Note: this post originally appeared on my (now defunct) Substack on March 18, 2026
Playing
the game Perfect Tides: Station to Station last month has got me
thinking about my own personal college experience. I began my Freshman year at
Rhode Island College (or RIC for short) during the Fall term of 1998, and
graduated over the summer of 2003, with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree. Why
five years instead of the traditional four, you may wonder? Well, to get your
diploma, there were a number of requirements you had to meet, like having so
many total credits, being at or above a certain GPA point, and various course
requirements. One of those course requirements was Lab Science, and I had a
devil of a time passing such a course (even during my middle school and high
school years, my two worst subjects were always Math and Science). Having said
that, it’s not like my fifth year was even a full year. I did take four courses
that Fall Term, but in the Spring Term I really only took one class, Advanced
Workshop in Creative Writing, which met once a week, on Wednesday (in June-July
of 2003, I took a summer session course at a nearby community college, CCRI,
where I finally passed a Lab Science course . . . after my credits were
transferred, I got my diploma in the mail in July). My major was English, while
my minor was in Film.
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| My College Diploma |
Thinking back on it all, I kind of wish I had taken
college a little more seriously. It’s not that I was a bad student, or a stupid
one, I was just somewhat unmotivated and indifferent and driftless: the only
classes where I generally really tried to excel were the advanced creative
writing courses. Plus, I had a lot going on in my life at the time, with a lot
of distractions. I was pretty diligent my Freshman year, but by Sophomore year
I was, on the side, doing a lot of gaming (mainly Doom, Gangsters:
Organized Crime, the first two Rainbow Six games, Thief
Gold and Thief II: The Metal Age, and System
Shock 2), working on music (this especially became a big concern in
the year 2000, when I began composing music on my computer), watching movies,
writing novels (including my short noir novel Twist in
February 1999, my serial killer thriller novel Red Cherry in
the summer/fall of 19991,
and Illuminated
Shadows, the first book of my Trinity fantasy trilogy, in the year
2000), plus holding a part-time job (working as a bagger and cart attendant at
a Stop & Shop supermarket) and spending a lot of time online posting on
forums and message boards, mainly sites like Through The Looking Glass and Barbelith.
Essentially, I was just in my own little world, and kind of scatterbrained.
Also, it didn’t help that while some of my professors were great, others were
real hard-asses, and then there were some who had long ago checked out and just
stopped giving a damn, and in that latter case it’s really hard to get inspired
or motivated with people like that. Complicating matters, in the Spring Term of
2002, I also began reading The Invisibles by Grant Morrison,
which got me dabbling in the occult for a time, and that was yet another
distraction. I even had a bit of a social life: while I wasn’t the type to go
to parties (RIC wasn’t a big party school anyway), I did socialize and even had
a small circle of friends. So I was just all over the place. In some ways, I was
like Max Fischer in Rushmore, just with less charisma.
The funny thing is, recently I downloaded my college
transcripts, and I was surprised to see that my grades weren’t quite as
terrible as I remembered them being. Of the 39 courses or so I took during my
five years at RIC, there were five in the A range (most of which I got during
my final year, where I started buckling down), ten in the B range, 12 in the C
range, 4 in the D range (which still counted as getting the low pass), and five
in the F range (plus two “Satisfactory” and one “Unsatisfactory” grades, the
latter being from my first attempt to get my Math requirement). Essentially, I
was a B’s and C’s student, which according to the college’s grading system
classified me as a “Good/Satisfactory” student. It wasn’t always pretty, but I
usually got the required credits. The five courses I flunked were mainly
Science-related: Introduction to Astronomy, Introduction to Geology, and
Introduction to Biology, while the other two were Film courses (one of which,
through a scheduling error on my part, I kind of missed the Final exam . . . as
I said, scatterbrained). At the very least, I never flunked any of the 16
English courses I took, and seeing as how that was my major, I’m happy about
that (though it’s somewhat embarrassing that of the two Shakespeare courses I
took, I ended up with a C and a D- grade; one of those hard-ass professors).
What it boils down to was that as a college student I was adequate, and to me
that’s not a negative connotation word (hell, according to H.P. Lovecraft’s
wife, he was an adequate lover).
