Kenilworth Ave.

It's 72 degrees outside, a few hours after twilight. You'd like to hear the waves crashing on the shore of Illinois, but you can't. Some fifty yards away and you can barely discern any noise at all besides the buzz of wasteful incandescent light bulbs floating from metal poles somewhere above your head and the equally annoying but more natural buzz of insects. You could name them all, if you had to. You remember, primordially, that one day in girl scouts years back when you had been an entomologist for a day. Wait a few seconds and you might remember.

Any minute now, a car will drive along the road a few blocks behind you. It will be traveling at one of two set speeds: teenage crazed, full of raging adrenaline fast or moving through the motions sleepily slow. Indeed, you don't really know why you're still awake, looking into lake Michigan. It's past two. You should go but you can't.

Is it a severe boredom? Or is there a reason behind this impotent madness? You walk back through the thoughts that led you to get into your own car and drive away from home to here--over a highway, past an emptied mall, cross blocks and blocks of suburban sameness, then your mind wandered as you listened to van hunt on the radio, and then you were here.

It must've been boredom. Nothing at home that hasn't been done thousands of times before. Not that being around this body of water early in the morning is something you haven't done frequently in the past. But alone? That's new. Usually there's people around who've coaxed you to stay awake... just... a... little... longer, and decided the lake was the only excitement in the duldrums of those in-between years.

Why? Couldn't tell you. Some young adults turn to alcohol. Some throw crazy parties in the city. Some play video games until they present carpal tunnel. We couldn't do any of those things with much success. The lake, however, represented just enough illegalness, excitement, and physical activity to be permissible. We should have been cool kids. Maybe in a different time.

Why was I now here alone? I couldn't tell you. Did I miss it? Did I miss those years? No. Never. They were awful. Like walking around in a darkened room trying to find a red marker I missed the mark, so many times. What did I want to achieve as a teenager? Those things I never got around to. I turned 20. It was over. And I was just the same.

It was a mistake to come back. To travel out of the city, back to the 847. I had a life where the roads were all beat up. I had a job. I saved lives. Now I had mysteriously travelled back to the place where I had lost mine. Just as quiet as it ever was. Frustratingly so.

The headlights of a cop car fall upon me. My heart beat races for five seconds before I catch up to it and hold it down. I'm an adult now. I toss my keys up into the air, catch them with one hand, then walk over to my car. No parking after midnight? Alright. I'll go.

There's nothing here anyway. People pay millions of dollars to live here. But there's nothing here. Not anymore.

When my dad had come to visit to see Colin Powel address our university, he thought it'd be nice to go out for lunch. We eventually settled for Sumo, the closest thing to a Japanese steak house central New York had to offer, when we drove around Outback steak house and realized it wasn't open during the awkward time between lunch and dinner. But before this, on our drive, my dad had talked about his time in college. He always talked about his days at Colby as if they were sacred. He had been on the varsity tennis and soccer teams, had received honors in both his major concentrations, biology and chemistry, and one semester he had come blasphemously close to proving the existence of god using math. Yes, my dad was both a nerd and an athlete, and apparently that had suited him.
I asked him about the parties he attended. When I was younge I remembered him telling the family about how he had pretended to get drunk at parties after cunningly adding soda to empty beer bottles. I wondered if that was still true now that I was nearer to the legal drinking age. Yes, it still was. But he added more to the details with which I painted the story of his life in my imagination. Oftentimes he would stay in his dorm room alone, working with model kits he'd cobbled together from random hardware supplies, trying to build a replica of Watson & Crick's then recent discovery--deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). College, he concluded, was a time of learning intermixed with finding ways to not feel lonely. He had had DNA. I had a pretty black dress no one ever would see me wear.

I Don't Like Boys, a poem

Wouldn't it be awesome if I was a rapper? I was thinking about it, there are two types of women*. R&B singers and female rappers. Why? They don't need to do it. The music world is traditionally flooded with men--but how many XX rappers do you know? What compels them to enter into such a world? (Female rappers= Trina, Lil' Mama, Missy Elliott; can you think of any more?)

