She wore her glasses like a helmsman with a lubricated nose. The lenses were always on the verge of tumbling down into the plebeian sub-sector of students with overly animated faces that sent the message of a clamor for knowledge but with brains that begged for the minute hand to collide with an arbitrary increment and release them out into other situations that they love to hate and love to leave.
I wondered when I stared into her faces of sometimes expression but oftentimes regret and I listened to the movement of the heart of the kid that always sat next to me. Pondering about why exactly it was that I yearned to tread the lineation of carpet that would lead me into the tile which would siphon me into the well-constructed doors that served the fiberglass purpose of showing the tiger the zoo’s food-court. Those doors take you to cars and cars take you home and home gives you the time, stress, tension, and impetus to study for the next day of clamoring for an escape and the original intent of bending the wills of others into appreciating our musings on the dreads of the time.
The dregs of swilled tobacco drain out into the foot-pedals of the automobiles that we each earn in a line and the first in line is the most lovable, the last still gains the power but by then it’s a standard that should have been granted at the whim of the planet’s revolution, not at the crest of a financial or cultural yarn. So I stare at the raisin-stain on her left cheek and wonder what the motion of a circular flow chart really means in relation to the daily choices we make in and as a consequence how we react to the scare resources that grow scarcer each day. As she preaches the by-chances of macroeconomics I try to visualize the amount of oil under the crust of earth that shelters the tile, carpet, and the doors, the cages, the jailers, and the perceived prison. It’s like the experiment at Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, or some other institution of higher-education we all hope to enter and that have enough fluffy research ability to delve into the psyche of humans and fester in the fungus of truth-diving.
Each legion of professorship holds the flagellant of fascist Catholic political pundits that beg for us to cease being apathetic and grasp for our own opinions, all while telling us what to believe and what flag to burn, which one to pray for, which one to worship to, and similarly how fair, honest, and politically correct we must be to be prim and accepted by the very society that we as a generation constitute the future. Well, if we the students are the bridge that the golden era dough-men and the baby-boomers are using to shuttle themselves into retirement and crash-and-burned pension plans, then why do they hold so much antipathy towards the very concept of our existence and our inevitable success?
I can’t hate the graying woman with the slippery lenses that peers down at us with the recognition of our inner-drive to replace her. To improve her job, utilize all her manifestations for the most possible enjoyment while maintaining the effectiveness of teaching and idea-sharing. I cannot hate her in any sense of the influential four letter adage to madness, but I can use another quatrain of cerebral attachment to describe my feelings for the informative witch that brews cauldrons and tests to chuck at while we duck behind social networks, textual distractions, and the fuel for the hobbies that will define our careers later in life; whether our function in society is to provide cannibinoids to the unnecessarily stressed out masses, to pick up after those that don’t think about who picks up, or to teach those who toss for those who pick up, or to maintain a nine o’clock to five o’clock entering data into computers that laugh at us for having to work then going to a bar after-hours with your buddies that hold similarly useless professions and ganging up on the one who decided to teach those who mock the ones who pick up and secretly throw down bits of their trash onto the tile that connects to the overbearingly warm carpet in the classrooms, lulling each child to sleep and dooming them to pick up after those that negatively consider the ones that pick up as a career choice. It’s all about the grades that you earn on the first day of school.
Regardless of whether these grades affect any sort of GPA or whether not that GPA in and of itself describes the person that is in possession of it (and with the constant stream of pseudo-intellectual fodder that counselors spew at us about the importance of college-acceptance, we are defined by these things), the pertinence in grade-work starts on day one and starts with an initial sense of superciliousness towards our classmates and developing an obsequious need to impress the teacher with mile-per-hour hand shoots that nearly scrape the ceiling with the fervor to answer the question of the teacher who at the time is wondering why they haven’t blown their brains out with the luger that they bring everyday in their lunch sack and stare at next to their lumpy peanut-butter sandwiches as the children thrust each other in the playground and establish the social power-structure within their specific school district until the day that senior year ends, and even then the placement of an individual within the vacuous importance of his classmates will always affect how said person acts in college and whether they choose to imbibe toxicity every morning before class or whether they retreat into a tangle of cloth, paper, glued spines, and hysterically pathetic situational comedies revolving around the lives of anyone but the person viewing them in a wake of dependence on escapism.
I don’t need drugs to be an addict, or alcohol, which any stoner will tell you is also a drug and they are correct in their own little red-eyed way, except that the majority of societal partners will say that alcohol can enhance life in minimal amounts, forgetting that the natural flow of minimalism when combined with the adrenaline-flooded brains of us noble savages is straight into maximum usage and the plunge into rock-bottom. No one looks up when they’ve reached that tangle of thorns and peers, if they did it would be easier to start climbing or devising plans to at least afford some elevation. No, no, they stare out into the recessive valley of constant declivity that broadens itself in the manner of 180 degrees of maddened vision. Blunted by the idea that there’s nowhere to go but straight through bales of pricking hay, they accept vile resignation and remain there. Looking up, in retrospect, could potentially provide hope, but it would be false hope, as the cliff-side manages to make itself more steep by the very force of will that caused it to lure in once-dreamy eyed and inspired individuals and thrust them down into its womb of terrifying loneliness but absolute transparency. Where nothing can be kept private, but everything that is laid out to be critiqued by truth is so ugly that any passersby vomit at the very concept of its existence.
