Walking around the Antelope Valley Community College Campus on the first Monday morning of the spring semester, with no purpose at all, except to have a place to ash my cigarette and a moment to prepare for a day of aimless class crashing, revealed many tiny tragedies, just beginning to brew around our school and its attendees.
The first squander I noticed was in the back parking lot, where there where hovels of pathetic cigarette and blunt smokers.
It was a cold fingertips kind of morning; they stood on their cement islands with sheer anger and ideas of pure vendetta written about their faces; the new campus policy stung, no smoking, crude death to all heathens . . . Try me (Administration)!
As they disbursed and dragged their sorry feet toward their painful and begrudgingly early morning class, I stomped out my cigarette as well as my laughter, and cut on through to the heart beat of our campus; the social quad in between the cafeteria, library, and business education building.
There wasn’t a taste of positive socializing to be had that Monday morning, all of the students were walking around with their eyes gauged out, bleeding out pints of good blood from their empty torn crevices.
They were all bumping into one another trying to grab for anyone with the scent of human sight, only to find another eye-gauged college denizen, eagerly pissed off and with a temper large enough to destroy two two-story buildings.
As soon as I noticed this tiny-tragedy a crowd of them began to form, sniffing the sensual aroma of sight; I cursed God for all of my good senses.
Unarmed, and incredibly in shock, I began to run in a full sprint toward the APL building, taking the short-cut through the narrow outdoor hallway mouth, revealing the smiling face of the APL building, all while hearing the zombie cry of bloody faced college students.
In a joyous and semi-triumphant retort I yelled, “Lucky for you, I play Nazi Zombies 25 hours a day!”
I made it to the quad of the APL, gasping for breath, but luckily overjoyed at the sight of able bodied students: aspiring writers and critics, poets and art junkies, music fiends and digital design dinguses.
It took a moment to catch my breath; I gained my awareness and found a congregation of pretentious bohemians touching on the new MGMT album, “I heard it was completely uninspired.”
Standing under the giant-green-money savers with my smoking buddies, another pathetic tragedy began painting the day.
Groups of couples began magnetically massing, toward the center of the APL quad. Significant other’s that weren’t present were immediately dialed from the cell phones of angry, put-out college student lovers; the collective ringing would only cease once a positive connection was made.
Those with their significant other chained by the hand-grasp were being pummeled by harsh yelling and projective frustration.
“Why did I spend so much time kissing you in my lifted truck, you’re the worst thing that’s ever happened to me!” Only the eek from the scenes recipient, blonde yet able, could be heard in response.
Tears hit the floor like Mike Tyson at the end of his boxing career, with as much pouting and mumbled pleading as the man himself could muster.
I stomped out yet another cigarette and walked closer in toward the action, so I could get a good tune in on the cell phone conversations.
“How do you expect me to get into Stanford and turn you into an honest housewife? I mean, here I am on campus trying to get into English 101, and you’re asleep half stoned from last night, just laying there waiting for me to get home!”
Murmurs continued from his mouth but ended the conversation with a clear cut, it’s over!”
Depressed, and sadly reminded of my own loses, it occurred to me that we are merely young apathetic humans, thrown into a caged match, for the sake of cheesy references, call it Thunder-Dome, and for those in desperate need of an education are placed unarmed and entirely lethal to themselves; we don’t stop to think why there is a shortage of classes, facilities, and or a messiah.
The only advice I can give at this point would be to focus your sights on a new town, a more organized town, not smaller, just better-off. Give up on this town and its lazy attempts to give us an education and a progressive community; unless you crave playboys like R. Rex Paris and the bomb-building business men of Lockheed.
They wonder why we reciprocate after their damage has been done, and we won’t know much about their blue-prints to drown out our voice, but I’m certain it involves 10 percent of us passing, and 90 percent of us waiting in purgatory for the rest of eternity.
