The Reckoning of Jean-Pierre, Chapter 5

The Scholastic Years

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I was always a bit of an outcast even in my early years. Cast out into the unknown in my adolescence. Somber notes of solitude and the discontent of malcontents. Times kept changing for everyone was working more and more to keep up with the Joneses and my family was no different. Children in today’s world are just too much of a bother for anyone anymore really. Constantly trying to shield them from a society rotten to its core is no way to go at it! Constantly multi tasking your way through life is no way to raise a child either. Maybe I was just too much hot bloodedness for her? It was hard working and raising children as a single mom with bad ankles. Our extended family was either too busy working or had moved too far away to more advantageous places of opportunity. This is how the modern Global economy works more and more, by driving physical land wedges between us. The familial dynasty has been broken from the chasing of the times. Thrive, die or keep moving to brighter shores. Ever moving labor forces of mass immigrants. Labor and the motion of money, money, money rule the World.

My mother had decided that I was to be sent away to a boarding school at the age of twelve. Who was I to ask any questions? I was just a stinking kid. A juvenile now bunched up with a cadre of fanciful foreign students who were so much different than myself. Most of which had vast amounts of hubris, old culture, power and wealth that I knew nothing the sorts of. Boy was I naive. They came draped in Physical Materialism; Versace, Gucci, Ralph Lauren, Hugo Boss, they were all dressed in suites to the nines. I was just a poor bumbling rural American lad who ended up at a private school that my mother convinced I needed saving of. Saving of what? Was I lacking a sort of worldliness that she sought for me? What if the world of wealth and glitz was already fantastically sick? Maybe it was the pitiful esteem that my father had left to this planet, I was to ride on his coat tails. The school paid for my boarding fees but my mom had to work extra to pay for the rest. What did I need saving from? Why would anyone in the loving peace of home life in the rural pearl country be tossed in with a bunch of lost foreign students with bad english? These fanciful foreigners mixed in with a few brutish aristocratic American athletics types. What would become of this small town lad? What would become of all of us in this institution. Cast into the fate and destiny of young men lost. Peter-pans wild band of merry mates. Always an escape route at the ready! Would we be lost like Pinocchio? Turned into Donkeys at once. To a young man finding his way in the world this path could be ripe with possible misroutes and lapses of judgement. It could also portend of a better path upward towards future financial mobility, the building and fostering of some upper class connections. Maybe my family wanted me to become the bread-winner some day? Fat chance. Maybe I was to tutor the dunces? No way. Maybe it was a continuation of my Grandpas dreams for the men of our lot? The family tradition to be cast out into the unknown to see how you fare when you find yourself alone and tossed into the timeless abyss called modern life.

I believe too that my mother had seen all the failings going on with the public education system and decided sending me off to a boarding school was the best thing for me at that moment in time. Alone and responsible for myself all at once! Off to this boarding school on the double. Quick, quick. Who me? A young autistic twitch! The pattern-recognition pauper Prince. I had no choice in the matter for even if I did I was too young to know what was in store for me. I was from a modern troubled family with an utter lack of the artistic or divine. Is this an event which would break me and recreate us out of whole cloth into a newborn better man? Separated from my youth, now lorded over by such refined chaps as; Professor Hennerberry, Professor Collings, Monsieur the Frenchman. Attending class with such notables as, the bathroom floor pisser, the dancing gay plagiarizing poet, a class of supposed nobleman and business tycoons from all over the globe trotting World. The Board of Monitors overseeing the student body. It was much too much for me at first. The hard fought life of a boy younger than his peers pushed forward to keep doing more and more. Struggling with more classical forms of education and music, especially here in this formal setting… Hating Latin and therefore learning to give up on the ancient and old. This would have to come back to me later in life. Years of struggle. Seven, eight, nine, falling behind... Stressed out depressed and in poor physical health... Lowered self-esteem. The fall of a young man's precious immature ego. This new age of electronics looming overhead… The Wild West of the new digital frontier just around the corner. The knowledge that can be acquired, but also the pitfalls of it all. Technology became a shortcut to escape in these early times… A crutch of pure shortcuts leading to nothingness.

