How to assemble a Paul Bot: Step 3

Like a good little obedient child you return to the meat grinder from Pink Floyd’s rock-opera extravaganza and robotically write down the answers you were expected to memorize that week on blank lines or scribble in little ovals with your selection of either (A),(B),(C),(D) and don’t even think about rubbing that aluminum gum wrapper up and down on the scantron! Alas your heart was not in it and while the dreaded, unappealing hours of this forced indoctrination camp was endured you oft found yourself gazing out the blinds waiting for when the real world would begin. Waiting for that final bell of the day that, for a time, meant you really were free. You were the kid that felt like O.J. Simpson getting acquitted every time the last day of school for summer vacation was over. The next three months would be the lavish overindulgence of Saturday morning cartoons, chasing squirrels through snake infested woods with a slingshot and a bone handled knife and of course sleeping over with the only friend you still had. Frankie the turtle necked albino. Which was nowhere as bad as it sounds because not only did Frankie’s parents bestow upon him the ability to play with power by way of the Nintendo entertainment system, they allowed him to keep it in his bedroom. And Frankie’s parents were alcoholics so whenever you came to spend the night they pretty much passed out after David Lettermen was done with the top ten list and wouldn’t bug you guys about playing “Duck Hunt” or “Metroid” until the sun came up. This type of thing pretty much repeated for the next few years only somewhere in there Frankie, in an obvious effort to deflect, starting delving into the world of video games way too much; remember? This guy was reading Nintendo Power all the time and marking it up like a holy text, he was wearing the power glove to school, he knew the release dates for all the upcoming 8 bit cartridges and who produced them. I mean come on? Why would any normal prepubescent know that type of thing? Frankie did though because he had become obsessed. His family had blurred into an 8-bit reality so all he could do was choose an 8-bit reality that was a little bit better. You hung in there as long as you could but when he started talking that crazy talk about “One day in the future Mario will eat koopas and defecate them like eggs while flying through the level with nothing but a leaf.”, you knew it was time to stop having sleepovers at Frankie’s place.
Then the day came when that chemical reaction we talked about earlier kicked in and your world was about to change forever. Honestly I don’t understand why puberty is considered taboo amongst so many people, or a topic not to be discussed in polite or mixed company. That’s foolishness. Puberty is a wondrous, beautiful thing that is life’s version of an abstract painting because in a world with structure we would declare little people going through life’s change temporarily insane and have them committed to a padded room for the duration of their little caterpillar into a butterfly routine, but instead we let the rascals run around free.

No really, this was a great time for you it really was. This is when the creative part of you, the passionate part of you, the rebellious part of you, the misunderstood part of you, the hopeless romantic part of you, the angry part of you, the sad part of you, the poetic part of you, the musical part of you, the artistic part of you, the optimistic part of you, the pessimistic part of you, and the know it all part of you all sprang up into one absolutely irritating personality. This is like panning for gold though so we got to throw all the dirt in there before the gold can come loose once it’s all shook up. This stage is where most of society got stuck quite frankly because when this chemical cocktail is spinning in your brain what’s suppose to be happening is you are suppose to be pointed in the direction of perfecting that which you are passionate about the most in order to get on your way on the path to your destiny. Not so in modern society. No at this point in a human’s development he/she is only presented with the reasonable outcome of pursuing a “career” in the “workforce” in order to one day have a mortgage, insurance, a portfolio, a retirement fund and a plot. Ta dah! I think it’s this shock of such a brutal and unethical option for existing in this life, one of uniformity and compliance incessantly, that when presented, either envelopes you like a giant jelly blob or shocks you towards where I believe most of us went; namely open rebellion. For us, the most difficult personality traits inhibited during puberty didn’t last anywhere near as long as our peers. Sure we indeed went through the stage of thinking our parents were complete and total idiots whose ability to have kept us alive this long was mind-blowing to ponder and of course making them damn near have a heart attack at three a.m. in the morning when they discover that you’ve stuffed your bed with a pillow dummy and have long been gone out the window and into the night for mischief and nothing but. All that you did inflict, but don’t hit the bottom because for you this lasted about as long as it takes to shake the flu in comparison to the rest of your peers who drug their jackass stage out way too long if not for the rest of their lives.

