America's Playground
If you leave the house on a wednesday, early in the morning when this town is at it's slowest, you can catch them. Having grown up in the city, the first thought is of carriage rides and then of Hasidic Jews, but it's just the Amish in their horse-drawn carts replenishing whatever supplies they don't grow, cobble, blacksmith or create for themselves. Dusty black/grey clothes and dusty blck/grey beards atop a vehicle that would be convincingly from a hundred years ago if it wasn't for the reflective orange and red triangle affixed to the back end.
Their presence here is quite sobering, in this town of youth. A college town is not about an education. Sure, there's a handful of kids that will excell in their classes and make an academic name for themsleves. but the cream that rises to the top always has a bucket-full of worthless, milky water underneith it.
Thursday through Sunday the academics in this town drown the fear of growing up in cheap beer. That's what they're here for. To exorcise their youth. To prepare for adulthood. You can see it on their faces, the desperation, the need. This is the last chance for fun. Do it now and, worst case scenerio, you'll at least have it to regret while you go to work everyday and struggle against the responsibilities of marriage and parenthood. Drink, yell, fuck, be loud, be something, 'cause it's your last chance.
Have you ever seen those TV specials on the Amish teens. When they are 16 they get to experince the Devil's Playground: The Non-Amish World. It's a chance to leave the community, break all the rules and then decide whether they are gonna go back and be Amish for the rest of their lives. It seems absurd at first, when you see these Amish girls and boys in the their grey and black garb taking down beer bongs full of rum and smoking pot and hash and cigarettes, but it's a perspective I can appreciate. The Amish are not isolating their brood from the rest of the world. They are not keeping life's alternatives a secret. Mostly, they are not paying $20,000 a year and kidding themselves into thinking their kids are getting a higher education either.
The first reaction to all those Devil's Playground specials is:
How the fuck do those kids go back to all the restrictions of being Amish after tasting the world?
But, then, in reality all these drunken staggerers and bare-titted-heel-walkers and yelling-homo-phobic-pukers and frat-brothers and frat-squaws and wanna-be-cool-but-can't-get-it-rights and dressed-like-a-whore-but-scared-to-dances will all pack up and move from this town of youth. They'll start families and start careers and buy cars and think about all the fun and freedom they had for those four years of college. They will re-enter their society for good, fresh out of their chrysalis of booze and parties, and they will be the providers.
And I'll still be looking and wondering how the fuck those kids can go back to all the restrictions of their culture after tasting the world.
The Amish aren't fooling themselves. They can face the truth. As much as they remain seperate from the "modern World", there's still that reflective triangle to keep them from getting rear-ended by some house-wife on a cell-phone, whose probably distracted thinking about the good rogering she got in the fraternaty closet so long ago.
Their presence here is quite sobering, in this town of youth. A college town is not about an education. Sure, there's a handful of kids that will excell in their classes and make an academic name for themsleves. but the cream that rises to the top always has a bucket-full of worthless, milky water underneith it.
Thursday through Sunday the academics in this town drown the fear of growing up in cheap beer. That's what they're here for. To exorcise their youth. To prepare for adulthood. You can see it on their faces, the desperation, the need. This is the last chance for fun. Do it now and, worst case scenerio, you'll at least have it to regret while you go to work everyday and struggle against the responsibilities of marriage and parenthood. Drink, yell, fuck, be loud, be something, 'cause it's your last chance.
Have you ever seen those TV specials on the Amish teens. When they are 16 they get to experince the Devil's Playground: The Non-Amish World. It's a chance to leave the community, break all the rules and then decide whether they are gonna go back and be Amish for the rest of their lives. It seems absurd at first, when you see these Amish girls and boys in the their grey and black garb taking down beer bongs full of rum and smoking pot and hash and cigarettes, but it's a perspective I can appreciate. The Amish are not isolating their brood from the rest of the world. They are not keeping life's alternatives a secret. Mostly, they are not paying $20,000 a year and kidding themselves into thinking their kids are getting a higher education either.
The first reaction to all those Devil's Playground specials is:
How the fuck do those kids go back to all the restrictions of being Amish after tasting the world?
But, then, in reality all these drunken staggerers and bare-titted-heel-walkers and yelling-homo-phobic-pukers and frat-brothers and frat-squaws and wanna-be-cool-but-can't-get-it-rights and dressed-like-a-whore-but-scared-to-dances will all pack up and move from this town of youth. They'll start families and start careers and buy cars and think about all the fun and freedom they had for those four years of college. They will re-enter their society for good, fresh out of their chrysalis of booze and parties, and they will be the providers.
And I'll still be looking and wondering how the fuck those kids can go back to all the restrictions of their culture after tasting the world.
The Amish aren't fooling themselves. They can face the truth. As much as they remain seperate from the "modern World", there's still that reflective triangle to keep them from getting rear-ended by some house-wife on a cell-phone, whose probably distracted thinking about the good rogering she got in the fraternaty closet so long ago.
posted by Matthew Pazzol at 5:55 AM
3 Comments:
I see what you're saying my man, but I'm talking about parent-funded debauchery. Our friends back home had jobs and made money and paid for their own gas and beer. They co-exhisted with regular people, and where under no pretense of better-themselves while they binged. They where living life, they didn't have the same sense of temporarily being justified in partying until they where a valid member of society (and a valuable, employable one with a degree, at that). I don't think the friends back home felt the same sort of detached-beating-the-system that the college-goers feel. They never pulled out of their surroundings and entered a place where what's do stays where it's done at and you can return home, like in the mythic fables, a man with experience and knowledge. Not to mention the irony in our cultures take of the college experience as a worthy path towards enlightenment.
Sure our friends back home grew-up, partied and learned how to not be a young adult, but it's the ceremony and the ceremonies clearly defined and anticipated finalization that I'm getting at. The knowing that you're outside the reach of your past. Being Pinoccio in that strange, other-worldy paradise of all you desire and slowly watching your peers turn into asses and slaves while retaining knowledge that you can run back to what you know, or accept your fate as a donkey.
All I see are donkeys.
matt remember when we met? i thnk it was technically when you were handing out fliers at some talk at ISU but the memorable time was when i was hanging out in that tree on the quad just trippin out. and you ripped out a page of your notebook and gave it to me...a chicken dressed as elvis. remember that? oh so many memories from my parent funded space explorations. grad school just really WAS NOT the same. how i miss my college daze already. im going to oakland this weekend. who wants to go??
You know, I wouldn't rip out Memphis-chicken-love for just anybody.
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