Assignment for "Mythology and Modern Life", a case study- 03/06/11

I drifted though my life like an ordinary parasite without concern. I was fed, I was rested, my needs were being met, and I was comfortable. Women who had in the past been a difficult species to understand, had become for a time that I was now in the midst of enjoying, a cheap and easy thing to take advantage of. As long as my comfort was entertained, I lived in my dream world hoarding as much of myself to myself as I could; only tossing out messages casually in the mistaken belief that I was being understood as a genius. But I knew everyone saw the true reality as I tried to ignore or deflect this fact from my admitting consciousness. I went on as I always had, not because I thought I was right, but that I could not become anything other than what I was used to being. Then my mother died and I lost what I thought was the best job I would ever have.

I thought I was a big shot, with my “Allied Electric” embroidered sweatshirt, t-shirts, my work phone, showing up in my work truck with the logo on it. To appearances I looked like I was somebody rather than the gofer, the errand boy, the bum I really was. I was unhappy but I thought at least I had the image of being someone. My only ambition was to get paid to drive around Central New York all day, listening to audio books and podcasts on my mp3 player, or singing obliviously along with the radio. I didn’t care about anything other than going as many miles away from Syracuse that I could get away with, with exploring parts of Central New York when I should already be back at the shop being useful, of obviously taking too long to go out on a delivery, and then coming  back. I fought a vicious psychic battle with that company not to insist on curtailing my attempts at vacation. I had always had the call to adventure in my veins, it was in my blood, and it was my character, even if I only had the faintest perception of this idea in my conscious mind.

My cell phone rang one Monday morning at work and I just happened to be talking with my boss in the shop. My phone usually never rang; my family and social circle are very small, consisting only of my mother, my grandmother as family, and my girlfriend Sue. Sometimes Sue would call me just to say “hello”, knowing that I had a driving job, and was probably on the road and able to her craving for baby talk. I tried to discourage her from this because over time I felt it become aggravating and a distraction. After not answering my phone for a while she had taken the hint and stopped trying to waste both of our energies on what was just a pointless pursuit of communication. She still tried every once in a while though.

I pulled my phone out of my pocket to see who it was, and if it was Sue, I would just hit “Do Not Accept” on the phone to stop the Doctor Who ringtone from blaring.

It was my grandmother’s phone number. I answered it because it was unusual for her to call me, especially if she thought I was at work.
            “Joe, I just got a call from the hospital. You’re mother is there again”. I could hear the terror laced in my grandmother’s voice. I told her that I would come and get her, that it was probably nothing, and not to worry. I hung up with her and I told my boss, who of course let me go.

She had previously been hospitalized due to her asthma that she had seemed to suddenly develop over the past few years. When we went to see her the first time she was hospitalized, she was exhausted but still able to talk, and my grandmother and I got over our shocks quickly enough. Now two years later when we arrived at the hospital and saw my mother, with her tongue hanging out, tubes going down her throat, hooked up to machines, we knew she was gone. You could just tell.

My grandmother and I decided to donate her organs and tissues to science, so that they may help someone else, and four people benefited from this decision. The rest of her remains were sent to the funeral home and we had her cremated. Now the person I knew as my mother was now a box of ashes, my family now only consisted of myself and my grandmother.

I was not ready for the trial of caring for my mother’s death, not this soon in my life, not before I had enjoyed more years of life with her. Now I was disposing of all her belongings, of all the things she had accumulated in this lifetime, what now had no worth to anyone. I was not ready for this supreme ordeal but my fate gave me no choice but to deal with the situation.

            When my mother was still in the hospital, only alive due to the machines that kept her life functions going, I went in to pick up my check for the week, what I thought was only going to be for a few dollars, but since I was in the vicinity I might as well swing by and get it. I was surprised when I opened the check. They had paid me for the whole week even though I had only really worked for what were only a couple of hours that Monday morning. I was so grateful. I told them the first opportunity that I got.

Over the next several weeks, with the help of my mother’s friends, we packed up my mother’s belongings, after we sold what we could, then donating everything else to charity, giving away the evidence of my mother’s life so that it could become someone else’s.

I was resurrected back into my normal, working life, and I went on about my life. It is a sad fact of how easily one is able to go back to one’s routines after someone we have known our whole life dies, or goes away. It was as if she had never existed at all. Someday I knew this is what other people will go through with me. This is what happens to us all.

After a few months I sank back into not caring about the job, goofing around on my phone when I should have been working, sorting this mess of a warehouse into some kind of useful organization. I was supposed to be busy putting all the equipment and left over parts from old construction sites into order so that it could be easily found and used for new construction projects that my company would get hired for. Instead I used to take off and go spend an hour or so at the Onondaga Lake Parkway, down the road, if I wasn’t hiding somewhere in my company’s basement, kicking back, and reading a book I had smuggled into the place that day.