That is truth, unacceptable by most but yearned for by an influential some. It’s this some that drive the hyper-kinetic motion of thoughts within my brain and make me forget what the slipping-glass instructor was even ruminating upon which then leads to me making amends to myself that I’d both listen more and care less about not listening. I grasp at the vine of the truth like Tarzan leaping from a gaggle of predatory masses, but either the plant is too chary to hold me or my palms are too slick from the anxiety of leaping, for I fall and tumble down into the abyss nightly, despite my best efforts.
The reason I’m so affected by soundtracks from cinematic bliss and landscape-spanning camera shots detailing the oracle of truth transcending into a desert bowl meditation of solitude is because I have these moments of stagnancy in the abyss, and I know that the true beauty in life is that there isn’t a way to quantify amazement. It isn’t the pheromonal hyperdrive of the middle-teens that lingers in my physicality, it’s a turn into what I believe will be my dominant personality as an adult; a man who wishes to connect with each and every person that has a unique story and a wish to document their trials, tribulations, and thoughts in a manner that does them justice. Not a memoir, but a series of textual illustrations that impart an essence rather than a concrete narrative.
What I want and what would give me temporal bliss would be to see an initially disconnected, epically formatted span of vignettes that eventually mingle and collude towards the end, all in the name of achieving a higher thematic purpose. It would be the perfect film, borrowing elements from Inarritu’s Babel and 21 grams, while maintaining the nearly heavenly cinematography of Malick’s work. Shedding tears would not do its poignancy justice, and I would feel like the snow-blinders I had worn throughout life had been peeled away by a compassionate guardian angel and replaced with a sense of courage at the events to unfold in my life, whether they would be remembered as inherently positive or negative.
Even walking away from that movie would not hinder its absolute truth within the spectrum of the ideas I’ve gained from art, the distance would only strengthen its hold on my heart, and each sigh I would exhale from the minute it ended until the second my last breath escaped me would be a milligram heavier from bundling the swathing weight of a masterpiece. A magnum opus so revolutionarily-charged with innovative ideas and hitherto unacceptably divergent methods of production that it would almost necessitate acceptance and immediate, worldwide acclaim. That is what I wish for when I stare into the half-lensed eyes of the economist who jaunts through exceedingly efficient presentations, denoting importance to a particularly graph, way of thought, or historical event. This is why I stare into the very pits of her pupils and cause her to uneasily shift to someone else within the classroom that isn’t actually listening and is obvious about it. She would hate to have to look into the eyes of a man who digested her words without caring and haphazardly tossed the picked bones of her fallacies onto the carpet that links to the tile that leads to the doors.
Of course she would much rather romance a completely hierarchical relationship with a falsely prudent student who gave off the impression of erudition and foresight through constantly struggling with their studying habits and their personalities. At a certain point, the flood of needless information and stress of cramming begins to chip at their cores, and the shells that husk around the linked tile bemoan with tumescent throats and lips covered in sores the loss of their youth, which is the most tragically scarce resource, in economic terms. I struggle with the concepts she delivers to us under her greased lens and hawkish nose, not because they are irregular or too complex (this is just the first few days of class), but rather because my mind is finally coming to terms with thoughts that I had never before seen expressed in educational terms, and with having a class that has actual implications independent of continuing an upward collegiate slope, despite the lecturing deficiencies of its administrator. I could tell that I was taking a bearing on her modus operandi, as she stammered through a few slides detailing the importance of opportunity costs, marginal costs, and marginal benefits. It’s a simple concept, one must not do other things in order to successfully do one thing, and economists are tasked with factoring in the need to sacrifice certain activities and expenditures to put a salve on the wound of our collective hour-glass, which is spilling forth right onto the headlines of the perennial newspaper nobody gets (or reads) anymore.
The situation of having to decide between two functions of society that aren’t particularly pleasurable singes the layers of skin separating our infantile toes and implants the chip of proper actions within our soggy minds. The heavy-footed staccato of an incrementally existent elephant thumps against my rib-cage as I refuse to break the link between our fields of vision. If during the interval of time that she explains the basic definition of economics and its impact on politics, I should climb up as a tribal warrior and beat my chest while keeping eye-contact stable, the look of horror on her face would only be as passionate as the pulse of her increasingly dead heart. She would see the truth projected from my eyes as from a terribly beautiful deity bringing once forbidden celestial knowledge to a primitive culture. What was once fire became electricity and nuclear energy and the extraction of plutonium, and without advancement into weaponry she sees in my eyes a plummet into the psyche, as I burrow down in hopes of avoiding the standard class-warfare of socialization and communication.
She knows that I’m expressing my utter insignificance, and although she’d like to pin her anxiety on a fear of the future domination of my generation, she knows the truth that the only frightening concept my eyes project is that one day she will die alone, no more lenses sliding down her nose and no more presentations on autonomous economies.
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