Name: Joseph Rodgers

Age: 20

Occupation: UCF Student, Freelance Artists, Freelance Writer, Aspiring Songwriter

When I'm writing the computer screen is glowing, the room is filled with music, everything from the mad techno throb of Alien Sex Fiend and My Life With a Thrill Kill Kult to the heart wrenching tunes of Portuguese fados. I'm typically wired from head to toe on coffee and cigarettes, I'm alone I can't write around people.

I ruin my keyboard when I write, I slam out words too fast, too hard, the staccato click of my keyboard almost competes with the noise of the music. I try and justify my actions, I try and justify my senseless detail and poor grammar. I try to claim that I write of higher human nobility, that I write of things of substance, but the only substance around is all the different things pumping in my veins... if you get what I mean.

In school I was a maverick, I was the kid who showed up to class everyday hungover or stoned. I had a mohawk and I thought it was cool... maybe it was, maybe it wasn't, but I had one anyway. I wore a leather jacket and stunk of cigarettes, I tried to have sex with any girl that was even mildly attractive. Most of the time I didn't succeed, sometimes I did.

Sometimes I was manic, sometimes I wouldn't sleep for days I would do things that were juvenile and stupid. Sometimes I was god and my fingers were my host of angels.

But most of the times I was depressed, I held onto sadness like a lover, I preached the gospel of Oblivion and practiced what I preached. I was a burning ball of nihilistic fury, I was also a pathetic cry for help that no-one could offer. I saw road signs sandwiching the void, I saw girls as tunnels, and I saw sugar as salt.

I saw the written word as escape, I devoured books, one after the other, sometimes two or more novels in a day. Then I went home and wrote, I would sit on my porch smoke my pipe and write with my cat on my lap. My cat is a skiddish little creature named Bruce Wayne who doesn't live up to his namesake... nothing ever does. I would write two thousand words a night, I wrote a collection called the "Memoirs of the Violated", short stories of despair and terror. I wrote a novella, I wrote half a novel, but my inner censor would always mess me up.

My computer crashed, my mom and step-father recovered the data, but they don't really pay much attention to me and haven't taken the ten minutes of the day that it would take to send me my stories back. So I kinda slumped, I still kinda am...

I'm going to college now, I don't have a mohawk anymore I have a very short hair cut. I go to campus everyday and attend classes, I bum cigarettes off of pretty girls and try to get their phone numbers. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I got in a car crash so I don't have a car anymore, it's a major bummer and the economy is too messed up to find a part-time job. I ride the bus from my apartment to the campus everyday, even if I don't have class. I'm broke all the time, but I don't feel too bad about it, I'm sure things will get better.

Sometimes I try and lie to myself, I try to tell myself that at one time I had everything, but it's not true. Aside from lacking a car and a job I have more now than I ever have. I'm working for a good education, I have good friends, and one day I'll have a good job. But no matter what happens I plan on writing until the day I die.