At the age of 16 I broke into a discarded and abandoned window factory with the intent to revive it with a skateboard. It was not my idea, but one I latched onto with experience as the motivator. I wanted to feel the pressure of being somewhere I wasn’t meant to, supposed to, or perhaps even wanted to be. Not in an attempt to destroy my 16 year old self– I don’t think so. I don’t think I was self-aware enough. I didn’t possess the ingenuity to want to do something wrong at 16. I simply wanted to be impure at that moment.
We skated for about a half hour before a kid from another time and place took the opportunity to kick through a clamped slab of glass in an attempt to grandstand for the only girl involved in the day. I saw his leg taken by it. The glass, and the girl. It was bloody, but not gory. I didn’t care about the kid, so I didn’t hesitate to flee when someone called for an ambulance.
I spent the remainder of the day in my neighbor’s pool wondering if she’d narc us out; not whether the boy was alright. I never cared for an instance, because I was not a part of that moment with him. I was bystander to his faulting. I was desperately indifferent about that kid losing his leg. And he totally lost it. I saw him lose his leg. Not a weird metaphor or some shit. They totally amputated his leg.
This song reminds me of swimming in that pool that day.Atari Teenage Riot Kids Are United!
Korean Barbeque at Honey Pig in Duluth
This is someone’s actual dorm room.
On June 1st, 2009 I’ll be packing a single bag and moving to Greensboro, Alabama.
Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal-arts cliché about “teaching you how to think” is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: “Learning how to think” really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.” This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger. And I submit that this is what the real, no-bull- value of your liberal-arts education is supposed to be about: How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default-setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out.
