Head Case by Cole Cohen Read Free Book Online Page B

music is deeply physical. The texture of sound travels through my internal circuitry, tumbles through my veins, and fans out to all of my limbs. It’s an out-of-body experience, yet this hyperawareness of my physical being as a conduit for sound is also the greatest sense of my own physicality that I have ever felt.
    I buy my first electric guitar for a hundred bucks from another Johnston student, using money from my summer job as a counselor at a theater camp. Learning is hard, and I have more than one built-in excuse to fail. At twenty-two, I already feel embarrassingly old to be awkwardly plinking and squawking away over an instrument most of my friends figured out in their teens. I am scared that I won’t be able to learn, more scared of the responsibility of learning. I am determined to try, though, because it’s hard for me to imagine that loving music as much as I do has nothing to do with actual musicianship, which is like thinking that I could be a great chef because I love to eat.
    I never learn guitar, and when I graduate I give the instrument to Matt. Three years later, Matt calls to tell me about collaging the guitar with magazine cutouts. “It looks great! You’d really like it.” I feel a twinge of jealousy, but I know that the guitar is in its real home.
    My senior year, 2003, I take a class in alternative medicine to finally fulfill my science requirement. As part of a class demonstration, I’m hooked up to a biofeedback machine for the first time. Looking at my brain waves on a computer screen, the professor furrows her brow.
    â€œDo you have a history of depression in your family?” she asks.
    â€œYes,” I say. “Why?”
    â€œWell, there are all of these spikes—we call them rabbit ears—in your brain waves.”
    I’m already seeing a local therapist and trying to blunt my moods with prescription antidepressants, sleeping pills, and antianxiety prescriptions. I am twenty-three; it would be easy enough to say that I don’t know my own mind yet, but with my brainwaves on full view I feel as if I’ve blown a secret by exposing instead of protecting my darker self. I have no way of knowing that my brain is keeping a bigger secret from me.
    By the end of senior year, graduating students at Johnston choose a committee of professors and peers who decide if their graduation contracts have been fulfilled. Upon completion, the students are granted a diploma in their own self-titled emphasis. Alumni have passed down to us that a colon in the title of your degree will help on grad school applications. Otherwise, anything goes. One graduation, I watched a woman receive a college degree in the supercalifragilistic world of art. Amy, my freshman roommate, graduated with a degree in global domination and went on to receive a masters in political theory from the University of Virginia. In May 2003, I graduate with a degree in integrating writing and performance.
    I approach the postcollege world delicately, like a bomb technician.

 
    2004
    Portland, Oregon
    In 2004, after living with my parents for a year—they moved to Portland when my father started teaching philosphy again while I was in college—I have saved enough money to move out on my own.
    The city of Portland is laid out in a grid; the streets are in alphabetical order or they are numbered. Neighborhoods are divided neatly into quadrants: Southeast, Northeast, Southwest (downtown), and Northwest. I start my tic-tac-toe game of moving from neighborhood to neighborhood in a run-down house in Southeast Portland. Last year, the inventor of the MRI won a Nobel Prize. It will be three years still until I lie down inside of one.
    Out of college for a year and a half, after four years of believing that we are each special enough to merit degrees as individual as snowflakes from the Johnston Center, my college friends and I are all working retail. I work as a barista in the caf é section