The state of the economy has lead to a boom in the proliferation and popularity of personal writing about being jobless. In this subgenre of creative nonfiction, Sam Biddle is fast proving himself a master. Much like how Will Leitch chronicled his semi-employed wanderings in the post dot-com crash wilderness for his “Life As A Loser” column (and later a book of the same title), Biddle is detailing his life as a post-grad student with a degree in philosophy, trying to make a go of it in New York City. The self-deprecating wit and honesty with which he lays bare his situation makes for great (meaning in my case, cathartic) reading:

To sit in the NYPL’s [New York Public Library's] reading room is to be ostensibly part of some enterprise, and to feel good for it. There’s nothing I look forward to more than a friend asking some variation of “So, what exactly… do you do every day?” My usual response would be something along the lines of “Oh, ha ha, yes, wonderful, I was hoping you would ask that unintentionally devastating question. But before I answer—my word! Look! Look behind you! Some sort of explosion! It’s a bear, exploding!” and then I leap out the nearest window.

I ran into such a scenario (minus the window leaping) over lunch with friends a couple weeks ago. I was meeting one of the gentlemen dining with us for the first time, and at one point he asked me, “So what are you doing now? Just taking a break?”

To which I replied, “I think they just call it ‘being unemployed’ now that I’ve graduated college, but yes.”

I’ve been doing research on the Palestine War for some short stories I’m working on. It’s been over a year since I started, and I still come across new information that surprises me. Just today I came across an amazing account of international intrigue. During the Palestine War, Israel was under an arms embargo that forced it to acquire most of its weapons illegally. This newspaper article, dated September 20, 1948, is on Emanuel Zur, one of the Israeli agents involved with smuggling aircraft out of Britain. It reads like a pulp thriller:

EMANUEL ZUR, the man for whom Scotland Yard has been looking since Beaufighters, Mosquitos and Halifaxes vanished from Britain, sipped cognac in the sunshine of the Champs Elysees today and said: “I was the brain behind the deals. The planes are now in Tel Aviv, part of the Jewish Air Force”.

Zur raised his glass again, smiled, and added: “I made the plans which got the warplanes out. But I don’t think I could do it again”.

Our tale begins on the previous Sunday evening with a play written by Robert Sherwood (supposedly, anyway) in 1935 called The Petrified Forest. I was going through the syllabus of each of my classes to make sure I hadn’t forgotten to do anything in the way of homework. I came to my syllabus for my senior capstone class–MAR 498C–and saw that I had to read The Petrified Forest by that Tuesday. I had finished everything else due for Monday so I decide to get a head start on it.

Normally I’m pretty good about buying books for classes ahead of time. I usually have all of them by the first week of the semester. I even remembered picking this book out at the University of Arizona bookstore and wondering what it was about. I remember what kind of book it was too: 8 in. x 5 in. in size, a little under a quarter of an inch thick, with a dull blue cover and a picture on the front, set in about an inch and a half from the edges.

I started looking through my bookshelf in my closet. Then through the stack of books I had on my desk. Then through the stack I had on my side table by the closet. Then through the stack of papers on the spare futon. (My room isn’t in the best of shape lately.) No dice. I checked again, adding a few other locations to my search. Nothing. Befuddled, I looked at my receipt from the UofA bookstore to make sure I had purchased it. It wasn’t listed there.

That’s when things first started getting weird. I could have sworn I purchased it from the UofA bookstore. I was almost positive I had. I logged on to my account with Amazon to check my recent purchases. If I hadn’t gotten it from the UofA bookstore that’s probably the first place I would’ve gone to to get it, and indeed I had gotten several other books from there recently for other classes. But they had no record of me buying The Petrified Forest.

This also struck me as strange. I had never completely overlooked getting a book for a class before. “Oh well,” I thought, “I don’t have to have it read until Tuesday. I’ll pick it up from the bookstore tomorrow.”

