finals, part four.
so i watched this movie adaptation of this book i read when i was 15... back when we were sprinkler thieves, before blood red summer '04. i was going to the adult education division of the local community college, having dropped out of my high school after sophomore year and swearing, like the good strong-willed revolutionary that i was, to never go back.
i went back.
this one year, my junior year of shattering streetlights and days where the sun passed too close to the earth, was different. the tides were stronger, and ships broke apart on our beaches until the wrecks formed a levee between us and the sea. i would sneak out late nights to walk the train tracks by my lonesome, sliding through and over fences to search car parks and auto shops for a car to steal, one that could carry me away from this place.
i even bought a gas siphon. i was determined.
i never went.
i was sideswiped by a beachcombing waif with blue eyes she loved to roll my way. that's another story, well documented by the masses, and already bled out thoroughly in my critically acclaimed writings collection, reign of the autumn queen*.
{press play}
i'd skip my classes, throw on my discman and some giant wraparound headphones, and make my epic journey. past the west side of campus, through the hopsital's old archways and sloping roads, across the back lots of strip malls, through the woods past the ruins of homeless cities. over the barren black lava pits of the mall parking lot into runoff ditches, running behind the strip malls and into manmade lakes.
i'd make this trip five days a week, to the foot of a barnes and noble/best buy, a shrine to the nascar gods.
this was where i got my formal literary education. i'd wander the aisles of the fiction section, grabbing anything i'd heard of and reading away until class would have been over. i found myself drifting towards the dystopian and the subversive, and anything about the end of the world. the kids in cyberspace had taken to this particular book for some reason, so one day i sought it out and read it in four hours in the giant's embrace of those amazing barnes and noble chairs.
being from florida, i didn't understand what was so wrong with being found laying outside on new year's eve. snow is the stuff of legends and bedtime stories, not something that swoops down and nearly kills you. and i was one of those sickly clinging vines, trying to survive in infancy. so of course it resonated. of course i yearned for a manic pixie dream girl to call my own. even before that stupid fucking phrase existed. of course i read the ending and cried like a baby and kicked and screamed, all before lunch. these books were my escape plan, and when they came crashing down, so did i.
i'd go home and go out with friends, and on the really bad days they didn't even bother to ask what was wrong. i'd never explain it in terms that weren't opaque and ambiguous, or mumbled too quiet to hear. those days i couldn't be convinced anyone could understand my internal discord. instead i had a notebook that held the beginnings of a world of my own, a mythology i'd raise up like legos and play-doh.
eight years later i read it again, and realized i didn't catch a lot of the really resonant stuff the first time. by then the world was in its formative years, and it was learning alongside me.
nine years later and it's almost self-sustaining, complete with angelic choirs, weather patterns and the written word. the movie is different than the book, but not all that worse. just a different way of looking at it.
*forthcoming, april 2039
i went back.
this one year, my junior year of shattering streetlights and days where the sun passed too close to the earth, was different. the tides were stronger, and ships broke apart on our beaches until the wrecks formed a levee between us and the sea. i would sneak out late nights to walk the train tracks by my lonesome, sliding through and over fences to search car parks and auto shops for a car to steal, one that could carry me away from this place.
i even bought a gas siphon. i was determined.
i never went.
i was sideswiped by a beachcombing waif with blue eyes she loved to roll my way. that's another story, well documented by the masses, and already bled out thoroughly in my critically acclaimed writings collection, reign of the autumn queen*.
{press play}
i'd skip my classes, throw on my discman and some giant wraparound headphones, and make my epic journey. past the west side of campus, through the hopsital's old archways and sloping roads, across the back lots of strip malls, through the woods past the ruins of homeless cities. over the barren black lava pits of the mall parking lot into runoff ditches, running behind the strip malls and into manmade lakes.
i'd make this trip five days a week, to the foot of a barnes and noble/best buy, a shrine to the nascar gods.
this was where i got my formal literary education. i'd wander the aisles of the fiction section, grabbing anything i'd heard of and reading away until class would have been over. i found myself drifting towards the dystopian and the subversive, and anything about the end of the world. the kids in cyberspace had taken to this particular book for some reason, so one day i sought it out and read it in four hours in the giant's embrace of those amazing barnes and noble chairs.
being from florida, i didn't understand what was so wrong with being found laying outside on new year's eve. snow is the stuff of legends and bedtime stories, not something that swoops down and nearly kills you. and i was one of those sickly clinging vines, trying to survive in infancy. so of course it resonated. of course i yearned for a manic pixie dream girl to call my own. even before that stupid fucking phrase existed. of course i read the ending and cried like a baby and kicked and screamed, all before lunch. these books were my escape plan, and when they came crashing down, so did i.
i'd go home and go out with friends, and on the really bad days they didn't even bother to ask what was wrong. i'd never explain it in terms that weren't opaque and ambiguous, or mumbled too quiet to hear. those days i couldn't be convinced anyone could understand my internal discord. instead i had a notebook that held the beginnings of a world of my own, a mythology i'd raise up like legos and play-doh.
eight years later i read it again, and realized i didn't catch a lot of the really resonant stuff the first time. by then the world was in its formative years, and it was learning alongside me.
nine years later and it's almost self-sustaining, complete with angelic choirs, weather patterns and the written word. the movie is different than the book, but not all that worse. just a different way of looking at it.
*forthcoming, april 2039