History was the only class that I enjoyed because history is storytelling and I enjoyed reading and listening to stories. I wasn't particularly good in math and in most subjects I was below average. I was so alienated from the social order of the Institution that at one point I found myself becoming compatriots with the loser kids from Hong Kong and Thailand for the Japanese students were far too cool even for me. I attracted the attention of a young girl named Anne, who would pass me notes asking for intel on all the asian boys. I prodded her for informations on some of the girls. “She doesn't hate you, she just cannot stand you.” was her reply when I asked her about one I was infatuated with. Later on I would work my way up to the ranks of the Samurai although I must say the Japanese seemed far too Americanized for any of the other Asians tastes. The Japanese boys would carry along in all the vices and devices that the Americans would. The wealthy Koreans seemed the most cultured from one point of view but also the most backwards from another. For example, they dressed the best but also the most gaudy and it was still kosher for the older Koreans to beat the younger ones to a pulp, pressuring them into cooking and doing their homework for them. Whereas that seemed far too crass for the cunning Hong Kong-ese who felt the more I would gather “English-like”. They smoked pipes and cigars, not cigarettes. The Indonesians smoked cloves. The Arabs, shisha. Then there were the older American athletic brutes who lived in the dorm, recruited to play sports and who dropped atomic bombs when they really wanted to tunnel you back into the stone age. Then they would rebuild you in their own likeness, minus offensive military weapons of course. How apropos. These older boys would poop randomly in weird places to catch people off guard. I never fit in with them much either.

My first roommate was this moldy American slob who was my same age named Steve. They thought we would hit it off and walk to class together. His mother would visit and get all furious about his messy ways and toss the roof of his stuff. She barely noticed I was watching it all snickering. She made her son cry. He deserved it all and more for what he did. He literally had decomposing cups of food and juices flowing over so it was pretty bad on his side of the room. I shouldn't talk, the communal showers freaked me out and so I barely washed much myself. Moving in with the international students the next year was actually a plus hygienically although they always teased me relentlessly. “Does he even shower?” comments turned up in Anne's notes again and again. I am trying to remember some fond memories of brotherhood too. My really good Korean friends and another William from Hong Kong. The brotherhood of glimmering youthful companionship in alms. I finally received some long overdue respect in this place. The Koreans let the younger ones cook for me even though I was younger than all of them. I had forgotten what my own culture even was, it had been partially erased before my time. My first loves of the fairer sex amongst the Hong Kong girls. Working to better myself for them, even without them knowing... The ones who never learned how you felt. Betrayal by your first roommate, dirty ole Steve stole my first love right out from under my nose! The stinking bastard! Anne warned me against all of this! Such betrayal of lost unknowing loves. It was all such a blur in my memory now. The rebellions against the dorm-parents. We locked them out of the gothic stone dormitory building and us schoolkids went crazy inside the grand halls. What a youthful party it was. The adults broke in through an open window to scold us all. Tore through a screen. We all paid for it especially the older kids. Got the switch. Becoming class president in tenth grade on a fluke. Your first taste of popularity really. Someone else ran my campaign. No clue how they pulled it off. It was all dirty politics. Tracy would know. Always surrounded by J’s. Julia, Jennifer, Jasmine, Jaspinder who ended up marrying a Brit after all. The fall of a young boy's ego again.