Oh man, but if I could I would totally be a rapper. I'm not a very good singer or speaker, so I don't know why I assume I could ever choose between the two occupations. I guess one can and shall always dream.

pink plaid, orange cardigan,
a warning to boys,
i'm poisonous.

but i get a polar reaction
i get to feeling adventurous
this dude's staring blanky
at me like an acephalous
it's guys like you that make
me wanna be abstentious
make me spit acidiferous

i raise a fist doused in ice
deck you with middle finger
can't be nice when dealing with common teenage vice
an absolute zero stare ensures you don't linger.


*clearly there are more. i just like simplifying things to their extremes.

Doom Crush

Doom crush, n.

1. The noise of doom percussion; clashing; a crash. Obs.

2. a. The act of crushing; dooming compression or pressure that bruises, breaks down, injures, or destroys doomfully; also fig.

2. b. In the following perhaps = crash, as now often quoted, and as alluded to by the Pope.

2. c. A person with whom one is enamored or infatuated with, ending in doom; an infatuation; so to have or get a crush on, to be enamored of, take a strong fancy to someone who will cause your demise. slang (orig. U.S.).



Doom crush.
Any crush that results in epic failure.

There are two traditional types of doom crush.

• The first is the crush one has on people who are "way out of their league", also celebrities. These crushes help to establish the social hierarchy inherent within environments. example: "I have the biggest crush on [the cutest guy in school]!"; "Enrique Iglesias and I are going to get married and have model babies."
  
• The second, and ultimately more harmful crush occurs when a person decides to pursue someone significantly inferior; potential receptors of this crush are criminals, losers, and high schoolers. Doom crushes of this type can be classified as "attempting to date below your means", "lowering your standards to end your desperation", or "becoming too damn easy."
  example: "Guys, I think I have a crush on Mike." "You mean that guy who is not only ugly but has no social skills?" "Yea, that guy." "Sounds like a doom crush."; "I know I shouldn't like Jamie, she's a convicted felon. But she's sooo hot."
  A doom crush of this type will lead to depression if unsuccessful.
  example: "I must be really ugly. I couldn't even get Mike to date me. And he's like a two."
  

... and that's when the soda machine jizzed all over my pants

Paul walked in looking disgruntled and... wet. He had a knitted brow and... a huge wet spot on his gray t-shirt. Matt was quick on the offensive, "What's up?"
He slid onto the barstool over looking the frozen ingredients settled in plastic containers illuminated by clean white lights. "I am having an awful day," a kiwi caught his eye and he looked upon it transfixed. It's green was too green. It looked too delicious. He must have it.
"What happened?" Matt continued asking as he washed his hands underneath the flow of Arizona aquifer water and above a chrome sink.
Snapping out of it, Paul looked up.
"So I was just in Moore's, thought I'd watch my weight and get a diet coke," Matt raised his eyebrow. Usually his friend didn't sound so--metro. "and the machine was so freaking excited to give me diet coke it jizzed carbonated water all over my clothes."

Blood and Teenage Retaliation

I came to the realization some months later. I didn't want this disease. My form of resistance was subtle, hidden in my room, knelt over a journal and a test kit. Mother had been disciplining me again about how I never tested my blood sugar. Didn't I know that I was going to die? I didn't want the reminder. Crying in bursts that made me rock softly I drilled into my flesh five times producing pin pricks of blood; thinking I must be crazy because it didn't hurt at all. I smudged my forearm into the pages of my journal, and scrawled uncharacteristically fast "Are you happy now?" under the large dots of blood that first appeared bright red like Christmas lights but over time faded to dull rust. And then I cried some more. Now I was ill in body and in mind. Would there ever be a day of complete freedom? Could I ever just get intoxicated purely with life and screw the results? Or would I be forcibly shackled to clear consciousness for the rest of it?