Awake, but only Half-Way
There it was, once upon a time, a young man of twenty years who sat bored in his second round of American Literature classes. Almost nodding off to the monotone voice that rebound and echoed in his brain, just before the words of a graduate student sat in for the real instructor he paid tuition in order to listen to seeped out of his brain and were lost to the airwaves forever. He heard the muffled sound of emo rock bands screaming about their god-awful lives in the ear-buds of the student behind him.
The desks were too cramped to be comfortable, a necessary expense on the part of the school in order to keep its students awake, which could almost be surprising, but students tend to drop out when they fail classes. So hand it to them, the college wanted them to pass, if only to continue to receive tuition dollars, but with each passing semester the student sitting uncomfortable in second row just to the left of center would wonder: “Why”
“Excuse me?”
The stand-in instructor asked aloud and the students’ stomach turned to liquid nerves. “I’m sorry?”
“You asked: ‘why’?”
“I did?”
“Yes, mister, I’m sorry I forget your name.”
“Why does it matter?”
“Well I assure you, the words on these pages…”
The student smiled as a forced bravado healed the nerves that tickled his stomach with the ferocity of an electrical storm, “Why does my name matter, you don’t assign my grades, you’re hardly better than a proctor.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Apology accepted,” the student smiled while the graduate student fumbled to find meaning in the disturbance. “Please go on, I mean I’m riveted to my chair, don’t mind me, I was just thinking.”
The graduate student put down the pen she had been biting between eager undergrads giving their points of view on the poetic form of one dead poet or another, “Please enlighten us, I’m sure you’re excited to tell us all just what you think, <i>again</i>.”
He shrugged, and wondered to himself if there truly was anything to be said today. Monday another proctor had thrown him out for questioning the validity of the stand-in and comparing his work to that of a lowly slave to the system, allowing the PhD to sit on her fat ass and scribble down notes for a book she would never write, but would only attempt just to save her job security. Not that a tenured professor would have anything to worry about, so it was in the seas of appearances Dr. Swassoon swam. “I’ve nothing today. Only really wonder, why does all this matter?”
“Lest you forget, the society that doesn’t appreciate art soon falls.”
“What dead asshole said that before his society fell in the mass of joblessness, war, and rampant sexual deviance?”
“Are you referring about today?” The pretty blonde two rows behind him and near the right wall uttered a word, though not surprising; she always seemed to have something to say when he opened his mouth.
“Today and any other era in human history, of course. You see, we’re all slaves to the system. This poor woman is up here talking to us, while we pretend to understand or care to what she has to say and what does she get for her troubles? An undergrad like me. Look at us, we’re not even students anymore, we’re slaves to a system that’s throwing out its traditional definitions right before our very eyes, and here we hope to get our fifty-k a year and waste out lives inside a cubicle wondering if our ex-girlfriends will ever update their blogs.”
“It’s all such a waste, isn’t it?” The proctor stood behind the podium, stared at the young man just within the grasp of his legal age to ingest alcohol, and she mumbled. Nothing worth speaking, nothing worth listening to, she just mumbled and the boiling of blood was apparent under her red flushed face before she torn the podium down and said: “Burn the place for all I care! I’m done with all of you!”
“That sort of rage is really fit for the war effort; you should do your civic duty and put your rage on the line where it belongs. Scream to the sound of battle and lead men and girls to the glorious chaos that awaits them!” The young man smiled and lifted the podium from the ground. “And you see. This is where education gets you. Frustrated and filled with rage, well just enough to throw things and go into the unisex bathroom and cry your eyes out. Fuck this place, who wants to get a beer?”
Class was short that day, there were only a few that stayed behind waiting for the true instructor to return to the American Lit 345 class on a dreary Thursday morning, but really only those sleeping with their ear-buds that toned out the entire conversation. Those poor hapless souls that missed everything around them, too self absorbed and full of self pity for no reason at all. All they desire, too simply to escape their entire existence in a fury of synthesized tones that only disguised itself as music. They would wake up soon enough, to find their classroom as devoid of people as their lives devoid of meaning. Half-asleep they would drag their feet through the hallow shell of a learned institution and press down on the <i>repeat</i> function and just as their media player embodied, they would repeat their same old same old, without a care of what occurred as they slept.