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last chance texaco |
| 2003-05-05 : 12:11 a.m. lct |
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The summer is a funny thing. A few months intangible and everybody's forgotten you. It’s a frustrating, confused, prison sentence tinged with listless melancholy, but hey, the weather’s nice and it never lasts long enough; just a heavy-handed lock-down before school, when the real fun starts, when the sunlight doesn’t wake up with you anymore. Spend October through May, and sometimes into June if there are any snow days, with the same people year after year after year, and nobody ever notices that nobody really knows anybody. Everyone gets so set in their ways that it no longer becomes necessary to reach beyond the limits of their own habitually alluring cliques. It’s like any other drug, really, the back-to-school ritual. The skaters all meet in the parking lot, the computer kids in the main stairwell, the soccer players in the courtyard, and so on and on. Each year, the same people with the same plaster smiles make the same beelines to their respective favorite hangouts with this nauseating spring to their steps. And while school’s in, they’re best friends, pretending not to remember that over the summer they barely saw one another. What kind of a half-life is that? As far as I’m concerned, a person can only live and breathe that sort of static, plastic, and costume camaraderie for so long before it becomes virtually impossibly to separate themselves from it, like it's some kind of irrational umbilical cord feeding imitation life into you. We don’t realize that we’re choking on the cord, kind of, drowning. And people think I have bad habits. Whatever. Nobody can even tell the difference anymore. Most of the people I go to school with aren't even friends with their friends. Like it becomes this huge hassle to actually have a conversation with the guy who you've only ever regarded as "that senior dude with the fake ID who buys me beer sometimes.” Narcissistic marriages of convenience. Why worry about friends when there’s plenty to choose from? They shouldn’t be so wasteful.
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