Notes from Maine - 2024/06/30

When I went away to school, my first roommate told me about the time that he took mushrooms. 

“You see a doorway,” he said, “just a couple steps away from you in the center of the room. And you know that if you open that door the answer to everything—where we come from, the meaning of life, everything—is behind it.”

“What happens when you open it?” I asked. I already had an idea what his answer would be.

“That’s the thing—you can’t ever get to it. And if you do, you’ll never remember what you saw.”

I knew that’s what he was going to say. Growing up, I was trained by TV and movies that anything mystical or supernatural would turn out to be empty or a hoax. In the first act of a Michael Crichton plot, he’ll introduce the most amazing concepts but by the end you’ll have to re-kill the dinosaurs or gun down the gray apes because the world needs to be returned to the unenlightened state that it was in at the beginning of the story. 

Later in the school year, I returned back to my room to find the door guarded by two enormous football players, barring my access. 

“It’s my room,” I said. 

“Take a walk.”

I tried to move past them and one grabbed my arm and walked me down the hall. 

“Murph is having a conversation with Steve. You’re gonna have to wait.”

When I was allowed back in the room, my roommate was covered in his own blood. There was a decent amount of his blood sprayed across my desk as well.

“I deserved it,” he said through a hand that was pinching his nosebleed.

My roommate had gossiped in class about how, “Murph knocked up his girlfriend.” The teacher happened to be a family friend (of Murphs), which Steve didn’t know. Because of Steve, Murph’s family found out everything. It was an accident, but undeniably my roommate’s fault. He took the beating without objecting. I objected (on principle) but it wasn’t my affair.

I think I remember every teacher I had at that school. There were some oddballs there, but also some really talented educators. My Latin teacher required all homework to be formatted very precisely. Subject, upper left. Name, upper right. The page must be folded in half lengthwise. Only the fronts of pages would contain writing. Your grade would be marked on the top side of the outer fold. Five points off for sloppy penmanship. No erasure marks were allowed.

My handwriting at the time was atrocious so I had to find a workaround. I wasn’t going to lose five points from every assignment. After the first week, I started writing all my Latin homework with my left hand. It took longer and required much more care, but forced me to write precisely. I got perfect marks once I stopped using my right hand. To get from Latin to Math, I had to descend two long carpet stairways that wrapped the center of the big hall. With one foot tilted down and the other tilted up, I learned to “skate” down the stairs. It’s difficult to describe, but my legs didn’t move at all. Only my feet toggled back and forth as I let gravity take me down. Once or twice I rolled an ankle, but it was worth it. To skate down the stairs like that was akin to flying. I still dream about those stairs. 

Here’s the weird thing—I’m not the only one. 

This is a quote from a Reddit post from a couple of years ago: “For over a decade or more, whenever I encounter stairs in my dreams, I slide down them like in this gif [embedded video]. My feet angled down and I just smoothly go down them like I was on skis almost.” 

The responses include, "I have this dream all the time. Had it for years. Not sure what it means,” and “no way !!!! i thought it was only me … seriously what this dream means???”

But I swear to you that I did this maneuver in real life long before I dreamt it. A few years ago I finally found a tutorial that described the exact process: https://youtu.be/eT1mXVdOHTY

When I skated down the stairs and went to Math class, I was in my safe space. Mr. Hansen understood me from the first day. I never had the ability to learn math in a classroom, but I also never had a problem getting a good grade. Classroom instruction was both too fast and too slow for me. I needed to learn math on my own. I would work through examples and the theory would just pop into my brain. No amount of explanation could make this trick happen, so in class I was often bored and disruptive. To keep me quiet, Mr. Hansen would hand me a book at the beginning of class. In Math class I read Camus, Albee, and Dostoevsky. Hanny never demanded book reports, but he would talk to me about the books after class as he smoked in his tiny office. 

Years after, I thought about all the ways I could have better taken advantage of my time at that school. With enough perspective, prior mistakes become so clear. Then, a few years after that I realized that none of it really mattered. I learned just as much from the mistakes I made as I did from the teachers. Mr. Hansen had the right idea all along—the math wasn’t the important part. We were sitting in that classroom so we could learn how to learn. When it was clear that I already knew how to learn math on my own, he taught me how to appreciate dense philosophical books, or at least pretend that I did. And my first roommate taught me taught me that enlightenment was unachievable and that snitches get stitches. 

I’m not sure precisely what my father had in mind when he sent me to that school. I could have picked any school, but I went there because that’s where my sister went. It was easier to follow in her footsteps. I trusted her judgement (or I was too lazy to make my own decision).