How I Survived Three Years at a Two-Year Community College

Blame it on the cheese sandwich, if you must.

Two mushy slices of greasy, burnt toast collapsed upon a microwaved chunk of mozzarella: the remnants of several suppers past, transmogrified into a makeshift breakfast concoction, vaunted on a holey plate of polystyrene foam.

As I embark upon the initial bite, translucent green ooze bleeds from the sides of the comestible, dying my fingers a greasy, lucent viridian. Bits of crumbs rain down onto my solid black tee-shirt, as stray morsels find themselves embedded into my mane. I gently brush the remnants of my early morning meal from the folds of my khaki shorts, and take a final swig of coffee before exiting into the 6 a.m. yonder.

I tactilely rummage through my left pocket, attempting to snare my key ring. I can palpably differentiate the set based on the rusted, flaky shell of my car keys, a rather stark contrast to the aluminum smoothness of my house keys. I nimbly grasp the bronzed artifact between two knuckles, slowly dragging the object from the lining of my pants. I let out a rather morose sigh, and unlock the driver’s side door of my antiquated sedan.

The morning commute was, typically, a lugubrious venture. The landscape consisted of a mishmash of bucolic idleness and urbanized eyesores. The scenery, ostensibly, was a perpetual loop of rustic housing and gaudy, neon-tinged edifices. Often, the two intermeshed, and after months of traversing, the local barbeque joints and Pentecostal churches were virtually indistinguishable from one another.

As I neared my occupational destination, the backdrop transitioned into a universal, grayish hue, as chipped concrete, bent fencing wires and stained bricks adorned practically every structure in the area. The scent of industrial smog and car exhaust coalesced in the air, producing a thick, nauseating aroma that permeated the clouds with a scent comparable to rotten eggs, as the roar of passing trains rattled hourly, constantly shaking the frames of windows that still secured unbroken glass, of which there were very few in the industrial sector.

All summer jobs are, veritably, the same: lugging archaic textbooks up wobbly ladders is equivalent to selling lemonade, or extorting one’s neighbors into paying outlandish sums of money for less-than-professional-lawn care services. A summer job is, essentially, industrial prostitution: in exchange for eight dollars an hour, you whore out your body, expel copious amounts of fluids and place yourself in seedy, hazardous predicaments for nominal financial gain.

I had been absorbed into a vortex of negligible expectations and minimal aspirations. The ten hour days of manual labor reaped only the basest of fruits for me: extravagant electronics purchases, outlandish beer parties on the weekends, the occasional sordid backseat encounter with a single-mother colleague. The increasingly banal aspects of life eventually pressed me into a dizzying state of introspection; atop massive industrial shelving, I would existentially ponder as ounces of sweat streamed forth from my brow, a sort of neo-Proletariat Plato.

Even from such a formative point in my existence, I professed an unrelenting abhorrence for such a cyclical, blue collar lifestyle.