THE SPELL

It begins when we are children. The spell takes hold and we're busy everyday. There are adults telling you about the world, and you have no choice but to believe them. We have trust in them and the system (how they operate) seems natural to us. School is where the spell is strongest, and it keeps everyone in line...to an extent.

There are those of us who couldn't fit in or conform to the rules for one reason or another, and we were singled out as soon as it was clear that we had any kind of problem. (I had a lot of trouble in high school, mainly because I had a very strong desire NOT to be there.)

Some of us were kiss asses and suck ups to whom schmoozing comes naturally. Some were bullies or cheaters and they'd do whatever they wanted and just lie to get out of it, or succeeded in gaining positive attention through grades that they didn't earn. Some were abstinent while others got pregnant junior year. ( I attended to my first shotgun wedding at 17, friends of the bride).

Some young people think that they are ready for responsibility, but no young person knows what that really means until they aren't young anymore.

To make it, you have to have a plan in mind of what you want to be and where, and then the people around you have to agree with that plan. Your teachers, coaches and even your parents all help shape where you will really end up after high school, but for every student that gets into the college they want, or think they want, there are others who are "falling off" so to speak.

If you do not have the support of all these people in your decisions, it immediately becomes a battle just to show up anywhere. People ask you what you are doing, and you may not know, so you say I don't know, and now everyone thinks you're a lazy slacker with no direction. People like you don't go anywhere in life we're told. People like you just sit around all day and smoke drugs, and do weeds.

The truth is that the only people who welcome you at this point in life are people who are similarly perplexed by there situation and decide to take a break from faking it so hard and smoke a joint or have a beer and say hey friend do you also suffer from afflictions such as mine, existential and misanthropic?

Why yes I do. What's that? Oh sure I'll try some. Oh thank you kind sir/maddam, this is most delicious...and so forth...

Drug and alcohol use was a completely natural part of my early adolescence...

It was the number one way to deal with hypocrisy and injustice, either imagined or real.

Certainly we weren't outing people we thought were bad, or protesting rules we thought were unfair...we just wanted to be alone to think for a minute...
that minute turns into fifteen years in a blink.

And then you are here: {BLAM}