ii
No matter where or when you go, you’ll always find the type of person who tries to beat the system. For whatever reason, these people get it into their head that the system – the “Man”, the government, the universe – is leeching away their well-being. They are resentful, sarcastic folk who look for the shortcuts in life and smugly exploit them. The problem is they never really try to escape the system; they just end up turning it on its head. They leech off it until they’re caught, or until they self-destruct.
I guess I’m like that, though I’m not proud of it. The system: it sucks, but it’s the truth – it’s what we’ve got. You can’t beat it forever. You always pay for your sins, in one lifetime or the next.
That’s what I thought, anyway. That’s what I thought when I was young and in college, an idealist ready to take on the world and make it better for everyone. Science and learning would save us all from ourselves, and now it would save our souls. But I learned better.
The classes were part of it. You study enough history, philosophy, and religion, talk to people totally different from yourself, maybe smoke a little, maybe drink a little, and your mind opens right up, just like a puzzle box. It’s like being high when it happens, but better. That’s why colleges are full of hippies.
But the regressions clinched it for me. I don’t know if it’s the same for everyone, but I didn’t remember many specific details from my past lives – events or things or places – I remembered feelings. I remembered frustration. I remembered feeling tired. I remembered planning to change the world a hundred times in a hundred different ways, and it was always too hard. Just too damn hard. Thwarted by sickness, thwarted by accidents, thwarted by some goddamned short-sighted greedy bastard. The system protects itself, is what it is.
I dropped out of college in the middle of my last semester. After all, what was the point? I had a secret, guilty thrill when my grades came in the mail, and I’d passed two of my classes without taking the finals.