During the three months that I’m away from Longwood, my shoulders are blistered from sunburn, my toes have sand between them and my work pants still have cow crap stains splattered on them. It’s a time period where I can finally breathe lightly without the crushing weight of a literary analysis due in the next five hours. It’s the only season where I can squeeze out a story or two, and run it through a few magazines with hollow prayers of it getting published.
Last summer was a dry season for me, spending my last two semesters crunching out essay after essay, and script after script; it left me drained of words. I was sitting at the computer at three in the morning, two forties murdered in a back alley, no words were coming to me. I realized that I might as well have started chugging formaldehyde; this is how authors die, a sick mixture of apathy and alcohol swimming in the liver, and no words pouring into the empty word document. Stephen King said that stories aren’t going to come to you, you make your way to them. I’ve already written everything that has to do with my life, poverty, abuse, nature, love, you name it: I figured it was time to expand the horizon a bit.
So I joined a UFOlogy club. No, I don’t believe in UFOs, but you don’t have to believe in Zeus to find Greek mythology interesting.
The first meeting was inside of a library. It was a secluded membership, one that shunned non-believers and skeptics. The group leader and I had a few back and forth emails that sounded like they were ripped straight from an X-Files pilot episode: “I want to believe,” I told her. Any sign of skepticism shown was taken as blasphemy, in order for me to maintain a membership, I had to suspend all disbelief thoroughly.
At this point, I began wondering if this is really worth a memoir. I began questioning my own morality in lying to these people’s faces for the sake of using their stories and leaving their names behind. I wondered why I picked abductees and night watchers as the group to write about. Am I going to learn something from this? Or am I some demented egocentric writer desperately trying to find a story?
Of course, these questions were not immediately answered when I walked into the library’s spacious meeting room. I opened the door and walked into the room, the fact that the door was closed before the meeting began, I found mildly alarming.
I was the only male in the group; I was the only college student in the group. The group consisted of white females (estimated to be in their fifties or sixties). Their characters were very warming, greeting and cheerful. It was as if meeting me (or meeting anyone), and making a new friend was the greatest thing to happen to them that day.
I shook hands, smiled and observed. I felt like I was walking across a field where discomfort and fascination waltzed.
