The House Where Achewood Began, College Pics, The Doubt

Last weekend I flew down to Stanford for the annual reunion of the Chaparral, the campus satire magazine where I first cut my teeth as an aspiring intellectual miscreant. The Internet as we know it did not exist in the year of my matriculation, 1993; my dream was to spend the rest of my life in a smoke-filled room full of Conan O'Brien's opening monologue writers, growing bald (everywhere except my cortisol-hardened paunch) and miserable.

If I could do it all over again, would I forsake the long afternoons spent painting myself silver and harassing the dining halls? If I had spent a little less time dripping warm Goldschläger into my eyeballs, and a little more time learning C++ computer code, maybe by now I'd have that house on the hill. What if I'd taken anything as seriously as I took laughing my ass off?

A return to these mythic headwaters always foments an insecurity in the validity of whatever it is I have done in the days since I flipped the tassel. After I ask my ride to drop me at the Oval, and I embark upon my unscripted yet predictable pilgrimage across the Quad and White Plaza, I am washed over by the same sense of unbelonging that they included with my freshman registration packet. (It was a powder that you mixed into warm water.) What was an undecorated kid from the rural Sierra Nevadas doing among Andover and Exeter's best-looking Olympians and most hat-melting chess masters?

This time was a little better. Returning to the Achewood universe last May — nearly a year ago! — was, without question, the right move. (Most critical to this internal diatribe is that I have finally granted myself supreme authority to declare what the right moves for myself are.) My relationship with Lauren is fun every day, and stabilizing. Learning how to restore old homes built an unexpected reserve of confidence.

(A quick aside: The Achewood universe...I'm frustrated that dealing with the old and the new houses, both so decrepit, has kept me from completely losing my days with Ray and Beef, writing new adventures big and small, but those plates are largely clearing next month, when I will finally sell the old house. E.g., I spent today building a new gate there, figuring out which touch-up paints stay or go, and mowing a lawn absolutely lousy with dandelions, their fat wet heads splatting against the blade like zombies marching into a helicopter's blade.)

Back to the topic. I spent these recent days on campus trying out this new perspective, and it took me a while to realize this, but I don't think Stanford and I need each other any more. Of course, it definitely never needed me, but I'm learning not to look there for validation on any scale. Allowing this realization is part of letting go of the idea that I can ever go back there and start over, an idea which must have metastasized along the back of my medulla at some early point, like a sticky rind of brie against a dark portion of large intestine. I wasn't even aware it was there, but, like deep-space astronomy, sometimes we can only tell that things exist by observing that other things are not behaving as they should. Perhaps this condition is a common companion of regrets.

This does not go for the Chaparral, the place in which I formed large pieces of myself out of Weinhard's and Sharpies. As I reflected with Lauren upon returning home, the weekend proved that I had made the right friends there — the sort you flop down next to and pick up again as though great barrels of a completely separate life hadn't been topped and shipped in the meanwhile. Among the doctors, diplomats, tech legends — and even a scoundrel or two — I felt the ease and welcome of family.