Cut My Head Off!

By Peter Nevland - Oct 28 , 2008

“Cut my head off! God told me to ask you to take this samurai sword and cut my head off.”

“I’m not so sure, Peter. That doesn’t sound like a good idea.”

“No, it’s going to be ok,” I reassured him. “I’ll be fine. God told me.”

We went back and forth a few more times before he finally shrugged his shoulders and gave in to my request.

I stood upright, cringed as the sword sped toward my neck, felt the tingle as it sliced clean through, and then froze as still as possible so it wouldn’t fall off. I was still alive, and my head still sat in the same place it had been. But something was wrong.

“Call an ambulance,” I told my friend.

When they arrived and finished checking me out, the paramedic shook his head.

“I don’t know how you’re still alive, and I hate to tell you this, but you’re going to die.”

The shock washed over me. “Dang.” “I guess I misunderstood God.”

I awoke clutching desperately at my still tingling neck. My fingers frantically searched all my skin to see if there were any cuts. The tingling stopped. My head was still happily attached. I breathed deep sighs of secure-necked relief. “What the heck was that dream about?”

I never wanted to be a writer. I’m still not sure I do. Liberal arts majors are for people who aren’t smart enough to be engineers. At least that’s what I thought when I stepped onto the University of Texas at Austin campus to pursue a mechanical engineering degree. I was going to save the world with math and science.

Thankfully, engineering is a harder major than I had anticipated. My first two tests in physics and 2nd semester calculus I scored a 50 and 48, respectively. It didn’t matter to me that they were honors courses with a bunch of other smart people. I was going to have to step up my academic game and actually start trying—you know, study for longer than 15 minutes. But, in my renewed focus on schoolwork, I missed something.

That’s the trouble with big brains. They think they’ve thought of everything and overlook things that are very simple. It’s how my brother used to beat me in checkers. It’s how I lost two chess matches to a 12-year old kid in Indonesia. It’s why I never saw it coming . . . .

In every heart is a hole and a key that longs to fill it.

Not long after my decapitation dream, those words popped into my head late at night in my dorm room. “That’s weird. Maybe I should write these down,” I thought. I wrote, and the next line came—

But man won’t listen to his soul and the cries of lost fulfillment.

“Hmm, maybe this is important.” I kept writing.

How can you see when your eyes are blind?
Where can you go when your hands are tied?
Amidst the sobs of a desperate world, one hope remains unchanged. . . .

Pretty soon I had something that looked like a poem and read like a song. It seemed pretty good, so I tried to put music to it. When I played it for my piano teacher, she said the song was fine, but what she really liked were the words. I tried writing more songs out of poems, but it quickly became apparent (partly due to the helpful insight of my brother) that the music sucked.

At least the lyrics were good. Plus, I really enjoyed just writing words. It was like following gumdrops or some other trail of candy that I wouldn’t be allergic to. Coming up with music felt like I was following a trail of poop that led to a big pile of stink slathered over a questionable treasure. I gave up the trail of poop-covered, regular sounding songs and started following the non-allergic candy highway. It was fun. It had no purpose. My oversized brain saw no reason for alarm.

I took one American literature class at UT. It was the only English requirement remaining in my nerd degree since I had tested out of the other one. After giving me a 92 on a poem for an assignment, my professor asked me if I’d ever thought about submitting my writing to be published in the university literary magazine.

“Why would I want to do that?”

“Maybe because other people would want to read it,” she fired back.

These were strange ideas. They didn’t contribute to oversized brain getting a job, making money, or doing anything it considered useful. Don’t English majors get jobs at restaurants or stay in school accumulating debt until they can’t pay it off with their measly teaching salary? I didn’t submit my stuff to the literary thingy, but I kept writing here and there.

Big daddy brain still kept me on track for my engineering degree, but things gradually started to change in the alternate universe of Austin. I occasionally started hanging out with friends past 10:30 pm and got up later than 6:30 am on weekdays. I took a job as a security guard at a sorority house my sophomore year. My hair got longer and I finally developed the ability to grow facial hair. I even started making friends with people my age.

My junior year I studied in Germany and discovered I needed to speak fluent German so I could understand what the professors said in my engineering lectures. Through relatively miraculous circumstances, I passed all my exams even though I hadn’t understood a single thing said in lectures throughout the semester. A ruptured appendix returned me to the United States after 10-1/2 months, having undergone 2 surgeries in 2 different hospitals that robbed me of 25 pounds. My skinny body had shrunk to that of a pale concentration camp survivor, but I wouldn’t trade any of the hardships, loss of engineering knowledge, friendships, or brushes with death for the experience of having tried something different than my brain’s prescribed plan.

I kept writing through all of it. My eyes began to see the world differently than the conservative sunglasses I had worn growing up. Sometimes my emotions felt things that made no sense to my head.

The passion I had reserved for Sunday morning services began to erupt at the sight of sunsets or the sharing of late-night stories with a beer in my hand. Occasionally, I chose spending time with friends over studying. Dreaming had irreparably severed the rigid control of the gray matter in my skull.

My heart gasped fresh air after a long, sedated slumber . . . .