Here is the first few pages of
I Have Three Kinds of Hiccups. I've recently been back at it with having conversations with publishers and thought why not throw it out here and let the universe have it for a bit. Enjoy!
A great
example of the young adult I was before I was released into the world? Before I
was released into the world, I was just a “make everyone happy” boy who wanted
to learn and get involved with everything yet wasn’t quite prepared for the
journey I was about to set out on. This
was before I blindly moved to Las Vegas, before I attended the University of
Wisconsin-Eau Claire and before high school graduation. It was my senior year of high school, when I
still thought I was going to go to Hastfra University in Long Island, New York. My favorite class my senior year was
Anatomy and Physiology. It was my favorite for many reasons. One was that it was full of advanced seniors
who wanted to learn and were always in constant competition with each
other. To add to that there were two
juniors in the class that wanted to fight right along with us. There were only two men, me and Dane, that
were always being given such a hard time;
Both of us extremely active and with great spirits that always kept the
class in constant laughs when opportunities arose. This extremely bright class was led by Ms.
Barth, a woman who always challenged us and brought learning to the next
level. When we exclaimed we could teach
simple biology to freshman, she challenged us to make an instructional video. This
video was called Gregg Nye the Science Guy. When we said the dissection of the
mink was under us, she found the class a calf to dissect together. When we inquired the relativity of the calf
to an actual human, she got us a bus and brought us to Madison in order to look
at cadavers at the university.
These
great challenges added to the excitement of going to class every day and the
desire to learn everything we could.
With that said though, the life of an extremely busy high school senior
can only stay organized for so long and once in a while, I would bring other
activities into Anatomy and Physiology to sit in the back of class and work on
besides the actual class workload.
On
one of these particular days I was sitting in the back of class working on a Key
Club fundraiser, getting ready for our spring choir cabaret and sitting with
everything else that is on a senior who’s about to graduate’s mind. The class had gotten into an extreme
conversation about the diaphragm and what exactly the hiccup is. In this detailed conversation, that I was not
at all paying close attention to, I announced, “I have three kinds of hiccups.”
To my
ignorance, I kept my head down working on other priorities while the entire
class stopped the conversation and all turned around to gawk at my idiotic
outburst. After a moment of watching me
continue to make the class conversation the less of my priorities, Ms. Barth
asked, “Would you care to elaborate on your unique hiccup situation?”
I
feel that my memory is so clear of what happened next. I set my pen down, raised my head, took a
breath and went on to explain that yes, I do in fact have three kinds of
hiccups. “I have the quick little ones
that can easily be resolved with some sort of focusing anecdote. I have extremely deep ones that hurt the
whole of my insides which usually pass after a short time and finally, I have
the ones that effect your entire body for a moment, and then again, and again,
and again, until I can only focus on my hiccups.”
With
that, the class just looked at me with blank faces until Ms Barth continued
with, “OK then.” As everyone turned around and all the attention was taken away
from me, I heard a whisper coming from across the aisle.
“That
should be the name of your book.” The
girl who whispered this phrase has just come back into my life. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin with her
husband and children running a community fine arts center. I was at Trader Joes a few months back when I
looked down the line of checkout lanes and saw her familiar face. I had went to our last two reunions hoping to
see her and tell her what I had been holding with me for almost fifteen years
because of her. Almost fifteen years
later and now, as I quickly approach age thirty two, I know that my voice is
clear, and I am ready to share my three kinds of hiccups again: I Have 3 Kinds of Hiccups; the Modern
Struggle through Our Post-Modern Twenties
The most
difficult thing about hiccups is that we are forced to stop and resolve that
one issue; the hiccup. Nothing else in
our life can be taken care of until these hiccups have left our presence. Sometimes hiccups can take all of the focus
of our lives so bad that I think if I were on a plane, plummeting toward the
ground, that the hiccups would still take precedent over getting the emergency
door open, putting on my air breather, or finding my life cushion. They can be just that bad.
Well, as
I ventured through my twenties, and became this person who somewhat has an idea
who he is, what his voice wants to say and understands the world a tiny bit
better than at age nineteen, I have had my share of hiccups. I’ve had the tiny ones that just need a small
anecdote to give me relief. I have had
the great ones that hurt the whole of my insides and we think that it may be
all over. I have had the ones that just
sit, and take all of our energy and concentration to get them to pass. We don’t know how long they will take up our
lives and we don’t know the state we’ll be in once they have passed, but while
these repetitive, annoying hiccups are present in our lives, all we can do is
put focus on them.
