What Happened Next (Time)?

Stay tuned for scenes from our next episode...

If you’ve been following along with Zuko’s Musings adventures during the past week, you’ll have noticed that the good Recovering Academic posted a section of my memoir, called Next Time, on his Substack. That section was the Prologue, called “Monday at the Meeting,” and it described a Big Quit I made relatively recently. 

Since the Prologue ends on something of a cliffhanger, I thought you’d get a kick out of having another memoir snippet here, with a few more details. The following is from Next Time’s Epilogue, which begins right where “Monday at the Meeting” ends and goes a little into what happened just after (with a couple braided-essay tangents, because, hey. It’s me). 

The Prologue, of course, being a Prologue, lands at the very beginning of the book, and is supposed to make you, the reader, go: Whoa. How did it come to this? and the Epilogue, being an Epilogue, comes at the very end. So by the time you get to this part, you’ll have gone through a whole harrowing journey with me through various injustices, weird and wild theatrical endeavors, messed up relationships, some pleasureful pain, and an angry open letter to a professor, among many other things. Only after going through all that do you then get to this part, which is what happened just after I walked out of that room, at the end of the faculty meeting. This isn’t the whole Epilogue, just a small snippet out of the middle. The whole chapter is called:

The Great Escape

With all the construction and in-between-ness of the Arts building, it actually didn’t feel like an ending, leaving campus after that post-meeting beer that day. Maybe it’s because I still had finals to grade, and a summer semester to prep for, just the same as almost 20 mid-Mays before this one. Maybe it’s because everything looked unfinished, and so it felt like it was. 

I went back a couple weeks later to clean out my belongings from the shared adjunct office. That felt a little more like grieving—like going through stuff left behind by a beloved elder who’s passed on. Except that elder was myself. I ended up throwing out a bunch of old documents and teaching tools, including several stacks of DVDs and a disc player that never did work right. The discs were almost all recordings of a decade and a half of student stage combat and movement finals and other events, like one of my early book signings where my students stage-fought through the audience and one of them almost got ejected from the coffeeshop where it took place. 

This time, it was me doing the tossing of memories, not all of them mine. I ended that long culling session by consolidating all that time, all that teaching, all that care, into one tote bag. It’s full of papers and old musical instruments for dance classes. The tote is bright red, and has a university alumni logo on the front.

As of this writing, I haven’t received a single email from anyone in the theatre department: not the Chair, not Friend Tenured Jim, not the secretary, not anyone, telling me anything. No acknowledgment of my leaving, nothing about anything resembling an exit interview. No friendly or otherwise casual reachings-out on any of my personal social media. Nothing. Not a hello. Nor a goodbye. Certainly not a thank you. 

Silence. Just like at the meeting itself. But bigger.

Now what?

I go on to describe my systematic unfriending and unfollowing of a bunch of the people associated with that school, off of my social media: ”that little death of the 20-twenties,” as I call it. But I’m a make you wait till it’s a real published book before I give you more. Can’t wait? Welp, anyone know a literary agent? A publisher? Hmu, as the kids say online…

An encapsulation of my ‘value’ at that institution. School name and logo erased for propriety and politeness purposes. And, yanno, probably something legal…