packed full of ideas that woke something in my spirit. I wanted to read more books like this. I wanted to learn to write like this man, to fall into stories where each day wasn't the same until I was bent and used up like my workmates.
My two years stent as a rebellious and lost adolescent in the adult work force was coming to an end. I wanted to go to school. I didn't have to. I wanted to. I quit my job in the rain and enrolled at the community college. I was twenty years old.
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