I always felt frightfully new in this boarding school, even right up until the end. Surrounded by these ancient foreign cultures I knew nothing of. My culture had already been distorted horribly by modern times. This boarding school life was all so different than the American world I grew up in. Lots of faces would change each coming fall semester. With each new year I found I really didn't know anyone. And I mean to really know someone. Deeply and thoughfully. To hear their thoughts just before they spoke them. Just when you thought you really knew a bloke it all changed so fast no one could keep up with it all. We were all so conflicted with modern grievances. We all came from completely different backgrounds. Some of us were destined to become shining stars and others pathetic little goat farmers. I snicker now and laugh but back then I was a sad sap. I was no longer the popular kid in a group of 10, I was the unpopular kid in a group of 50. Since my only soul companion at night was just an actual computer screen I did what any young lonely American boy stuck up with a bunch of Asians would do. I found an Asian American girlfriend on the computer. She told me her name was Jasmine, actually it was Akiko for her family were Japanese immigrants and despite all my Asian friends in school saying that she was as ugly as a dog, I soon fell spell boundingly in love with this fare Japanese angel. When would I learn about this yellow-fever trap? We went on some sneaky dates. She told her parents she was hanging with some friends. Our hands were so soft back when we were young and we held them so tightly. I took her to the movies where we bandied into the lusts of young loves in the back of motion pictures that we never really cared to watch. Pop-cinema was such a ruse back then. No one liked those popular movies as they claim to now. The camera image was not even very good, it was all a game to trick the parental system and meet up with a dame. I lost the game the very next day as you shall see.

I had my drivers license and life began to move real fast since I was now king of the road. That next evening I dropped Jasmine off at her Harvard upper class home and things became very short lived for our young loves. Her short yet very stalky Japanese father was ready to greet me. Apparently he knew nothing of his daughter's lustful ways and he began pummeling my vehicle in such a way that left me rattled. She had warned me of his stinging wrath. I was shocked at his extremely perturbed appearance. He kept hitting stuff at random like his arms had tourettes. I cannot believe I did not simply flee. He started yelling how he must see my driver's license right away, for him, his own honor, he must know the identity of this craven lecherous lad who would dare defile his youngest daughter! I came to find out he had three daughters, Akiko being the youngest. He must have been through all this before. Being a young naive and fairly compliant lad I presented him with my identification. Why I did that, I do not know? He kept telling me to punch him for he wanted to punch me in reply and I was nothing but polite to this wild foreign man in retaliation. I knew what his trick was about. He wanted to get me riled up so he could pounce like an asian tiger and cry defense! I tore my identification from his hand and proceeded to reverse my automobile out of his driveway. In haste I crushed his rose bushes. Now he was really furioso-san. He began to rave and chase after me. I trampled his garden in such a way that only angered him further. Dishonored the whole Sun Empire right then and there with my motorized Pontiac. When I was out into the road I put the vehicle in drive and hit the gas pedal. That was the last I ever saw of my first true love Jasmine. I heard later through the grapevine that his daughters all fled the home. He was a really angry despot of a dad. His wife killed herself and he was having a hard go at it all. I feel bad for him now. I can’t blame him. I was a real American dog when it came to his daughters chastity and this had become a tough time for fathers during a cultural breakdown in this big old crummy melting pot of ours. Sometimes lust boils it over.

Oh the horrors of being young and alone, bunked up with hundreds of lonely young boys all pining about their lost true loves. Over time I had worked my way up the social ranks. Most nights I was being served rice and udon by the younger Koreans and by day hanging out with some of the more badass American and Japanese students. We drank sake and smoked. We took up each others vices. Smoking cigarettes late into the evening with my Asian compatriots singing along with wild American songs that I had never paid much attention to. These foreign students assured me they were quite truthfully the best type of music ever. Fat chance! Thai music really sounded like something from the 70s. A throwback was what I always enjoyed. The not so Future Sounds of London.

