I’m reposting this from the third stab at doing a personal website from scratch. I thought it is a pretty successful piece.
I’m just going to stick up a weird peice of writing i did today while my brit lit class what canceled. It was inspired by trolling through myspace, one of the worst places on the internet today. It was inspired by the picture below, of a 17-year old girl from Mississippi who according to her myspace is pregnant by her deadbeat boyfriend who has recently left her. after becoming curious it appears the same thing has happened to someone else in her town who she is at least acquainted with. The world in a very odd place.
She was a girl from the place that seemed more American then anywhere I’d ever heard of. She was from a long line of Ford driving, beer drinking, laborers who scrapped by and worked themselves into early graves clutching packs of Marlboros. She had a look in her eyes that carried generations of struggle, struggle that seemed to yield only enough for one one more push. Life seemed to carry with it an inevitability, that she was just going through the motions, acting her part. She was falling deeper into it with each passing day. She had parents who lived her just enough to point out when she was a disappointment but who were generally too absorbed in acting their parts to notice anything. She had a boyfriend who was a waste even when he wasn’t wasted and who’d stick around only long enough to get her pregnant. In all she had a resilience bred into her, she was close to death but still alive, so far from living she seemed to be dieing a bit more everyday. She was middle aged at 18 and her life felt like a slow crushing inevitability of which she was both unaware and powerless to stop.
This feels like the America I can never know, that I can’t feel, that I can hardly see and will never truly visit even if I travel there. This is the layer beneath the plastic flags and the patriotic bumper stickers. This goes beyond the realms of politics and economics. Those things seem only effects of the sort of unending decay. The people seem to live in a way that appears to me to be more straight forward. Things seem to be expected, and they happen. There is no rebellion in youth because there is no alternative and no conception of one. This seems more alien to me than almost anything else I can imagine. In my mind even the land and the sky look different. These people are descended from pioneers, the ones who found their promised land, claimed their piece of the American dream. Their descendants perhaps still hold to the dreams of their ancestors. They have arrived at their destination and can no longer see beyond the the horizon.
