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If anyone is interested in critiquing, I can post the full chapter elsewhere... In the meantime, here are the first couple paragraphs:

It was late October and I was back in the mailroom. After an impulsive sabbatical that found me driving around our musty backyard of a nation in my dad’s oil-burning Datsun–which I’d stolen–looking for somewhere else to be, I was back sorting mail in the basement of Oklahoma City Community College. Before I’d left mid-shift and without notice, I’d been there every single work day for six straight years. Not once in those six years was I given a raise and not once was I given a promotion; crude estimations, though not uncalled for.
When I first took the job to which I’d so unceremoniously returned, it was as part of a work-study program through the college, with the only reason I was doing the "study" part in the first place being that I was working on “pre-reqs.” For what I was fleshing out the pre-requirements, I had no idea, but it sounded good and, more importantly, didn’t really matter because nobody pressed the question once I dropped that mind-blowing achievement bomb on them. I think most people understand–or should, anyway–that taking “pre-reqs” at a community college is an unspoken admission that one is just farting around until one drops out or something better comes along, which it never does, or something worse comes along, which it often does. Taking classes at OCCC was just allowing me to buy time to fade away, to acclimate to the reality that I wasn’t going to be the next voice of a generation once someone of note happened upon the revolutionary ideas I had–namely that everything sucks–or some raw, unpolished talent I had of which even I was unaware... What talent I was waiting for them to discover is anyone's guess. No, taking classes at OCCC was a cooling down period, a time to slowly whittle away the dreams that I kept to myself, a time of moving the expectations a little lower and a little further down the road. Taking classes was the time to shake off the audacity of youth in a comfortable environment where you still get positive affirmation for your shitty, quasi-literate work.