The large green grassy quadrangle at the center of the school with all the buildings set around it. The Adam's dining hall was next to our monumental Gothic dormitory where we lived. It was named Dexter Hall. It's wide Notre-Dame frame facing outwards towards the quad. I came to learn a bit of unique knowledge from all the young men traveling from far away lands to attend this faux academy. For example, did you know in some countries they count mid-digits instead of simply fingers? That way you can count to twelve on each hand with your thumb. There was Gregor and Jakob from Germany. The great Prince Francisco de Braganca from Brazil. Jin Ho & Jun Ho from Korea, along with Mr Tsang, Tristan and Mr Ronald Chan from Hong Kong. We shall never forget Hiro-san & Yuta from Japan. The Samsosubs from Thailand. Those Thai twin sisters. What lively mates these latter were. How could we forget Vinny, always the Pho-hustler, even into College and beyond. From Seven AM to Nine PM we studied. Unbeknownst to the Administration during all other possible hours we partied hardily. We never slept. We we're supposed to be in bed by 9:30 pm. Lights out. We each feigned to sleep and then around 10 to 11 PM you would hear the footsteps scurrying between unlocked doors, rapt up in our midnight adventures which kept us awake until the wee hours and made us all sleepy at school the next day. We shared in food and drink and tobacco and we were very merry young men. We would talk of long-lost loves wether made up or in fact real. Boarding school bards. I remember many a late night with Mr William Tsang dreaming of the future loves of our lives. Mr Chan was quite the romantic himself... Confucius de Bergarac would be proud. I learned here in this place that ancient cultures with hierarchies and authority still existed. For a moments time at least. It was about to be flustered apart. My people, the West, had shunned this sort of traditional and ancient spirit as a sort of failed destiny folly but it still lived on in some of the outside cultures somewhat, at least before technology had flattened us all into one big mass of junky lumps. I saw the final remnants of cultures destined for steamrolling into tar made of silicon.

Us students continued to rebel in our own little way the best we could manage. We had hidden entry ways into the attics and basements. The elder students would put on impromptu kabuki shows in these concealed vestiges. William became a Monitor so he was able to swipe us plenty of late night snacks from the canteen hall. It was a wondrous well-fed illegal late night show we put on and we never got caught. Maybe they knew and wanted to tell the trouble makers from the obedient. It was in one such student play that they had a small opening for a sound person. I always ended up with the slightly odd technical jobs that no one wanted. In the small setting of an invented theater Megaron I crashed those pieces of metal to make thunderous sounds. But not too loud – we did not want to wake the dorm parents. I always liked to be behind the scenes. The man behind the veil. Behind the hidden curtain. If we did get caught it was easier to run and hide that way! We would all sneak out at two am and run off to Denny's to hang out with the whole late-night crew. We never slept. At most three or four hours at a time. Sometimes in a heap all together on one bed. This is how old cultures relaxed back then. It was no wonder we were so tired in class. We were always exhausted and on the verge of coma. Our Math teacher, Professor Delaney, would leave the classroom windows open in the dead of snowy winter so we would all stay awake due to the brutal cold draft. I cannot believe our Mothers all sent us here. What were they all really thinking? One night me and a few mates snuck out late in the evening per the usual route. The others almost got caught and ran back to take shelter and hide. I was in a bind. Stuck on the outside alone. I slept behind a nearby pizza shop until it got closer to dawn, then I carefully snuck through the basement window back into the dorm and into my room. Got in a quick nap before the morning bell. The next day my friends said they searched room to room that night to see if anyone had escaped. They wanted to reprimand one of us once and for all. A real good verbal and physical lashing! The administration would have found me out but before I had left I had filled my bed with a body made of pillows and a fake head with hair to boot. Paper mâché’ me. Boarding school was in short sorta like Alcatraz.

The school also tasked me with the technical aspects of arranging the pictures for the annual yearbook. Oh the control I wielded in my mighty hands then. The maestro of yearbook photo placement. Hand me a fiver and I could get you up front and center. Do me wrong and I will put your worst photo on display. For senior project me and one of the Japanese students Ryosuke built a big computer system which ran some lame ass website for a local business. It was in all those technical tasks that perhaps I had finally found my true calling. The year after graduation I was sent off to a technical university. Looking back we were so happy to be progressing onward, but none of us had any clue that these were to be the last days of an old style of life. Cell-phones had barely caught on yet. We still passed each other long eloquent cleverly folded paper letters written in cursive penmanship. Anne and Deepti were such writers! What we now know as the Internet did not even exist yet. Industry had indeed moved light-years ahead during these times and conspicuous consumption was all the rage, but the technical ways of military like marketing were yet to be at the drumbeat and forefront of your everyday social life like it was to pitifully become in modern times. They were not as overt at pitching controversial new ways of life to children yet. We were still living somewhat in the twilights of yesteryear and we had no clue as to its glory. We thought things always improved. We were Naive.