Finishing
this book and allowing it to finally be read is for me, the final hiccup to hit
the reset button on my life, take inventory on what I’ve learned, who I’ve
become, and figure out what I do with that?
So many people in my age group are going through this same process. We entered our twenties with the values of
our parents and their parents, and left our twenties with different ideals and
brand new global problems. Our twenties
brought us nowhere to take the education, high school to post graduate, we
received and find a good paying job with it. The fanfare of our twenties, need
us not forget, is the cellular devise; this technological appendage that is now
fixed to our hands that really appeared out of thin air.
Some may call these newly developed twenties
the “Quarter Life Crisis” and some just call it evolution. I call it life without consequence because no
matter the different kinds of hiccups our generation is having, many of these
hiccups can probably all be found in the realm of decisions made without
consequences. Our twenties were about
discovering ourselves in a newly re-invented world that had no
consequence. We saw that when people
were selling us credit cards door to door in the dorms at universities across
the country. With those credit cards, we
purchased our first cell phones, trips for spring break, and our fake I.D.s
because it was in our twenties that carding became effective absolutely
everywhere.
I also
reference life without consequence to me because I made decisions for me, on
what I thought was best for me, in order to conquer my dreams. I moved to Las Vegas without thinking about
what that would do to my little brother.
I bought things and did things that I had no idea how it would affect my
credit. I ran crazy in Los Angeles and
lived freely not realizing how the impact would change how I believed I could
fall in love, what I deserved from others, and what I really needed to be
happy. The quarter life crisis,
evolution, life without consequences, or how ever you want to term it, affected
so many of us in different situations. I
saw it festering as well in friends all around me. Some had children early and some waited after
their careers to have children and are now finding it difficult to conceive. Some set off for graduate school following their
undergraduate and some switched schools and majors and dropped out. Some became single parents and some lost
their parents. Some left home immediately
and found themselves in sparkling new environments that formed the adults who
they became. All of these amazing beings
I call my loved ones and have seen them also struggle at times in our twenties
because of our unique position in history.
For me,
my twenties come off as a magical time that I feel I watched in a movie theatre
somewhere. Of course there were
obstacles but this is a movie about a naive boy becoming an extremely loved and
well rounded man. When I leave this movie, I am moved because I do not believe
it was me in the leading role. I feel it
was someone else and this main character is so lucky to be touched by all of
the supporting characters. It is them who assisted the lead in how he handled
his hiccups and it is them who ultimately created him into who he is now with
their kindness, compassion, selflessness and direction. I find this movie that plays in my head
unbelievable to have happened to me and it becomes clear why sharing this book
is so important.
Sharing this is for one, a symbol of gratitude
to everyone who has been involved in my life. Even if a certain memory or great
entertaining moment isn’t included in this group of essays, I am still
grateful. It’s not that our story wasn’t
good enough; there is unfortunately only so much room. With all of my favorite memories, I could
write a series of books but those stories might only be enjoyable to the
specific people involved. Know that everyone who has come into my life in the
past decade is in here. I am me because
of you all.
For everyone
who hasn’t been in my life, I hope you can relate to what I am sharing. I hope that in reading this, you laugh
because you remember a similar incident or laugh because you would never do
that. I hope when reading this, you remember how insanely difficult it can be
to start on your own or if you are just getting out into the world, find relief
that others went through it too. Our environment
is changing so quickly and evolving at such a pace that the urgency of us
connecting to each other is more important than ever. If sharing some of my stories
can help motivate and inspire this necessary connect in our lives with common
ground, they are worth putting out into the universe. Along with many of you, I somehow got through
my twenties and because of these hiccups, I have the tools necessary to
accomplish all the goals I’ve made and the ones I have yet not even conjured up.
“Turning twenty isn’t for
everyone” is what I remember telling myself as I was driving from Madison, past
Eau Claire where I was going to college, and the additional thirty minutes to
Menominee where I had an audition to work at Disney for the summer. I had got it in my head that I was actually
going to be talented enough to work at Disney at age twenty with the limited
experience and training that I had.
It was
my sophomore year of college and I had decided to do something far away for the
summer and get into a new experience.
Earlier in January of that year, I had traveled abroad for the first
time. I wanted more adventure and
thought Disney might be the vehicle for that.
So, unprepared and tired because I had been three hours away in a hospital
for two days, I was going to audition for Mickey Mouse……..