I guess if I were doing it all over again, I’d
probably, first of all, pick a different minor. My minor in college, as noted
above, was Film, because when I first enrolled at RIC, it was during that brief
period in my life where, inspired by the indie films of directors like Quentin
Tarantino and the Coen Brothers that I had begun to watch during my Senior year
of high school, I was entertaining dreams of being a filmmaker myself, hence why
I picked Film as my minor. And though I did diligently work on two screenplays
(neither of which I completed) during my Freshman year at RIC (Nurse
Sharks, a Reservoir Dogs-rip-off about an
all-female gang of thieves planning a car heist, and Arthouse,
which was to be kind of a Surrealist Eraserhead rip-off), I quickly
lost interest in that dream by the end of my first year at RIC, but just never
got around to changing my minor (as it is, I only took one Film course my
second year, none in my third year, three in my fourth year, and one in my
final year). In hindsight, what I really should have selected to be
my minor was History, one of the few non-Art/English-related subjects that I
really excelled at in high school. I only took two History courses during my
five years at RIC, an Intro to Western History course my very first semester at
the college, and a Perspectives on East Asia course I took my third year. The
Intro to Western History course was one of the few courses I actually got an A
grade on, and my professor was very impressed with a paper I wrote on the
atrocities associated with Christopher Columbus (so impressed, in fact, that he
made a copy of it to show future classes as an example of how to write an
essay). He tried to get me interested into taking a more advanced History
course, but I wasn’t really into that at the time, and I’ve always regretted
that. I sometimes wonder if that’s why I’ve read so many history-related books
these last 6-7 years, to make up for lost time. Not that taking Film as a minor
was a total loss . . . at the very least, I got to see a lot of really cool
movies, like Do The Right Thing, Un Chien Andalou, Meshes of
the Afternoon, La Jetée, The Ghost
and Mrs. Muir, Night on Earth, The Man
Who Shot Liberty Valance, and many, many Hitchcock movies.
Actually, it was pretty much in college that I first fell in love with the work
of Alfred Hitchcock (Strangers on a Train being the first film of his I ever
saw).
I also would have liked to have read more of the
books that were assigned to me, but it’s kind of hard: you have all these
courses with all this assigned reading and not enough time to read it all, so
you have to pick your battles and choose what to read, what to skim, and what
to skip. I did read some of the books I was assigned to read, like various
Shakespeare plays, Oedipus the King and Candide and Les
Fleurs du mal, but there were also a large number of books I blew
off: Frankenstein,
Wuthering
Heights,
Beloved, The Bluest Eye, Invisible Man, Wise
Blood, and numerous others2.
It’s just (aside from the time issues noted above) I was far more interested in
the books I was reading on my own time and of my own choice on the side. It’s also
worth noting that, after my second year or so, most of the rest of the English
classes I took tended to be more creative writing courses where the emphasis
was less on reading and more on writing, so in truth, over my five years at
RIC, I didn’t really have a hell of a lot of assigned reading, all things
considered (excluding generic textbooks, that is).
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| The Campus Library |
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| The suit of armor on the library's fourth floor |
Other times during between-class breaks, after I’d
have lunch in the Dining Center, I would just go for long walks all around the
campus (if the weather permitted): I used to often journey to the very top of
the campus, where, behind the old Athletic Center, there was a cul-de-sac, in
the center of which was an isolated tree, that I liked to say hello to, as I
felt it was lonely (alas, when I last returned to the campus, in the spring of
2013, I was saddened to see that the tree was no longer there). I would also
spend large amounts of time hanging out at the campus Computer Lab, either
working on papers or just wasting time on the Internet.
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| The isolated tree at the end point of the campus |
I also remember how I would usually park my car
behind the dorms every day, then make the long walk to the school proper (not
fun in the dead of winter, mind, as the campus was located up in the hills and
could get very bitingly cold when it was windy out): I would basically follow a
path where the dorms would be on my left and a forest would be on my right (and
vice-versa during the return trip). Though I can recall one harrowing incident
where, on the first day of a Literature and Film course I took in the Spring
2002 term, we watched the film Don’t Look Now during the first
class. This was an evening class, and when I left the building afterwards I saw
the campus was enshrouded in fog. As I walked back to my car, I was feeling
especially jumpy that evening, and kept expecting to see a little disfigured
female dwarf in a red coat come running out from between the parked cars as I
walked the long, lonely path back to the parking lot behind the dorms.