At this boarding school they tried to teach us Latin and French, at least to those individuals that seemed capable and interested in it. I still like big foreign words to this day but I failed miserably in high school. They tried to teach me all sorts of French vernacular and books and films and such and such, and even though I am indeed a Frenchman by lineage — both my parents having great great Grandparents that fled through Canada in the late 1600s and into America in the 1800s. Having been descended from the very first settlers that were sent to Canada by King Louis himself! To go fight those bastard injuns and wipe them from the face of this earth of course. Although my ancestors never really accomplished all that hooey. They just starved and froze and eventually got a boatload of women to keep the Mounties breeches happy — despite all of this genealogy I had very little interest in learning the French language'. It seemed dead to me and I was a lazy student much too I'm sure the headmaster's and his wife's chagrin. We would sometimes get invited to eat dinner in their on campus home. They would give each of us a good scrubbing and talking to, often in a foreign tongue. His wife was the Spanish teacher. The headmaster and his wife let me know on repeated occasions that I was letting them down so profusely for being a boy from such humble means on scholarship and all and for wasting my education. How could I be such a disappointment to my family! My father looking down from above. He was a man of learned industry once! They could let in any other bourgeoisie paying foreign student to replace me. And how I was, as Professor Hennerberry put it, “Just digging myself deeper and deeper into a dark deep hole.” I grew anxious and paranoid at times, fearing the sleepless nights were catching up with me, although perhaps not as much as they must have been with Mr. Hennerberry at the time. I must add 20 years later that I was somewhat amused to find out that Mr Hennerberry was actually digging himself deeper and deeper into a very big grave by conducting lecherous movements amongst some of the younger female classmates. He eventually got caught after we had all left. He was worse and deeper in it than me even! What a scoundrel. What a blackguard. Makes me smirk now thinking about the hushed scandal he became. Some school administration. They kept Professor Henerberry's scandals all as quiet as a mouse as was possible in those days but they never let mine be!

Occasionally at dances I would cast sidelong glances at some American girls from nearby schools who really did strike my fancy in some ways, I just never mustered up the courage to go ask them out. Ok, I did take little Anne from Groton Academy to the Senior prom but nothing happened. Anne and the prom and graduating high school. Finally some typical teenage memories. The year prior I was invited to the Junior prom by an older Korean girl who very much wanted to take an American boy to the dance. The older Korean guys arranged it with me. We were brothers practically. She thought it would be noteworthy to send home to her parents pictures from an American style prom with a blue-eyed boy. It was all a gag really. Although I felt lonely and unpopular at times I did taste a bit of glory and success with some mixture of exotic ladies in my high school years. Perhaps growing up all to fast was the trap? The snare is yourself.

How could I even forget in my senior year the glory of starting a small musical band! Finally music on my own terms. Two Japs, two natives, who played punk rock cover songs. We had a few spotty originals too. I was never that good at instruments although I had dabbled in them on and off as you know so I became the singer and leader of this band. In fact I was just the least musically talented so I got the lead role by default. It was like someone gave me a microphone and a backing band and then my senior year I was in all my karaoke screaming glory. Shunya really could shred it on a guitar. This cheered me up and redeemed me for a bit until it turned to nothing but troubles. The deep friendship with the fellow musicians, your brothers. But then the separation each semester. The new resentment that builds between you. The what ifs? Could we ever have gone big? We had no time for music, we had to focus on our studies. Mostly we were told to focus on our futures. Why did Hiro the bass player have to not come back next semester? We were just getting better. New members and new auditions never went as well as the original cast of characters. The new world and age of electronics looming still... Who could forget these early days. With glimmers of success the return of the ego. The Summer of Love and the betrayals of lost loves and lost music. Meeting the goth girls at the palladium and the espresso bar always hanging with their ogre cousins. The limelight, the destruction... The truly awesome gigs and the really lame ones. The married teacher who wanted to buy me an ice cream (and a kiss!) and her angry police officer husband. What on earth is happening to this world? The authority figures are even in on the ruse. These were my late teenage years, thrust forward into the spotlight of some glory, surrounded by impending modern societal ruins. Why couldn't we all just behave and be better people? We seemed to only make it worse. We were still just kids and did not know any better about what outside forces and influences were spiraling towards us.

