Tuesday, September 18th, 2007
Half-Sane & Waiting to Die: The Writing on the Wall

(Author's note) A few years ago I remember sitting in a hospice, sipping coca-cola from a bright red dixie cup and watching a baseball game while in a fancy hospital bed beside me my grandfather waited for death. Around me family members who had dressed up nice for the occasion ate slices of pizza and pretended normalacy could still exist in this moment. Though as my comatose grandfather weezed for breath, pale as a ghost, I realized that there was no such thing as normalacy. Not here, not anywhere.

A week later my grandfather was dead.

It's things like these that have led me to decide to document the deteriorating world around me before my sanity dissolves entirely. And to be quite honest, I'm not even sure I'll make it out alive.

Greenfield Community College a school. Built on the outskirts of hell and located near the only remaining Taco Bell in all of Western Massachusetts, it exists for those people who were too dumb or poor or both to get into Umass. It essentially combines the worst aspects of College with the worst aspects of High School (I actually had a class with notebooks checks) to form a hideous amalgam of learning and torture. Thankfully most of the student body is oblivious to their own plight, happily attending classes and asserting their individuality without realizing that individuality is a convenient lie invented by marketing companies to sell sports drinks.

I strode into the course registration office a week before classes started, only to find myself stuck with four different courses I had never intended to take, all of which curiously featured the word America somewhere in their titles. The day school started I strode in with a smile on my face and an old copy of Official U.S. Dreamcast Magazine in my bag to read when I wasn't paying attention. Here's how I fared.

American Literature II

The problem with taking classes with the name America in them is that the majority of College professors are staunch democrats, and you can expect a great deal of liberalism mixed in with your coursework. This can especially be amplified when you live in Western Massachusetts, liberal cabital of the world. We're not five minutes into a discussion on what it means to be American before I'm disgusted, mostly with the supposedly "rebellious" ones of the class, who keep interjecting with how America is more of a totaltarian dictatorship than anything else. We're talking about what it means to be an American when some fresh faced girl mentions "Even the homeless on the streets of New York are just as American as us."

I pipe up with "Hey, let's not get carried away." She gasps and I laugh.

American Politics

This class is awesome because sprinkled in with the liberals are a former soldier, a marine in training, a cop in training, and the professor himself is a former soldier and police officer. This of course leads to awesome debates where everyone is all tense and on the point of killing one another. I can only hope. Seriously though, good times, smart people, absent of the juvinality of some of the other courses.

Women in American History

The same however can not be said of this class, which in an exercise in tedium. When the teacher mentions her practice of using a "talking stick" to designate the current speaker, I'm about ready to leave. I can only expect that the "talking stick" is covered in glitter and menstral blood or something. Seriously there's like four guys in the class and the few hot girls in the class are probably lesbians anyhow. Three class periods in and we're watching a bullshit crazy movie about women's spirituality and how we should all worship goddesses. While a self-proclaimed witch talks about her experiences living with nature and learning to love her mother earth despire the confines of a barbaric male-dominated society, I'm murdering virtual dinosaurs in my bootleg copy of "Monster Hunter Freedom 2" for PSP. Good times.

Otherwise, school is mostly the same as it was before, boring and kind of horrible, though at least there's a Taco Bell. Currently the college is under renovation, meaning they've installed makeshift hallways out of plywood in order to herd the cattle properly. Unfortunately, this has led to the school's "Artist community" (an art degree from a community college is like a letter of recomendation from Hitler) taking pen in hand to scrawl their horrible uninspired works upon the walls. Worse still the school has actually encouraged it.

The results are not terribly unexpected.

Here's the typical "weeaboo" type bullshit you'd expect to find just about anywhere. Here we see GOKU SSJ3, because god forbid anyone ever let us forget about that fucking show. I love to walk down a hallway, spot a picture of Vegeta and suddenly have my mind flooded with guys screaming about their power levels. This guy probably spent all of High School copying this picture over and over and was enthused to be able to reach such a wide new audience with his shitty artwork.

Jesus fucking Christ. I really wish I could be this person. To be drawing a warrior riding a unicorn fighting a dragon and not pause for even one second to wonder what the fuck I was doing with my life. I like how the dragon looks kind of like it has a horse's head. I think this was drawn by one of those chicks who was wicked into horses as a kid and now gets laid by guys who wear D&D t-shirts so she started drawing dragons instead. I had a girl like that in a creative writing class and I actually wrote my teacher a letter saying "If I have to read one more of Molly's goddamn stories about fucking horses I'm going to kill myself."

I do not know who Michael James Richmond is, but his fucking poetry absolutely fills this very long series of hallways. None of it is terribly good, but the sheer volume of it is overwhelming. You can't go a few inches without another MJR gem catching you off-guard with its insightful outlook on these changing times. I mean, the pure symbolism of "That 100,000 foot ledge" really strikes me. How did he arive at such a number? Was a 1,000,000 foot ledge simply unbelievable, or was there something more?

In my blood, like a flood. Beautiful, really. I think the part of this one that really cracks me up is how he mentions the algee in the sea being "beneath/behind" each eye. Like, both of those words seemed really good to him and he decided to let the reader pick which works best. Kind of like a choose your own adventure for poetry. Remarkable.

Holding my breath
When my boat is down
Beneath the waves
Where I frown

Seriously, it doesn't fucking end. And he signs every single one, like, you're going to see the other 200 poems he's penned and then be mystified at the one left unsigned. Fuck it, this man is the world's next Robert Frost. If I die tonight, someone put "Plug the Holes" on my tombstone. Truer words were never spoken.

After seeing all this, I decided to sprawl my own message to the world on these hallowed halls of learning.

Attention Artists
Art is Dead

1. It has been for quite awhile
2. Warhol wasn't all that interesting
(And the Velvet Underground sucks)
3. Stop Trying

Seemingly no one took heed to my message, instead asserting that I was a "Red White and Blue Penis" (whatever the fuck that means) or LOLing at my perceived humor and carrying on with more of their horrible bullshit. However, some lone sole apparently agreed that something had indeed died, and perhaps its demise was even more important.

Or not.

I'll leave you to reflect on the words of our good friend MJR again. Hopefully there's something there you can relate to your own life.

NOT EVEN TONIGHT