The way the SunTran bus schedule and my class schedule work, the only way I can be on time is to always be half an hour early. Monday was no exception, so I walked over to the UofA bookstore before my first class of the day and waited for an attendant. They close off the shelves to browsers after the first couple weeks of school and you have to get an escort if you need anything. Why they do this is beyond me, but I assume it’s for security reasons.

“What can I do for you?” a man approaching the counter from somewhere asked.

“How’s it goin’? I’m looking to pick up a book for class.”

“What’s the class?” he asked.

“MAR 498C.”

He typed it into the computer and stared at the screen. “Poetics of Space?”

“No, actually. It’s called The Petrified Forest.”

He shook his head. “Poetics of Space is the only book that’s listed for this class.”

Huh. “Any way you can search for just the book title without entering the class?” Sometimes books are cross-listed if they’re required reading for more than one class.

A few seconds later he told me, “No, I’m sorry. We have it in here but it looks like it was never ordered for this semester.”

Now the gears in my head began to whirl. If the bookstore never even ordered it, then why did I remember buying it? Why did I have a memory of what it looked like? Memory is a tricky thing, and it’s not unheard of for people to have memories of experiences that they never experienced. I’ve read about psychological studies of such things. But honestly, this freaked me out a little. I had gone from definitely thinking I had this book to finding out that there never was and never had been any basis for thinking that. If the bookstore hadn’t ordered it, this was a major oversight on someone’s part–and probably not the professor’s, since she had told them to order the other required book for the class.

I thanked the bookstore employee and headed toward my first class of the day. It was an English class, but several of my classmates were also in my capstone class. I asked them about The Petrified Forest.

Now here it gets really crazy because it turns out none of them had this book. One said he had been haggling with the UofA bookstore for weeks to order it without success. Another said he had phoned two different Barnes & Noble stores and a Bookman’s, and none of them carried it either. I talked to half a dozen students from my capstone class in the course of the day. None of them had read it. None of them had it. None of them had any luck getting it.

I decided that the only way to get it and have it read by the next day would be to download it from somewhere online. I was perfectly willing to pay for it, but if it came up on RapidShare or one of those other file hosting sites in pdf, so be it. Amazon had a listing for the book (with a cover completely different from my memory of what it looked like), but they didn’t have it available as an e-book download. Neither did Google Books. Outside of them I couldn’t find it anywhere. I went through twenty pages of search results with some combination of “petrified forest,” “robert sherwood,” “play,” “read,” “online,” and “pdf.” Nothing.

I thought about asking someone in my Burton class that also happened to be in my capstone class if I could borrow it. I have an hour and a half break in-between the two, and if it was a short play I could borrow it at the start of the first and have it read by the start of the second. Given the track record of the students I had talked to so far though it seemed like a long shot. My last resort would be the UofA library. Of course I had thought of this before and of course the only copy had been checked out (with a due back date of March 7th, which meant it had been checked out a while ago). They had another copy that was marked “Library Use Only,” however. If I got there early on Tuesday I could read it before my first class of the day.

My sleep cycle has been all over the place for the better part of the last decade, and Monday night I continued that trend by sleeping from 7pm to 11:30pm before getting up working for the remainder of the evening. My roommate was headed to campus early the next morning to study for a test and offered me a ride.

Campus at dawn is an eerie place. There are few people up and about, all of the drifting like ghosts as the first beams of sunlight break over the mountains and spill out onto the Mall. Places that are normally crowded always feel strange when they’re empty. The quest for The Petrified Forest and the circumstances surrounding it made this early morning journey all the more uncanny.

I arrived at the UofA library by 7:25am and started looking. According to the call number it should have been on the third floor, section C. I searched for twenty minutes before going back downstairs to ask for help. The woman there called up an assistant from the lower level by phone.

