On Staten Island there is no such thing as discerning the forests from the trees. By the time you hit eighteen years old, you’re already wishing that you hadn’t been given an education. That way, it’s easier to blend in with a crowd that couldn’t possibly even begin to comprehend what was really at stake in the freeze-frame moments of their isolated, little lives. No, I’m not being harsh on my community. I just understand things. I’m in tune with the Earth. Not in that “go green” hippie sort of way that everyone seems to be enamored with two boroughs over. It’s more of a “girl walks into a pizzeria with bare feet, hair dripping wet from a steamy, urban summer sweat and blows kisses with her eyes to the clerk behind the counter” sort of way. My friend Grace tells me it’s an Italian thing. Earthiness incarnate. She swears I’m sexier than a virginal maiden from Renaissance Florence. Maybe. Or perhaps she just loves using her sex to get just that. It’s like I said. There is no forest from the trees in my town, only the murky green blur of a sylvan scene that’s all too redundant in a world of pedestrians and pizzerias.
Oh well. I forgive Grace. She only sees what’s on the plate and not under it. We wouldn’t be best friends if she didn’t provide that guitar pick sized window into the minds of SI’s populace. She’s the yin to my yang, or the marinara sauce to my mozzarella sticks of doom. Mwahaha!
Seriously, internets. She is bringing out the best in me. I’m working on savoring the limited beauty that’s around me. Challenging is an understatement. Class has started, and I find myself writing nonsensical messages in the margins of my notebook. Post-apocalyptic daydreams so to speak. The thin blue lines are playing tic-tac toe with images of my own American nothingness. There’s a country in my head that’s a barren flipside to the one in which we live. Sometimes the monsters of my illusions are echoed in the sounds of static coming from our television sets, hanging ominously over our heads in the rear of homeroom. There’s been a lot of turmoil as of late, has there not? It’s almost as noisy out there as it is in my head. The lies of change and uncertain hope are inescapable like the ringing ears of this teenage MP3 addict. Get me a root beer float, a cute boy with safe ambitions, and some failing grades, because this sock hop of competitive society is about to start rattlin’ and rollin’. Rejection never felt so fun, kids.
Believe me when I say you’d never want to visit the afternoon deliriums of Jeannette’s high school prison. But you know what? I’m offering free tickets to the amusements. I want all of you, EVERYONE, whoever can feasts their eyes upon this verbal vomit of the soul that someone out there knows it’s absurd too. No, not absurd. CALCULATED. We’re living a lie, and it’s bigger than Staten Island. It’s out to separate our art from the unseen anxieties that linger in each and every rebel of the Generation With Information. It wants your family, faith, beliefs, and goodness to squander itself to a paper, green Darwin. And oh yeah…it told me that your college degree is it’s fuel for fire. How’s that for oil-war, price gouging gasoline, Mary Jean?
Stand tall, GWI. This blog is for you.
Now if you’ll excuse me, my cousin just called. He wants to know if I’d join him on Xbox Live (very important, you understand).
Power to the humans,
Jen.
I’ll be spilling more beans about my life…stay tuned.
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