Re: hmm....birthdays...

Camille Scaysbrook (verona_beach@geocities.com)
Mon, 08 Feb 1999 09:20:06 +1100 

Okay ... to all the sixteen year olds I'm going to tell you something
you're not going to want to hear; that I was told by so many people whose
faces I laughed in and replied `God no ... I can't wait until I get out of
the place!' when they told me. They told me this. School is the easy part.
School is so fuckin' easy that as soon as you get out of the loathed place
you're almost aching to get back in there because it's so fuckin' easy.
Teachers are pushover. Headmasters and mistresses are glorified
babysitters. Peers are peers; you'll never see them again after school
ends, so what does it matter if you're popular or people think you're nuts?
Who cares? School is so goddamn easy. That's what they told me. They also
told me something else.

That is: when you become a grownup, you die inside. Your passion becomes
like a little grape left out in the rain. The world you were going to take
over numbs you instead; instead of separating yourself from the pack you
find yourself gradually falling into step after deadening step. I think
this is what Holden was depressed about (qv Chapter 16 especially the end;
I should have named my web page Gasoline Rainbows). Actually, no one told
me this. I figured it out for myself. If I had one tenth of my swagger or
belief in myself or creativity or drive or passion - plain hard feelings -
that I did when I was sixteen, baby, I'd be laughing all the way to the
bank. Cause if one thing sucks when you're sixteen, it's difficult to be
taken seriously. But no one can change that but the sixteen year olds and
the ex sixteen year olds. Especially as a writer. But I wrote two novels by
the time I was sixteen, and still had time to get a 94/100 as my final
mark. I don't think the lack of free time destroyed my writing career. God
no. It boosted shit out of it. I hate having so much time to pursue my
writing career. Time to think. Time to procrastinate. Time to remember how
abysmally unlikely it is to ever bring me fame or money. Time in which not
to write, not the opposite. I wish I had some sort of activity to force me
to write. University didn't do it for me. 

But back to school. Kids, I would kill to go back to school. In moments of
madness I have considered booking in under an assumed name and returning to
that comforting routine in which it doesn't matter if or when my next pay
check is coming (and seeing I have been jobless for about three months now
it won't be coming soon), it doesn't matter that I have to decide what to
do with the rest of my life. My biggest worry is the next assignment or
catching the bus on time or some brainless idiot who calls me a fag hag or
weirdo or something. Guys, that is nothing. Nothing at all. School is easy.
School is society spread across only a few hundred or thousand people.
School is masterable. A contract actor at MGM studios once said `Working at
MGM is like pressing up against a porcupine. It's a hundred pricks against
me.' At school you have twenty, maybe thirty, maybe even fifty stupid
assholes with which you will have to deal. In life, it's the guy in the
expensive car, the clueless woman who forgets that money must change hands
at a checkout, the plain boring idiot who works at your office, it's a
million billion pricks against you, beating your brains out with their
mediocrity until, one night, sitting in front of oh, I don't know, Judge
Judy, you will realise that you are a HUSK, the nasty bit of a nice nut or
seed that they throw away.

Your favourite music will suddenly become meaningless to you. There will be
no such thing as saving your dollars and rushing up to the local music
store and falling in love with a band or album because they seem to keep
you afloat above all the shit that threatens to swamp you. Your heroes will
seem hollow and bare or they'll go and plain die on you or worse,
artistically die on you. Oh, and guys - you're really going to get
disillusioned when you start fucking, if you haven't already. You're
waiting for that earthshattering moment of closeness that you feel has been
denied you all your life. You're waiting to buy a ticket onto the world's
biggest boat, although you discover it's the Titanic and there's no
Leonardo or Kate. Sorry to say kids - at the best it's diverting, at the
worst it's messy and boring and embarrasing and plain annoying. The world
will not move.

You hate getting up at 7 in the morning. You're gonna love that job at the
office or 8am university lecture. You're gonna hate not wanting to wake up
til ten because there is no point because you have no job. I used to think
we should get paid to go to school - but then I realised - it's so fuckin'
EASY. I can't reiterate this enough. When Holden gets out into the real
world - he is going to shit. That's all there is to it.

Anyhow peoples, if you wish to swap places I'm willing. Right now you are
laughing in my face, big ha HA HAAA!s because you don't believe the word
I'm saying. There is a tradition of beating the bearer of bad news. Go use
your passion. Go and feel. Go and get lost in a moshpit. Go and jump off
something. Don't bother drinking or drugging, it turns you into a bore. Go
and live. Don't think of them as the best days of you life, dear Holdens,
but merely as the most free. And freedom, if yr a Yank (and even if yr not)
 is I believe what your country is built on. You're never gonna be this
free, believe me. Go the hell and use it.

Calling Jane Gallager ... Jane Gallager

Camille
verona_beach@geocities.com
@ THE ARTS HOLE http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Theater/6442
@ THE INVERTED FOREST http://www.angelfire.com/pa/invertedforest