The kid that arrived on the scene to help me was kitted out like some kind of urban Sherpa in shorts, heavy windbreaker jacket, and baseball cap. On his back was a sturdy hiker’s backpack that looked like it was stuffed with what I could only assume were books, library blueprints, rope, grappling hooks, and trail rations. In a near Kafka-esque bit of irony his name was “Stefan,” only pronounced differently than my name, with the “a” pronounced like an “i.” He didn’t look anything like me, which was just as well, because if I was met by a “Stefan” who was a thin, tall kid with spiky hair I would’ve probably fainted at that point.

He was experienced all right, if I hadn’t gathered that from the get-up he was wearing. He merely glanced at the six figure call number and had it memorized. He lead me to the third floor again but to a set of shelves I hadn’t delved through yet. It was a series of those shifting space-saver shelves you see in cluttered libraries and vaults of one kind or another. In a cinematic moment of truth he punched some buttons at the ends of each of the shelves that commanded them to part where we wanted them to. He started looking at the spot on the shelf where it should be.

It didn’t take long for me to figure out something wasn’t right. “It should be in here,” I told him. “When I looked it up it was marked ‘Library Use Only.’”

A spark of recognition lit up his face. “Special Collections?”

I remembered seeing that term on the web page listing. “Yeah.”

“Oh, then it’s not here,” he said. “You have to go to…” and here he gave a series of instructions about some other part of the library that I didn’t follow, but I nodded like I did. “…You have to go in there, they’ll bring it out for you, and they’ll only let you read it in there.”

With everything I had gone through with this book, that had the ring of a set-up to it. Then came the kicker: “They don’t open until 9.” That meant it was no good to me. I had to walk the breadth of campus to get to my first class of the day at 9:30, which left me no time at all to read it if I waited until the Special Collections Department opened.

“Thanks anyway,” I told my doppelganger, easy on the ‘doppel.’

“Is it old?” he asked.

“Yeah, I guess”–by which I meant it would be old, if it did in fact exist at all.

“Then that’s why it would be in Special Collections,” he said as he turned to leave.

“That’s certainly one theory,” I told myself when he was out of earshot. “Another is that there’s a vast conspiracy behind this book and its contents. One that’s gone to great lengths to make sure it disappears from Tucson.”

Y’know, it’s funny. I didn’t have a real interest in reading it a week ago, but all this mystery surrounding it made me eager to find out what it was all about.

I killed another hour before walking to McClelland for my Burton class. I knew something was up when ten minutes before class started we were still at half capacity. It was unusual. I hadn’t thought to check my school e-mail that morning so I asked Andrew, who had shown up and was sitting next to me, to look into it. He text someone and a few minutes later got a response: class had been canceled. The professor was sick.

You wonder what the significance is? Just this: the professor who teaches Burton is the same professor who teaches the capstone class. After all this trouble to track down The Petrified Forest the one professor who made it required reading turns up sick on the exact day we’re supposed to be discussing it.

The whole thing made my head spin. I thought about going back to the library to check back in with the Special Collections people but after the vanishment of my professor I didn’t trust what I would actually find there. I took lunch at Silvermine early, then found a park bench to pass out on for a few hours. Having the class canceled meant I was off the hook for reading it in the short term. We were supposed to watch the 1936 film that the play was based on for Thursday, so I decided I would do that much and call it even.

You can guess how this ends, can’t you?

All the films for media arts classes are posted in an online student database known as d2L (a cutesy acronym for “desire to learn”). When I logged in that night and checked MAR 498C all the films for that class were there.

All of them except for The Petrified Forest.

After almost five years since it was initially published, I’ve been informed that Miscellaneous Philosophy: The Underclassman Years will be officially going out of print. Copies that are still floating around on Amazon and elsewhere will still be available for sale while they last, but the publisher will be printing no new copies from this point on.

With this sobering moment, I find myself reflecting on what exactly this book meant to me. It marked the official start of my writing career. I hadn’t written anything of consequence before it and didn’t even consider myself a writer before I began work on it.

