Pathos Rhetoric

I was experimenting with Pathos, my favorite rhetoric in this non-fictional piece I wrote, under my pseudonym, Reed Winters. Basically, I was just trying to create something that mustered at least a little emotional response from the reader. Here it is:

I've been pondering death and the afterlife for two weeks now. I can't stop. It occupies my thoughts constantly.

Tonight is no exception.

These thoughts have been escalated by the recent news; Trevor Wardle has passed away. I don't know the whole story. Something involving drugs and a car crash. Trevor lived right across the street from me back in Nephi. I never knew him. Never talked to him.

I used to come home from work really late. One in the morning sometimes. I'd pull my car into the lot on the side of our house, and get out to see Trevor sitting on his porch. Sometimes he sat with his parents. Sometimes one. Sometimes both. Sometimes alone. I never waved. Never shouted hello. I usually pretended not to notice him. I used to think he didn't want to be noticed. The mood was always sort of a melancholic awkwardness. It's hard to explain.

Sometimes I'd come home from school and he'd be out shoveling the driveway.

I didn't know much about Trevor. I knew he'd had some serious drug problems the past couple years that climaxed with a lethal overdose of Coricdin Cough and Cold. He took enough that it should have killed him. It was twice what could have killed a normal person. Twice what could have killed me. He narrowly escaped death, but was never the same person. I used to hear he was in a constant state of. . . well. . .the state he was in while high was about the same state he was now constantly in. Maybe confusion overpowered logical reasoning. Perhaps numbness was all he felt. I don't really know.

But there was something wrong. Blatantly wrong.

I described those afternoons and those nights I saw him as melancholy. He seemed to be in a perpetual state of misery. Just from my perspective. His time out on his porch or shoveling his driveway was perhaps the most he got out of life from this point forward. Maybe this was his only escape from the confines of the house which he was now basically constricted to. It seemed but a speck of hope for Trevor Wardle. Maybe one day he would be a normal kid again.

His parents seemed to loosen their restrictions on Trevor day by day. A few months later I'd see friends come and get him in an old broken-down Toyota pick-up. I remember once or twice catching a chubby, goofy grin on his face. That speck of hope seemed to be growing. A sparked fire growing ever-so-slightly.

Around this time I moved out. I never thought of him again. Until now. Now I'm hearing the news. Drugs again. Car crash. I thought he'd been off drugs. Maybe he was -- for a while?

I'm wishing now that one of those nights I'd just walked over there. Listened to his story. Talked to him for a few minutes. I wonder if he would have enjoyed that. If nothing else, given a friendly wave. The memory could have served as my own little requiem of sorts. A song in my head, respecting and commemorating Trevor Wardle.

Life can be fickle. Life can be touchy. We're always one overdose, one car crash away from an entirely new existence. Perhaps an entirely new non-existence. I'll never know what happens after the death until I get there I suppose. And maybe even when I do get there, I still won't know.

Perhaps I'll drift away into oblivion.

Sink forevermore through the void.

Forward into the darkness.

Nothing. Extinction. Nirvana.

Considering it always,

Reed Winters

Post-Script: This, and other various chunks and tidbits can be accessed at my blog here, at Stochasticity and Me (Including a link to my classical argument paper!).