I was comfortable with the way things were, I had no real motivation or ambition to change. I was going to school off and on, take a class here, then take two years off, take two classes here, take a year off there, etc. I knew eventually I would get my Bachelor’s and a better paying job, what does it matter if it doesn’t happen for twenty years? But now there was something awake inside me with the realization that I could die young like my mother, that probably within the next few years my grandmother would be gone too, and I would finally be really alone, no flesh and blood to rely on for comfort, no one who I could really pour my heart out to. I had to become my own man, to get an education for a better job, to learn how to follow my dream of becoming an author because I had nothing else in this world that could motivate me to live. I hate to say it but I think my mother’s death was the first threshold I needed to cross, that I had been nothing but a greedy parasite my entire life, and that only I could determine whether I too would end up like my mother, dead after only fifty two years of just going through the motions, and nothing to show for it.

            Then I thought, “If this was the best job I would ever have then I had better make myself the best employee that I could”. I figured that most of this job is manual labor, then I had better start lifting weights to strengthen my body. Unfortunately I had never spoken this thought aloud at work, and there was no way they could discern this for themselves.

It was the first job I ever had where they put $187 a month into what is called a health savings account, it was the first time I had ever been employed with someone who let you know that you were not just a piece of meat to them. With the money they had already started putting in, I thought that this money would best be spent by me by buying bodybuilding supplements, protein powders, vitamins, etc.

I started hitting the weights harder than I had ever tried to lift weights in my life. I was going to get huge. This was going to be as series of physical tests that I would persist with until I was noticeably larger and stronger than I had ever been. I would become more masculine appearing, like the statues of Greek gods, as close to the golden standard of “maleness” that I could become, and within the near future be able to reap the rewards.

One cold Wednesday morning, I walked into work for my boss to tell me that he was “letting me go” because he had caught me “hiding” as he handed over the last check I would ever see from that place. I crumbled inside myself. It wasn’t the greatest job in the world but I thought at least I would see this one through for another few years at least, that I would leave it on my terms, and not the way I had concluded all my other jobs, in termination or abandoning a dead end job in the middle of the work day. Now, once again, I was suddenly unemployed, soon to be in financial free fall with my bills, rushing out to once again take the first crappy job that took the risk of hiring me so I could regain the sense of peace that comes with a steady paycheck coming in every week.

Then I remembered my mother’s words after I had gotten fired from a job delivering auto parts a few years earlier.

“Joe, you have to fight for your job. Let them know how much you want it. You can’t just give up”. Back then I did just because I was too embarrassed. This time I would have to get over myself and go in there and clarify how this situation came about.

            Somehow my old allies had become my new enemies, rejecting me from their presence; all for what I thought was a misunderstanding of misunderstandings. I wasn’t a bad guy, I didn’t deserve to be let go, I was just in over my head. I couldn’t make sense of what even they considered expensive garbage. I had to clarify myself to them, so I spent the weekend writing a letter, pouring my heart and soul out on four pages of typing paper. I would make three copies, one for my boss, one for Jeff and Barb so the family who owned the business would know the true me, and not the one that my boss had probably given them the impression I was.

I walked in at 8 o’clock on a Monday morning with the intent of delivering the letters to their intended recipients, wanting to get it over with emotionally and psychologically, but also because I needed definite closure with them, to know that what I had built up in my head as the last job that I would ever have for the rest of my life was truly over, and now I would have to find my illusion somewhere else. I thought, “Perhaps if they had read my words and saw my sincerity in them, that they would welcome me back with open arms, and possibly give me a raise too”. I walked in; handed my letters over to the people I had in mind, walked out, and expected them to be calling me within minutes. But they didn’t. A week went by with no response. I gave myself to then to finally accept that it was over, that I had screwed up a good thing.

I went around filling out some applications, sending out a few resumes, although not very enthusiastically when the unemployment, or free money from the government, started to come in on a regular basis. I thought, “Maybe I do need a paid vacation from work for six months”. Six months has now turned into over a year.

Here I was at 35 years of age, broke and living at home with my grandmother again, 18 years later I was in the same spot I was at 18 years old. I had come full circle and the road back seemed to lead to a dead end. I knew that without an education I would be out there looking for another $8/hr dead end, manual labor job, and only getting closer to my feared reality of becoming one of those fifty or sixty year old men who have amounted to nothing more than some dirty, low paying job, because they had never gotten an education or learned some skill or trade. I knew it was only a matter of time that I would have to wear my shame on my face every day like they did, not for their station in life, but for never striving for something when they could. I became desperate to get my way out of this impending future. I committed to my dream of being an author which I had up until now had perpetually put on, with all my other fairy tales and dream worlds.