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| The main parking lot behind the dorms, with the arrow pointing to the path that led to the main campus |
Other memories: earlier, I mentioned how my last term
at RIC, I only had one class, Advanced Workshop in Creative Writing. You
couldn’t just pick this class yourself, the professor had to handpick you for
it, and of all the courses I ever took at RIC, that one was by far my favorite.
I actually mentioned this class in my recent Substack entry on Shakespeare; we
would meet once a week in the campus Shakespeare Room, which was one of my
favorite rooms in the entire campus, because it was decorated with a lot of
nice little Shakespearian touches.
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(The Shakespeare Room, with an arrow pointing to where I sat during the Advanced Workshop in Creative Writing course I took during my final term at RIC)
I also should mention the Mistress Mayhem S&M
Show. Towards the end of my Freshman year at RIC, during the Spring 1999 term,
I developed a crush on a Goth girl who worked at the campus Dining Center: I
remember that she would often wear a black Bauhaus band T-shirt, and the band
logo fascinated me. During the summer before I started my Sophomore year, I
started to get involved in the Goth subculture myself, buying CDs by bands like
Bauhaus and Siouxsie and the Banshees and Switchblade Symphony, getting Gothic
bracelets and necklaces and rings at Newbury Comics and Hot Topic, and even
purchasing (from a Salvation Army store in Providence) a black trenchcoat, one
sleeve of which I “artfully” sliced up with a razor blade, to give it a
asymmetrical ragged look. In the start of my Sophomore year of college, Fall
1999, I also began reading writers like Poppy Z. Brite, H.P. Lovecraft, and
started reading Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman graphic novels.
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| Portrait of the Artist as a Young Goth (2002) |
Obviously, I was trying to impress the girl in
question, who I believe was named Karen (which is why the Goth girl in my
Trinity books is also named Karen): one day at the Dining Center she
complimented the Switchblade Symphony T-shirt I had on, and told me that she
did a show every Friday night at the campus radio station that was focused on
Industrial, Darkwave and EBM music, the name of this show being the Mistress
Mayhem S&M Show. So during the Fall 1999 and Spring 2000 terms I would
drive up to the campus every Friday night where, from 11 p.m. to 1 a.m., I
would listen to her show on my car radio (usually while reading books like Lost
Souls by Poppy Z. Brite and Silk by Caitlin R. Kiernan). I
discovered a lot of great music from her show, and can even remember the first
two songs she played that first show I heard, “Do You Fear (For Your Child)” by
My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult and “Stigmata” by Ministry (the day after
that, I went to Newbury Comics and purchased Ministry’s The Land
of Rape and Honey album). By the Fall of 2001, however, in an
attempt to present a less ominous image I kind of ditched the black trenchcoat
look and also lost all the jewelry, though I mostly continued wearing black
T-shirts and jeans.
(Me on vacation in Montreal, in the summer of 2000. Note the skull-themed bracelets. Sadly, I don’t think there are any photos of me in the trenchcoat)
If I ever become famous enough, I think I would like
to donate my papers to Rhode Island College, as their final resting place,
preferably in the campus Library.
Some more pictures:
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| The Campus Quad |
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| Abstract art sculpture on the front lawn of the library |
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The Student Union building. The elevated walkway on the left of the picture shows the connection between the Student Union and the Dining Center (a handy shortcut on cold winter days) |
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The car I drove during my entire time at RIC, though it died right before I began my summer session at CCRI in June 2003. One of the bumper stickers reads “I’m so Gothic I’m Dead”
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| By the end of my time at RIC, my backpack was looking a little ragged |
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| Rows of desks on the first floor of the library |
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| One of the books I would often flip through on my library breaks |
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Another picture of me from that era, my 22nd birthday, June 17 2002 (shortly after I had finished my 4th year at RIC). This is the only tie-dye T-shirt I ever owned |
In
the years 2015-2016, I wrote a novel, Harlem Smoke, in which Red
Cherry’s main character, Marsha Garland, played a crucial role
In
all fairness, I did eventually read Frankenstein and Wuthering
Heights and Wise Blood on my own time, many
years later
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