Re: hmm....birthdays...

Jude (katsu@pipeline.com)
Mon, 08 Feb 1999 08:08:08 -0500

	Allow me to propose an alternate view, Camille, on two counts. First,
which high school life are you talking about?  the one where your parents
buy you nice clothes, and you can spend your money on a CD, and all you
have to do is homework or talk on the phone?  Or the one where you don't
know where your breakfast is coming from, you have to step over nodded out
druggies to even get to school, and you spend a a great deal of your day
warding off fellow students who want to fuck you in the stair well?
	But all that stuff aside, if high school is easy for some in practical
ways, and wonderful in its passions and newness of blossoming awareness, it
is devastatingly hard in others. Never is one less sure of their identity
and where they fit in.  Never, at any other time in one's life, can one be
so deeply cut by another's word, or disregard. Never, is one so vulnerable.
 On behalf of aging people, let me say that with age comes strength and
power, an ability to create your own identity, comfort with your own very
individual sense of what is right, good, fun, exciting. Age seems to bring
with it the time and inclination to look at things more deeply, to skim
less over the surface, and most certainly, to appreciate each moment. Every
time my teenage son actually talks to me, every time I finish a book and
close it and sigh with pleasure, every time I take a beautiful pen to a
thick piece of paper, I feel a gratefulness that only comes with age.
These may be different passions, but passions nonetheless, and they are
mine, not those of any pack.

At 09:20 AM 2/8/99 +1100, you wrote:
>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
>