When I would come home to visit my parents during vacations I always felt so different to my old friends back home. Occasionally I would run into them at the store or taco truck in town. They would snicker at me my new nickname, "el intelligente". Was the boarding school life any better than their lives? Nope. Just a hell of a lot more money and exhilaration flowing where I went off to. Schools, all of them, are just trying to determine who is compliant and who is a rebel, who will conform and who will not. Forever bend the rules and they will bend you to. They just want compliant little workers for all levels of the system. Even the upper echelons want total subservients installed in every corporate or governing office. The rebels sometimes get caught in the end red handed. Or left out of power and broken.

I think of these dangerous moments too. One of my first trysts. She was a singer in a metal band in the city but lived out here in town where our school was. Big beautiful voice and a buxom lady to boot. Back then it was all nice undulating curves. This was before she became a stripper as I would find out later on. It was hot and heavy between us. She would pick me up down the street from the school campus. I vaguely knew she was married but pretended not to know. I was always young and stupid and naive, right up until I gave up all this worthless stuff.

Well what a twist this tryst became. Every day when the students would file into the dining hall, it was like any other day. It was a grand large hall with high ceilings, from which flags were draped from all over the states and the world. Every student that had come to this school from a new place would proudly hang their homelands national garment from the rafters of this grand dining hall. A proud, majestic and regal place to gather, converse and break bread. A place not to be sullied. We all ate there every single day. Same day, same routine, the same magnificent hall, it all seemed the same always. Forever unchanging with just the occasional presentation of a new flag to hoist to its beaming rafters. But what horror had this tryst created before my eyes? I had never noticed him before until now. Now that I saw him I realized he had always been there. We had always seen each other, he would pile slop onto my plate each day — but we were always strangers to each other. Why did I care about this food server today? Why did I notice him now? Who was he? Now it seemed different. I knew who he was. I had seen pictures of him in my lovers abode. I was ashamed to eat now in front of this school worker who’s wife I had been in bed with the night before. She took it all very poorly when I told her it was all just too much for me to handle. “He works at my school!” I was too young for all of this. I hated eating in the dining hall after this event. More rice and udon at night would have to make up the difference.

In short, this path through a modern fast-forward childhood became sinisterly tumultuous and deeply troubling times. Times that kept moving faster and faster beyond my control. Each year my social milieu kept leapfrogging higher and higher but surely I was on a bad track morally. I had indeed found my own place within High School and Modern Culture but what had it cost me in the end? Would I be eaten alive? Anxiety and dark feelings filled my moods. By the close of Senior year I could hang and swagger with the most attractive good looking and hip native gentleman of my class. The real good looking bad boys of the Academy. These were my cohorts, my boys. How could I stop the reckless track I was on? It had moved me up the hierarchy. I was such a loner once and now I could kick it with the popular kids. Of course I'm speaking of the Piermarini brothers.