It’s a time capsule of the person I once was in high school–belligerent, bitterly sarcastic, and (I would be remiss to not include this last one) hopelessly sentimental. It captured all the emotions in me that were simmering just beneath the surface, boiling over at any given moment. It was a chronicle of an ordeal that I suffered for four years, and because I considered high school an ordeal few adults would take me or it seriously. Not surprisingly, people my own age who read it rarely shared that opinion.

It was testament to the people who immediately impacted my life at that time, for good or ill. Much of it read like a rant, but then I like to think that it still remained entertaining. Mostly.

At times, when I reread select passages from it, I don’t recognize the person who wrote it as me. It comes across as so virulent, so annoyed–especially now when I’ve managed to put so much distance between me and my high school experiences. But now and then I come across a phrase that makes me think, “Wow, I don’t remember writing that, but it definitely sounds like me.” Just a few examples:

“[She] always struck me as someone who wasn’t afraid to take on the world, but didn’t think that the rewards were worthwhile in the long run–which is probably true.”

“It’s weird, isn’t it? People who have imaginary friends are locked up, but people who can come up with theorems for imaginary numbers are considered geniuses.”

“Vocabulary assignments are always an adventure, with him asking me, ‘Hey Stefan! What comes first: R or S?’
‘R, John. It hasn’t changed since the last time you asked me.’”

“I’ve discovered a lot about high school in these past two years. There’s nothing magical about it, or special, or even worthwhile. It’s merely a place. A moment in time. Odd feelings, unnecessary embarrassment, and a last-ditch, lackluster performance by childhood.”

Its sales and the publicity it brought me were modest, but I’m not complaining. It’s no great work of literature, and even now it’s not something I want to be forever remembered by. Other young authors have had it worse. Marty Beckerman saw great success with his books Generation: S.L.U.T. and Death to All Cheerleaders–the latter of which he, like me, self-published at sixteen–only to publicly retract pretty much everything he ever said in an article for Salon.com a couple months ago, describing his desire for a time machine as “pathological.”

I know if given the chance to rewrite it I’d change much of it. But my sixteen-year-old self knew that. Even then I knew I’d change, that I wouldn’t be the same person, that I would want to put things differently if I viewed them through the hazy lens of memory. That’s why I was so insistent on finishing it in the moment, writing the 72,000 word-long first draft in only five months and working to get it self-published soon thereafter. So much of its raw intensity (read: verbose immaturity) comes from that short distance from thought to page to print.

So while I like to think that with the book at last going out of print I have the chance to, somewhere down the line, rewrite it and re-release it as a new edition, I know I’d be missing the whole point if I did. I wrote it to bluntly and mercilessly capture what the first two years of high school meant to me, in no uncertain terms, and to save it as a record forever after of what the experience was truly like. If today it reads like a wholly different person, then I’m glad. Because if there was a dream buried beneath the sarcasm, swearing, and sentimentalism of Miscellaneous Philosophy, it was this:

Escape. Escape to something better–a better life, a better future, a better daily existence. By any means possible, escape.

And if I no longer recognize the person who created it as me, then it means I have.

A few days ago I mentioned the chalk drawings on the University of Arizona campus that were made to advertise a rally against budget cuts. I didn’t think much of it at the time. Plenty of events around campus have sidewalk chalk advertisements.

I don’t regularly read The Daily Wildcat, the UofA’s newspaper, but by chance one of my classmates had today’s copy with this story on the front page:

Chalk one up for students

The University of Arizona Police Department decided to start arresting students who chalked up sidewalks, charging them with “criminal damage,” according to the article.

You read that right. Using chalk was being considered criminal.

After more students began chalking protests against the arrests UofA President Robert Shelton issued a statement asking the UAPD to drop the charges, preferring to approach it through the Dean of Students Office as a possible violation in the Student Code of Conduct.