I related my dream to my grandmother and my girlfriend, of wanting to be known as a professional artist, and they were very supporting. Instead of eventually getting around to writing a book, as I had always been intending, I committed myself to my pursuit, telling myself I will write a book, and it will happen in the next couple of years. I was no longer pursuing my own distractions, of drugs and girls. I knew I wasn’t going anywhere either going to a community college so I looked for a SUNY college that I could pursue my dream but do it online, without having the commute.

I discovered Empire State College and its flexibility in designing your own SUNY degree. Now I could create my own degree, for what I wanted to learn, and not some packaged deal that imposed what you felt was learning useless information along with the courses you were really interested in just to satisfy some kind of outdated requirement designed to make us “well-rounded people”. Doesn’t the college realize that we just go through motions when we are taught something we don’t want to learn, then instantly forget that information as soon as the course is over, and we know we no longer need it? Or if they do know it, like we students secretly suspect, then we just get taught their unintended lesson, that “everyone is a hypocrite, just go through the motions”. That is why I had changed my degree so many times when I was at Onondaga Community College, I didn’t know what I wanted to be, and some of the courses I had to take for some degrees were just beyond my limits, like Calculus and Physics. I would never have come to the circumstances of finding Empire State College if it hadn’t been for losing my job and awakening in myself the desire to return to college wholeheartedly.

Now I didn’t have to pay for, and spend precious moments of my life stressed out over something that I didn’t think and feel was necessary to me anymore. Now I could pick and choose courses, not only what I wanted to know, but what I felt I needed to know, what I saw were the reoccurring themes of my life, and what would take me in those directions that I wanted to go in my life. Now I could wholeheartedly pursue my dreams, of both getting and education, of being an author, of really being someone who could be proud of themselves rather than just going through the motions of life.

I wonder what the real reason is for this school, ESC, to use the term “mentor” instead of “advisor” like they do in every other college. Perhaps it is a place for those like me who have gone through the motions of life for so long, with so much dread and desperation, to find and become reawakened to life, and pursue our goals through higher education. When I met with my mentor I realized now I was finally on the right path in my life, that I had found something that had been missing all my life, and now I was completely invested in seeing this thing through unlike all the other things I had failed to accomplish, all the things that I had started, and never completed in my wasted life.

I selected my courses immediately as I could after going through the orientation and registration process. I wanted to take courses that would be the most relevant to the craft of writing. “Mythology and Modern Life” jumped out at me when I searched through the course catalog. I quickly selected it after reading “How to Read Literature like a Professor” by Thomas C. Foster. In it, he mentions how important the understanding of mythology is to writing, and how many authors used it to write their novels.

I realized after I started taking this class that I all my life I was weaving a personal mythology in my head, like we all do, like what our history and culture is always doing. I was awakened to the reoccurring cycles and themes of my life by the lessons I read in the books of this course.

The elixir, I believe, is my education, the things I need to tell my story, and I will only see the fruitful rewards of it only after much diligence and perseverance. It is only after I have earned my way to my degree, after much study and reading. Only then can I finally begin to approach the innermost caverns of my imagination, and tell my stories as I want them to be told, how they should be told. The only thing I can do while I wait for this conclusion of my degree, is to organize the notes I already have, into various categories to look at when I have an outline, having a structure for the stories I want to tell, then I attach the ideas and prose to their respective places in the outline fleshing them out, expanding or cutting as needed, stretching the fabric of the tent once the poles are put together. But it is only after I have thoroughly learned the lessons of masters who have gone before me and prevailed.

In effect I see myself as a kind of shaman, or rather that is the standard with which I want to identify with. The artist, like the shaman, exists to redefine our cultural ideas, to restate them, to analyze them, to create new ones, telling a story while trying to teach something. Our entertainment industry is our new religion, our new mythology. Our culture defines our ideals, and our culture is based on what the entertainment industry comes up with. It is always starving for new voices with new ideas but the ideas do not change, they are just restated, much like the myths and our religions. I would like to devote my life to this purpose and hopefully I can, through my education and ambitions, to keep other people from squandering as much of their lives as I did.

Not every hero’s journey goes the same as anyone else’s, but it is one we still have to make. The world does not turn for us, but takes us along with it in it’s endless orbits. And we like the earth, have our own gravities, pulling and being pulled into the people in our lives that come and go, and the circumstances that happen in our life, circumstances that we cannot avoid or escape. It is how we meet one another, how we enrich the lives and impress one another, how we evolve and adapt with one another that is the most important ideal in our lives. Or so I think.

Works Cited:

McLellan, Hilary. “Hero's Journey Basics”. 2003.