And this, at the time, meant proving myself—affirming my worth—to my alma mater.

Wrote my undergrad fiction advisor a thirsty, harass-y email.

About Checking In.

About could I buy you a drink. To catch up.

He responded after a week or so Semester’s a little crazy rn but did I wanna come out to a faculty reading later this month?

The reading was at a site that wasn’t a site when I went there.

When I went there there had been talk of a hotel to be erected adjacent to campus in the near future; I remember bc there had been much protest-ruckus about the ‘ethicality’ of this.

But they had, since, gone ahead and built the thing.

I pulled up in the box feeling excited and also ashamed for feeling excited, and also crazy.

Everything surreal, entering the room the reading was in.

I’d been planning for this all week, but was somehow still almost late.

Only one open seat.

Wasn’t till I sat in it that I realized who it was next to.

“Professor E!” I said, when I sat.

He looked at me with a sardonic twinkle in his eye—immediately recognizing me.

“I’m sorry, you’ll have to excuse me,” he said in that dainty, parodically academic, lowkey Asperger’s way he spoke. “But I’ve forgotten your name.”

I felt the wheels turning in my head. Felt my School Voice/Self wash over me like a mask.

Professor E was a savage.

First I had him was fall of senior year which was actually spring since I’d taken what would have been senior fall to move out west with ex bae (she’d graduated), work at a coffee shop, read all of Bolaño, and dwell in the romanticism of having ‘dropped out.’

He’d do shit like take a sentence out of everyone’s papers and read them aloud, one at a time, smirking after each, to show how shitty everyone’s papers were. Only never mine.

I had no qualms about assuming School/Academic Voice back then.

Plus I was grown and actually read the shit—on the Philosophy of Art, ‘life as a work of art,’ that was his thing—unlike the rest of those spoonfed fucks too sure of themselves, too concerned with pushing their woke agendas, to actually challenge themselves to consider anything they didn’t already think.

Things were good with us till the first class of his Philosophy of Language honors seminar, the following semester.

I’d finagled my way into writing a book on 2666 (2004), sexual assault, and the Juárez femicides for two of my final four credits to graduate, and was more shopping the seminar to gauge its relevance.

Like five people. In Professor E’s house.

That Wittgenstein was on the syllabus mainly why I signed up.