This got me curious, so I decided to look through the Student Code of Conduct. I’d never really paid attention to it before because I had always assumed it was for people bringing guns, explosives, or drugs on campus–you know, actual criminals. But I figured if someone has decided that it’s high time they started going after students wielding chalk I should probably take another look at it. (For those of you who are interested, you can find the Student Code of Conduct online here.)

Of the long list of things under Section F. Prohibited Conduct, there are only two that could maybe, possibly, be used against students protesting in chalk, and they basically say the same thing:
9. Unauthorized presence in or unauthorized use of university property, resources, or facilities.
14. Misuse, theft, misappropriation, destruction, damage, or unauthorized use, access, or reproduction of property, data, records, equipment or services belonging to the university or belonging to another person or entity. [Emphasis added.]

Here’s my question: aren’t these two rules broad enough that they could be used against any students at any time for anything unless they have explicit authorization? For example, could I potentially be cited for taking bubble solution and a bubble wand and blowing bubbles on campus? After all, there are no demarcated “bubble blowing areas” where it says I can blow bubbles, and I have no written authorization to blow bubbles. Those bubbles pop fairly quickly, and if that bubble solution gets on the sidewalk, am I not misusing university property? Sure, bubble solution evaporates in the sun just as chalk washes off in the rain, but does that matter?

Or will I only be cited for blowing bubbles if I’m protesting something that the university is doing?

I’d like to close with a quote from the article in the Wildcat that I linked to earlier which helps put everything in perspective:

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a non-profit dedicated to defending individual rights at colleges and universities, gave the UA a speech code rating of “red,” the organization’s worst rating, in April 2009 for, “at least one policy that both clearly and substantially restricts freedom of speech.”

Before this past week, this would’ve surprised me. Not anymore.

While on my way to class this morning I noticed a number of chalk outlines of (presumably) people outside the library:

There were more outside the Main Student Union and Harvill. Some were accompanied by slogans like, “Death by Budget Cuts,” and some were barely legible, but the figures all had this in common: they were really poorly drawn. At first glance they appeared to be either the murder scenes of midgets in bell-bottom jeans or Gumby. Most likely they were protesting the slashes in the University of Arizona’s budget, but I couldn’t be sure. They did announce that there was to be a rally at 12:15 that afternoon. I’ve never known sidewalk chalk to lie to me, so I checked it out after my last class of the day.

The gathering was fairly small. In this photo you can make out a small inner ring of the rally’s organizers around the speaker standing on top of the bench at center-left. A larger circle around it is composed of supporters and students stopping for a short while to listen. While I was taking this photo the speaker pictured talked about the need to organize the student body as a political entity so it could mobilize against so-called “easy cuts” to the budget for higher education.

The crowd gave sporadic applause and cheers. The mood was fairly apathetic among the casual observers. Gatherings of this size are not uncommon on any given day on campus, and unlike previous protests, like this one last January, there was little energy or enthusiasm about it. Over the previous semester a feeling of pessimistic inevitability has set in among the student body. After a protest at the state capital numbering in the thousands came to naught some months ago, a lot of people have begrudgingly accepted the university’s steady slide downhill.

Not too far off on the UofA mall was another, much smaller gathering, this one of students protesting the Iranian government’s crack-down in the wake of the June 12th elections:

They’re dressed in the Green Movement’s iconic color as a sign of solidarity. Their numbers are few, but it’s heartening to see that the issue still has traction even in a place as far removed from the violence in Tehran as Tucson. Recently the Iranian opposition turned Quds Day, a day that the Iranian government normally uses to bash Israel and support the Palestinian cause, into a massive protest against the government itself. A popular chant of the day was, “Not Gaza, not Lebanon–our life is for Iran.”

Leo methodically checked his coat pockets—front, inside left, inside right—and found that everything was where he expected it to be. Front pockets had his keys and a loaded Enfield No. 2 Mk I revolver with the serial number filed off. Inside-left had half a pack of king-sized Chesterfields and a book of matches from a jazz bar he liked up on 149th Street. Inside-right had his wallet and the keys to the briefcase.

