JDS

Oh boy, I can remember it like it was slightly over a year and a half ago. I was walking to my apartment on one of the hottest days of the year in a cold sweat. I was excited and simultaneously depressed. I was walking to my apartment after giving a speech in a Communications class. It was my last assignment before graduating. Walking home, away from campus, I began to think about campus. Just a variety of buildings, a lot of buildings (at tOSU, at least), but I had spent the past 4 years there and there really isn't a reason to go back after you graduate. I wasn't sad just because I wasn't going to see my buildings anymore, I was going to miss everything they represented. College. Walking away from all those buildings was a metaphor for walking away from those 4 years. The greatest 4 years of my life, without question. I wasn't ready to go. Walking east on Woodruff and crossing over High Street, as I had done for the last two years, I began to experience and eerie feeling. I felt like the campus I was walking away from was disintegrating behind me and so too, would all of my great memories from my time at tOSU. After crossing High Street I continued between Wendy's and No.1 Chinese and eventually was back on Woodruff (it jogs), standing right below where I lived my junior year, 30 East Woodruff, Apartment I. Fucking loved it there. I crossed through the parking lot adjacent to Tuller. While walking through this parking lot, where I had lived the previous year, in a depressed daze, I spotted something amazing. It was my footprint. While living at 30 I, we decided to make a roommate beer pong table. We wanted to make it unique to us. I suggested spray-painting our hands and feet and putting them on the board. Once outside we starting spray-painting. We had the soles of our feet painted we were putting prints all over the parking lot as we walked around like idiots. We made this board in August or September '06 and I had rediscovered these prints in June '08. It was about too much for me to handle and I had to stop. Staring at my old footprint, having just completed undergrad, my college life flashed before my eyes and I felt like "The Giver." So many unbelievable people and memories. But the eerie feeling I was describing before was completely manifesting itself, it was overwhelming. I felt like I was disappearing. For me, this feeling was so strange because a character from my favorite book says he feels like he is disappearing. I've always thought this was one of the most piercing lines from the book and I never understood it. What did he mean, disappearing? I totally got it that day. Does anyone know how paragraphs work? I feel like I should have more than one paragraph after all this text. I'll start a new paragraph now.

The speech I gave in class that day was supposed to be persuasive. That was the only parameter. I decided to try to persuade my peers to do more reading in their leisure time. The speech was, no doubt, extremely hypocritical. At the time I gave that speech I had read a grand total of four books for leisure, "Scar Tissue," "3 Nights in August," "Clapton, The Autobiography," and my favorite, "The Catcher in the Rye." Four books in 22 years. I have read one book since I gave that speech, it's called, "Twilight." Maybe you've heard of it. It was awful and I can't believe the movie was even worse. If I remember correctly, there are 6 reasons why I read this book: Kirby Boeke, Shannon Puthoff, Sam Schumann, Dayton Ohio, The Drury Inn and Dayton Freight Lines. That's neither here nor there. While I was creating this 7 minute speech about the pleasure of reading even though I never read, I was thinking a great deal about the few books I had actually read, specifically, "The Catcher in the Rye."

Have you ever heard me speak? Giving a 7 minute persuasive speech doesn't come easily to someone who happens to be the most monotone person Earth has ever known.

Anyway, "The Catcher in the Rye," is basically about a teenager (Holden Caulfield) who is completely alone, nobody cares for him, as he tries to deal with losing his younger brother, one of his only companions. The book opens as Holden is being kicked out of boarding school. During the process of leaving the school he states that he feels like he is disappearing. I first read this book when I was 16 or 17 and I couldn't really relate to it as I had always been surrounded by my friends and family in Minster. I reread the book when I got to college and I totally got it. I think the feeling of being alone is universal, we've all experienced it, if only for a little bit. The story has really stuck with me and I often find myself wondering about Holden, as if he were a real person. It's been about 60 years since it was written and it really is amazing how poignant the tale still is. The author, JD Salinger, has said the story is semi-autobiographical and he's also been a bit of a recluse since writing it. Which only makes him and the book more interesting.

Well I guess I've been kinda rumblin', bumblin' and stumblin' all entry and surely, this will be one of my least entertaining blogs, but JD Salinger passed away Wednesday and I thought this story was at least, valid. I've never, to my knowledge, met a person who has the same initials as me but JD Salinger does share all three with me. It's a shame I never met him. He wrote one of the best stories' of his generation, my parents' generation and my generation and it was all one book.

If you're ever in the parking lot of 30-36 East Woodruff look for my footprint. If you see it say, "Hi," you'd be talking to yourself, of course, since I disappeared from there in June '08.