Excerpt: Expect the Inexplicable

INTRODUCTION
This is a collection of select journal entries from my high school years. They are by no means complete. I have removed the most insufferable sections, modified some unclear passages, added to unfinished entries, and tweaked old niggling sentences. The three hundred page paper journal was an experiment, a rough draft that I planned to rewrite someday. The files in this folder are easy to access and read, and provide a truthful account of my high school days; what little I had to hide, I did not record. I have mostly forgotten what I have kept from my paper journal. The most eventful days left me the least time to write. Therefore, there is not much in the original journal about musical or football season, and I often made the mistake of not recounting the previous evening during the long, dull, academic day. The reader may forgive this lapse in light of what I do have to offer.

---KAY

I wrote this introduction sometime during the last summer, whenever I first got it into my head that, one, I should type out all of the old journal entries scattered between a few books, and two, that the events and thoughts they detailed were interesting enough for someone else to read one day. And that the finished culmination of those entries wasn’t revoltingly cute and snappy, like so many “young adult” books, and that it didn’t turn into a Frankenstein book, all the dead parts sewn together but without the life-shocking charge that would bring it alive for the reader. That’s partly why I’m writing now, when I’m nineteen, rather than when I’m old and venerable and too busy trying to keep the stove from belching flames at the grandkids to write. That, and the combined brilliance and fervor and joy of Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson is enough to drive any kid mad enough to try to write their own version of Look Homeward, Angel to the Great Shark Hunt. I’m no different. Salinger doesn’t cut it. I’m going to try.

The world is quiet here, a bizarre and popular author wrote in one of his tragic books, and his observation applies often to my little world, here at college. My dorm is quiet, cool, and the windows are criss-crossed by scraggly branches. This place doesn’t matter much, yet, though. Everything that hissed and gurgled beneath the surface during high school is still getting spit up during the weekends and through texts and Facebook. Things that we didn’t have enough energy to resolve during the appropriate time keep reappearing. At the same time, there’s this warm feeling of camaraderie between the five or six of us in the Core, and the Big Four has fissured somewhat, but put us all in one bright room for an evening, and it will be like the war never happened. We made it through; we were the Waiting, and now we are the Free. Or the Released. Not the Escaped. None of us was that brave...