Older Piermarini was one cool cat that the ladies always sought to hang with. I cannot believe he talked to me and hung out with me smoking after school. Listening to his music. He had impeccable tastes and works of extreme arts. He could sculpt and cut a figure like DaVinci. The Younger Brother Piermarini later went off to become a rowing master in the Beijing Olympics. This was the caliber of these two bruvs. Cool and athletic. The LaCrosse stars. The ladies dream. Perhaps some of the other kids had peaked early and fizzled out as freshman but not me. It was always the opposite for me. Slowly building from what I could for I came from far less means when I entered into this life. The fatherless son of a widow, I had to be in it for the long haul in those days. The long run for thee! I had to build long lasting connections to pull me through the chaos that would ensue a poor rural lads life. Kurt Breidenbach was good friends with the Piermarini brothers and we became sort of cohorts too. Compatriots living the final rebellious glory of our good old schoolroom days. At times though it felt like my friends were simply using my rural home for a place to commit an occasional lewd act with other female classmates. And to drink from some of my dads dusty old liquor bottles still tucked away in his desk. In the dorms my friends would all pile into my room for a hidden smoke, even if I was not around. Reckless behavior ruled our roost, after all life was nothing but whimsical enjoyment leading up to these fallen days. The Internet had not yet completely spread. No one used it when it was just the Usenet. The Internet was strictly old html 1.0 when it first started. Just text and low resolution basic images. Flash was not even a thing which had come and gone yet. You could barely wank off to more than some animated GIFs and play RedBaron 3D dialup vidya games. It was too crude to really suck you in. We lived one of the final partial analog lives but we could tell the outside world was moving even faster than us. We were simply responding to it all. Society overall was shifting faster and harder each year. We all saw the signs if we looked for them. The shuttered windows of the Main Street shops and the rise and fall of the corporate malls and big box stores. Local cultures replaced by global mass consumption. The President was getting blow jobs under his desk from young girls. We were all going downhill fast and thought it was all normal. Just a continuation of the 60s, 70s and 80s. We would come to find out the tax evading jet set elites were being blackmailed by dirty offshore island deeds into foreign entanglements and briberies. Underage kids even. Sick satanic stuff. The world had become an overly complex mess of debauchery and technical machinery since before most of us had been born, lorded over by dispirited corrupt bureaucrats hellbent on its further metastasis. We barely knew the cause of it all. Something made the faux revolution of the sixties forget conventional morality altogether and embrace a regression of the culture instead. Your country meant nothing anymore. It was all just a marketing brand. Globalism and deep corruption was in full swing. A colony on the exterior of the Great West would take it all down with it. Had the legacy of the big World Wars and our involvement in them unleashed some sort of demonic spirit upon us? The Technological Industrialization of the Western World had been well underway before our lifetimes but we were perhaps still feeling its spiritual reverberation and tremors. . . A Global Civil Cold war which simply spawned new and burgeoning technology to further divide us. Right versus Left, East versus West, America versus Russia. A Europe divided shall never stand tall. Morally our future facing society would soon become filled with digital null space standing between each of us like a giant sucking vacuum. Life had become too extremely easy and complacent in the preceding days of the overthrow of societal power structures. It was almost instinct for me to feel all of this history reckoning amongst my people standing before me. I knew it all from hearing my Grandpas rants. I knew it all from thinking about what my father had done for a living. We all wanted an easy fix at the touch of a button and all of this was its darkest results. Pushing that easy button and letting that technological prowess off without thinking of the spirit of mankind. Poof, lets reset the world. All for the money, all to confiscate some capital for this growing leviathan. This made the world one big chaotic mass of quietly desperate digital souls. Our Western culture had been replaced by get rich quick schemes and us youngsters were just along for the ride and trying to enjoy it all as best we could with our yet to mature brains. We were simply its most recent humble subjects. We knew all of this, none of us, not even the debonair Piermarinis or clever Kurt Breidenbachs of the world could stop it from sucking us all up into it clutches.

