Haven't Done This in a While

My story, my life story that is, was so absent of a hero, so unceremonious in its creation that it grew-up like a tree twisting around a neglected fence, begging for inspiration. Such was a life lived in isolation; sub-step on a pathetic rung of existence, in the small mining town of my adolescence. It was the pits. The epitome of nothing and everything. A place where you are never truly wanting, never truly having and always wondering at what's above and down below. Such is the curse of the middle-class. A place more abject in its oblivion then the deepest trenches of poverty. As imbued with guilt as it is hero-less and wasteful. A selfhood of preachy armchair agitators and the grotesque, maligned by a lack of integrity inherent to having nothing integral at all. Suffering wasn't real, so neither was anything else. Except of course for those unregulable moments one passed locked in the upper branches of the trees. So alive with the naive passions of childhood that one-hundred thousand suns could burst from the sky and they only question on those tiny curious lips would be; why?

And on it went, the days and nights and years, and in each the wish more forceful than the last for it to pass quickly and release me on to the echelons of adulthood. That ephemeral place of absolute autonomy, freedom and prosperity. Where all painful unknowable truths would be known. Where all injustices righted, all transgressions fought. Where the tiny becomes large–in stature, mind, and body. How smooth they looked, those adult folk, with their self-assured poise, their knowledge like missiles in the silo, ready to fend off the attacks of selfhood at a moments notice. So filled with agency were their cars and pocketbooks, as to sear into me a deep shame for my ambivalence and lack of understanding. Shame for my apathy to the adult sense of priority and togetherness, a strange obsessive custom of always doing the 'right' thing at the 'right' time. Get up, brush, wash, fold, eat, repeat. Feverish adherence, like Aztec sun-worshippers, to the delusion that these rituals, these 'life customs' as it were, would be met with a  conclusion. A congratulatory telephone call perhaps at the end of a hard day, the grace of the gods echoing through the airwaves. Everything that could be done, should be done, at least for the sake of doing it. 

Before self-realization I spent my days counting pennies and delivering them to convenience store employees in exchange for the good stuff they kept behind the counter. In each distinctive piece of gelatinous, hyper-neon, artificial ooze was the antithesis of white middle class insouciance; taste. A Fuzzy Peach was not merely a Fuzzy Peach but a melange of sweet and sour, crunchy and soft, orange, red and yellow dyes that seeped and caked the unbrushed teeth of 10 year-olds from one end of my block to the other. Mr. Freeze and Hubba Bubba, were the professors of our summers and the keeper of our dreams, a dream that could be lived by the pound, through experience from a bag.