He looked himself over in the mirror one more time. The layers of clothes helped mask the thin quality of his arms and ribs. His curly brown Jew-fro was cut short to within an inch of his skull. The blue dress shirt with vertical white stripes he had on was crumpled in some places but clean. Taken in with the tie it didn’t look so bad. He fumbled with the coat collar in a futile effort to straighten its edges. Tonight he wanted to look professional.

Afterward he went into the kitchen to double check the briefcase. Everything was laid out perfectly inside. He shut it and pulled the keys from the inside-right pocket to lock it, returning them to their place when he was done. Then killed the lights.

Leo locked the door to his apartment with all the care and attention of a banker closing a vault door. In the hallway he tried to look natural but anyone would’ve plainly seen that his grip on the suitcase handle was unnaturally tight. Luckily anyone wasn’t in the hall just then. He was halfway to the elevator before he thought better of it. Decided on the fire escape instead, even if it was raining. He clambered down the rusted iron gangplanks to street level. It made noise, but Leo doubted anyone would notice. Worse things than him went bump in this city’s night.

Phil’s car, a ’54 blue-green Ford Skyliner, was already waiting for him by the sidewalk outside his building. Leo grasped at the door handle and tumbled into the front seat.

“What the hell, Leo? You’re sopping wet!” Phil said, exhaling his Brooklyn accent in thick gobs. With a heavy build and rounded face Phil bore a striking resemblance to Curly from The Three Stooges. The black derby on his bald head didn’t help.

“Relax. It’s just water,” Leo said. He made an effort of brushing it off his arms as if that would help. The windshield wipers thumped back and forth on the Skyliner but did little more than push the rain around.

“You’re going to ruin the upholstery. For crying out loud, did you take the fire escape or something?”

“Don’t be stupid,” Leo said, briefcase now resting squarely on his lap. “I just took a detour to make sure no one was following me. And since when do you care so damn much about the upholstery?”

“It hurts the car’s resale value.”

“Not anymore than you driving it does.”

“Nyuck, nyuck, nyuck,” Phil said, playing on his resemblance.

The car sloshed its way back onto 99th Street and continued north. Leo pulled a cigarette from his inside-left coat pocket and lit up. This time Phil had no complaints about maintaining the integrity of the upholstery.

After a couple of minutes of silence that were unbearable for Phil and which didn’t bother Leo in the slightest, Phil spoke up. “Do you have everything?” Phil wasn’t nearly nervous as Leo—he just hated long silences between people. That’s why he loved Hollywood cinema so much. No one in the moving pictures ever seemed to stop talking.

“Of course I have everything. God, what are you, my mother?” Leo said.

“It’s a legit question. Shut up already.” On the approach to the intersection at 37th Avenue Phil put on his left turn signal.

“What are you doing?” Leo asked. “We’re not supposed to take a left until Astoria.”

“I ordered a pizza to-go from Bambinos. I figured we’d pick it up along the way,” Phil said.

“Damn it, Phil! We don’t pick up pizzas while we’re on a job!”

“Since when?” Phil said, getting defensive.

“We’ve always had that rule. Knock off your blinker.”

“Hold on a minute. When did we decide on this no pizza rule? Was there a meeting that I wasn’t told about? Was it put to a vote?”

“It’s just common sense, Phil. Do I have to make it obvious for you?”

Phil bitterly flicked the blinker off and continued on 99th. “The only thing that’s obvious to me is that blaster you’ve got in your front coat pocket.”

Leo went flush red, as if Phil had just revealed an embarrassing childhood secret to the whole world. “How could you tell?”

Phil snorted a kids-these-days laugh. “Shit, Leo. Why don’t you pocket a shotgun next time? It’d be less noticeable.”

The animosity settled between the two of them with the smoke of Leo’s cigarette. Phil turned on the radio, which worked about as well as the wipers. By the time they got to the left on Astoria they had both found themselves in a comfortably bad mood.