That summer between high school and college bled through my veins. What a summer. I’ll just call it my summer of love, for me and my new mate Kurt soon came upon some mind altering drugs that made us just love our life here on Earth and humanity oh so much more. For the first time even. We died of audible decadence while watching the roofs cave in due to sub orbital sounds and gyrations of soul hugging laughter. I remember that one night with the Hartnoll brothers well. They had to close off a section of town because of the auditory explosions. The frequencies were all wrong and the provincial dome began spilling tiles. We danced ebulliently and basked in all the glittering glory, in fact, all of the ladies wowed us with whispers that summer. Teenage tantric lovers high atop Mount Annapurna watching the stars fall. The Kama-sutra fizzled within me and one girl in particular that night. If only her big cousin was not always around. By day I was dreaming with Kurt in between bouts of glorious soul resuscitations about us careening to the cliffs of space someday. Russian MiG jets to the edge of the Earth, just high enough to see the darkness of the Universe above and the curvature of our own vast planet below. We could save up the rubles if we worked hard enough. One of us would own our own plane someday and we would soar away together as old men gliding past the turmoils of modern life. When you're still a child anything can happen. The sky's the limit. It would only be in just a few years that you would realize that there are bounds to every man which he shall never cross. Then night would come, our dreams would fall. Our loves would leave us. I wrote that bitch a letter and I never looked back. In fact I never spoke one word to her ever again. As was always my rule. Once I put that harsh mistress down I didn’t pick her up again. A good horse never eats the grass behind him. Like those whores I wasted my time on once. With music I felt wronged too. I never spoke one word to them all again. This was my personal code, the only code that still gave me some freedom over the outside and unreal modern world. Like Charlie wanted when he pulled that pin and lost it all with one question. Watched the answer explode into one million pieces to never be seen again. Gone, caput, over for now. Only he knows the outcome. Once I had forsaken my love, my music, my failed dreams, I never looked back. Not once. This was a choice I could make. The last thing I could control myself.

Failures, failures, failures. . . I wanted to be a musician once and look where I am now. How did I pass through this young nihilist childish outlook on my own life? Was music just a part of that outlook?

I remember this one conversation with Kurt that summer in particular where he said,

“To be very very proud is indeed very very good, No? I’m just not so sure how one could live in today's world and not conclude exactly that. Whereas the ancient divine texts seem to tell us that an excess of pride is a vice not a virtue. The great religions tell us to humble ourselves. Why? Look around you — What do you see today? Do you not see so many proud people surrounding us? Boasting even. Preening and strutting about like Peacocks. We are entitled to pride just by the virtue of being alive today. Or through some certain trite myopic popular things that entertain us, like the shows we watch or our certain sexual proclivities, just things which do not matter in order to really live and survive. Staring at shiny screens cannot really feed anyone. Us today, we would not dare know what it's like to have to earn pride through suffering and hard toil. Is that why an excess of pride is wrong? I enjoy our music as much as most but one doesn't need this in order to live. Entertainment is just that. Entertainment. It only seeks to distract us and numb our minds from the pitiful reality that we have become. The masses of Western men and women falling prey to African tom-toms. Hip-Hop Hurray! – until the entire ceiling caves in on us all. There must be more to all of this. Are we simply afraid of death? Is it all just a growing dopamine driven distraction keeping us from that one thought until it is too late? Where is actual fulfillment during these times my friend?”

I remember looking up at Kurts face. I could see that deep within his eyes he was yearning for a different kind of world than we had been born into. Different from the one which was placed and building rapidly before us. That I could not even begin to placate him in his tumultuous mind with my mumbling naive youthful answers. In fact I couldn't help him at all. I had so little real life experience. The problem was too big and we were all too small and simply helpless. I was clueless as to the answer which would quell him so I dug in my heels with him a little deeper to learn more.

“Surely you can find some good in the entertainment of our world? Surely some of it not only distracts but educates you.”

“Have you ever read the story of Siddhartha?” he asked me.

“I've only heard of it. What is it about?”

“It is about the journey of awakening within a young man who comes from a pious life, who then chooses to take a hedonistic path only to find himself once again cast astray. He only finds that ultimate meaning of life deep in the forest outside of the city by listening to the rivers delightful musings.”

“Can't you take heart that such a story exists?” I asked.

“See that's the problem Brother. It’s just a story and not a very good one at that because I've never seen anyone live and embody this life like Siddhartha did. Us humans are mostly rat bastards. Especially these days. Our fathers too. Perhaps for awhile now mans regressive ways have been building up inside of him. My Father is so miserable working in an office building all of the time. The alcohol is making his nose a permanent tone of reddish pink. Didn’t you tell me once your dad did some horrible things in his life?”

That was one of the last conversations I had with Kurt before I never saw him again. We had all graduated, thrust out into a new world.