A guy named Dagon

I once met a guy named Dagon. I only knew him for two days. He was a really nice guy. He hosted me in his dorm room when I was visiting Elim Bible Institute in upstate (or possible central, depending on your definition) New York, south of Rochester. (I don't know, people tell me I'm from central New York, not upstate, when I say I'm from outside of Ithaca, but I always thought that any part of New York that wasn't the Greater NYC area was upstate.) I was considering Elim Bible Institute because I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life. I mean, Art School was out.

I mean, Art School was out unless I wanted to go it alone, take out a lot of loans and pay them back with whatever job I found, if I really thought I could find one with an art degree. My parents were teaching me a lesson about economics, saying they wouldn't help me out with tuition if I didn't choose a sensible degree or go to an unaccredited bible school, which they also thought might be a good idea. I did horribly in economics in high school. Anything related to numbers I just blocked out of my mind. I blame this on getting placed in advanced math classes in the junior high. I wasn't a prodigy. I could understand algebra and geometry, but when we got to trigonometry, a fuse blew and the calculations stopped making sense. I don't think I was mature enough to understand trig, or calc, or econ for that matter. So I eschewed math and decided I needed that tuition assistance.

Not that I was any great and skillful artist, but I had an artist's temperament. One time, when I was a junior in high school, towards the end of the year, I was standing in the hallway with my friend Jason, clearly the most skillful artist of his class. He was a senior and was about to graduate, and said to me, "Albi, you're the greatest artist I know." And I took it to heart and really thought I was a great artist, if not a skillful one. Because I fit in with artists, and that's what my Art School dreams were all about. I just wanted to fit in. And besides, I'm sure you've all come across something that people claimed was art and cost a lot of money, and you said, What? And I was certain I could do something like that; be a con-artist.

But another part of me seriously considered going to Elim Bible Institute. They had a one year program. I forget what it was called, something about New Horizons, and you would just go and study the Bible for a year and get your brain imbued with mission, if such a thing is possible. I now think God can give you a mission whether you go to school and do a lot of studying or not. Last week at church, the pastor said that at some point we shed our faith, the faith of our childhood, like a snake sheds its skin. The old faith is stale, a routine that we live in that is brittle and hard, cracked and calloused. I'm not sure if the one-year Elim program would have helped me shed the skin, or if it would have been like putting lotion on it to maintain it for as long as possible. The point is, your faith needs to be soft, sensitive, maybe even vulnerable, to be aware of what God wants for you, what your mission is.

In any case, I didn't choose Elim, so I'll never really know what would have happened. I visited only a few other schools. The first school was SUNY Geneseo. At least I think it was. I just remember we were in the area and decided to take a tour. It wasn't someplace I was actually considering, but I remember the feelings of excitement I got at the possibility of moving out of my parent's house and living on a campus. I also visited Roberts Wesleyan, where I was hosted for a night by one of the students. We sat in this guy's dorm room with his friends and watched a basketball game while they drank beer. Then we went out to the movies and saw Payback starring Mel Gibson. I didn't care for basketball, and got the sense I wouldn't fit in there, so I didn't think of Roberts Wesleyan as an option after that.

We also visited Messiah College, where I got a tour, but didn't spend the night. I had no strong feelings about that place. On that same trip down to Pennsylvania, we visited Eastern College, which my mom had heard about while listening to a pledge fundraiser on Christian Radio. For any person whose child went to Eastern College and donated $20, some other donor had pledged to donate an additional $20. So we arranged to have me stay at Eastern for a night, and I stayed with a couple of guys, Joel and Travis, and not much really happened. We watched a bunch of comedies like Wayne's World and Dirty Work, and I met a lot of their friends. And I felt like I fit in there, so that's what I picked.

In retrospect, I now realize that, had I foregone my parent's assistance with tuition and studied art at a SUNY school, I would have come out with the same amount of debt I accumulated going to Eastern. But that required too much number crunching for me. And besides, I got a sensible degree. I was an English major. Who knows what would have happened had I gone to Art School? Who knows what would have happened if I went to Bible School?

Still, I remember from time to time that I once knew a guy named Dagon for two days, and always thought it strange that this was his name. I mean, he was a Christian, and it is a name from the Bible, so it almost makes sense. However, Dagon was the pagan god of the Philistines, or as the dictionary says, a Phoenician god of agriculture; not a very Christian name, per se. There were a lot of farms around there. But I never asked him the story of his name, and I never saw him again.