Chapter 8: Apocalypse Now

 

When the school year ended, I was out of a job, so I moved back to Beaverton. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I’d completed my spiritual quest. I was like a haggard Achaean come home from the Trojan War, only I was wearing a tie-dye t-shirt and a wooden name tag with the word GOOGOLPLEX written on it in purple Sharpie. I started feeling depressed. I’d peaked too early. I was like one of those high school jocks who forever reminisces about his glory days, only my glory was being alone in a cabin at 3,000 feet, reading essays about walking.

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My dad repeated his offer to get me a job at his electrical contracting company on the condition that I cut my long red hair. Reluctantly, I agreed. My perdition, in the form of gainful employment and health insurance, was inevitable. There was only so long you could earn your living singing “boom chicka boom” to a gangly pack of sixth graders. At some point, you had to join the ranks of men like my father and become chronically depressed, earning money all day so you could fail to buy happiness.

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I went into the bathroom, took a beautiful lock of hair between my fingers, and opened the metal mouth of the scissors. Just then the phone rang. It was Angela. She asked if I wanted to go to Montana. 
 

I said, “What’s in Montana?”
 

She said, “I don’t want to talk about it. Are you in or what?”

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