The other day in the bookstore, somewhere between the magazines and the paperback fiction, I had what I think was something akin to a religious experience.

Since abandoning the faith of my childhood just before college, I�ve been sort of spiritually bereft. There have been times when I�ve gone in search of a church home, only to find the Unitarian Universalists out of the office, the Lutherans being damn elusive with their directions and the Episcopalians off on a picnic.

Sure, I�ve absorbed some things here and there from the somewhat ambiguous heavenly messages on Joan of Arcadia and the subtle-as-a-truck brainwashing that is The 700 Club, a program I watch occasionally as a sort of stress test. But good, old fashioned religious instruction is but a ghost in my past, represented by the faint but happy tolling of the bells at the church a few blocks over.

I tried to explain my quasi-holy experience to The Danwich, but some days the things inside me don�t translate well into English. It had something to do with books and writing and gayness, I told him, but these elements were more abstract than concrete.

I don�t know how to describe exactly what happened, but an incredible burst of foreign energy came upon me like a tidal wave. I wanted to laugh hysterically and burst into tears at the same moment. Meanwhile, deep inside me, something was doing a million miles an hour on the hamster wheel in my soul.

I was seized by a blind possessiveness, a desire to ransack the bookshelves and return to my lair, where I would read tome after tome and become enlightened.

I often subject myself to a sort of binge reading in the bookstore, wanting to walk out with everything from the latest indictment of Dubya to the most recent issue of the Weekly World News and everything in between.

This time was different, though. Something about it � it was exactly where I was meant to be at that moment. I almost felt a weird electrical current running through me, like a fire inside me � eleccentricity.

Shaking, babbling, and convulsing on the floor a la Juanita Bynum seemed to be in order. However, since it was only an hour lunch break and I didn�t particularly feel like being carted off to the crazy house, I settled for going nuts on some book jackets and perusing the bargain table in search of an elusive novel that would put my life in perspective.

This feeling, which surely sounds crazy to anyone with some sense, was very intense and very real. It lasted only for a moment before gradually fading out, but I�m still feeling the aftershocks.

I walked out of the store and back across the street to work without having made a single purchase. I decided that clicking around at Amazon would be much cheaper than paying $14 for trade paperbacks and also that it is highly unlikely that my desire to consume the written word will be quenched anytime soon.

Perhaps I�ll set out to write a novel this November and read 365 books � one a day � in 2005. (People do it with movies, right?) Hell, maybe I�ll win an Emmy one day for my poignant yet hilarious portrayal of the trials of gay youth and kiss The Danwich before ascending to the stage and promoting equal rights in my acceptance speech.

One of the more tangible realizations I was left with after this experience was the fact that writing (and maybe reading) will be my life�s work. Now if I could just prove it by getting off my ass and writing some scholarship essays. You�d think this would be no problem since it�s very similar to freelancing, but you wouldn�t have accounted for my inexplicably poor motivation where scholarships are concerned. At any rate, I�ve decided that the universe was trying to say that I�m headed in the right direction.

Who knows, though? Maybe I�m just slowly going completely insane, hallucinating things in the bookstore. Or maybe I have a handle on things after all, which is certainly not the way things seem sometimes. In a college town that�s forgotten it has a college in a city mired in the stasis of "the way we�ve always done it" in the most back-asswards state in the union, sometimes it�s good just to feel fantastically, irrepressibly alive, even if it is only for a moment in the bookstore.