You navigated it well and once you figured out that you were suppose to be creating yourself as a person, building block by building block, you started to have fun with this stage in your life. Music that once had no meaning for you was now making you tear apart every lyric so you could somehow connect it to what was going on in your life at the time because they were singing that right to you, man. You were jumping into books like “1984”, “Animal Farm”, “Brave New World”. You were getting a taste of poetry here, a little art over there. You were starting to pay attention to how much skill it took to be a film maker or sound technician and even waiting with baited breath for the new video game consoles to be released so you could study how they were designed in hopes that one day you too would make joy for others as well. It took you back when after years of having heard Frankie ramble, Mario indeed did eat koopas via a dinosaur, defecate eggs as well as fly through the level with only a leaf. Maybe he wasn’t such a conspiracy theorist after all, maybe he was just ahead of the curve. You were feeding that right brain and letting your spirit fish for something to nibble on. For each of us it was different when we felt that tug, but we all felt it. There was something that just lit us up and felt like it was tangled up inside of our DNA and if we could do that one thing for the rest of our lives then all this stuff that doesn’t make sense won’t have to make sense and we would still be just fine. Once you lock that outward expression of the inward song of the soul down you are determined to steer your life in the direction of mastering your chosen path. Because the path is chosen. With high hopes and dreams as vivid as a blu ray disc in a VHS world you can’t wait until school starts back so you can jump through all there hoops as quick and as nimble as you can in order to escape this madness and get out into the real world where idealists like you are appreciated and allowed to blossom. This inefficiency of human essence in not allowing people to express themselves with laser point precision in the craft of their choosing surely was a discarded and frowned upon position in the real world, you were confident of this until you started high school.

When you thought that mass manipulation could get no worse you are dismayed to find that instantaneously on the first day of your freshman year all of your peers had put away the practice of grouping off in vague ways, rather a more maniacal system had been built seemingly prefab. Hmm. Yes now there were clearly defined cliques which was kind of like some ghetto, Americanized, teenage, caste system. You had your jocks, and can it get anymore MK-Ultra than having a psychologically predetermined group installed into the social strata of the mass youth collective of this country that is centered on popularity by wearing uniforms and engaging in simulated combat? Maybe I’m just being paranoid when I suggest that high schools all across our country are actually institutions which build barriers in the mind to prevent thoughts occurring outside a determined corridor while gearing a considerable amount of resources such as a band, a field, a stadium, busses, coaches, thousands of tax payer dollars on equipment and even the tarts in the short skirts shaking the pom poms and giving old men hoping for high kicks reasons to come see a ball game since the turn of the century for the sole purpose of worshipping a football team. Let’s just say I never got a pep rally for any stage plays I happened to scribble.

If the school spirit clique wasn’t your thing you had nothing to fear. There were still plenty more cookie cutter personalities you could pretend were yours so you could eat in the cafeteria with a group of people who dressed exactly you. One might pick the bunch that chose to ride the “lonely and misunderstood” thing to the extreme and show the world on a daily basis that they are just as black and dark on the inside as the costume they wear for the outside world to see. We called these guys the Goths but they could never hear us because they were always blasting Marilyn Manson’s poorly done revamps of songs you loved as a kid into their ears and eating up his philosophy of life was horrible and altogether a stupid move on whoever happened to be listening at the time’s part. If you weren’t down with spending all of your allowance on mascara and attempting suicide once a month, but this time it’s for real, then keep looking and your gaze didn’t have to go far to find your small town, hardcore gangstas. For realla. When not avoiding saying doughnut, making sure they weren’t displaying certain colors on articles of clothing or mimicking the practices of advertising “bitches” from prison by walking around like a slap stick clown due to the waistline of their fubu’s being just above their knees, you best be sure they are listening to the one song that all gangstas listen to called rap. Really it’s just one really long song that takes thousands of tracks, multiple hundreds of compact discs and lots of performers with pirate nick names to pull it off but rap is indeed just one piece of eardrum vibration. Not your flavor? Join the Buffy’s, as we called them. While you watched all those cheesy teen movies where the underprivileged boy makes it to the prom with the well to do beauty queen you couldn’t help but snicker at how over the top the film made the “popular” kids out to be. Yet when finally confronted with it in flesh and blood you find that the stuck up chick actually has the goal of surpassing the calculation of her intelligence quota by the number of backseat fumblings with a effeminate ken dolls who think that trying to pull pink off still doesn’t indicate that youre gay and to send up even more red flags they gots the collar popped. There were the anti-Buffy’s who I always found funny. These were the guys who hated the Buffy’s and were always going off on how superficial they were and how they probably took hours getting dressed for school to make sure they were trendy enough and in defiance of this the anti-Buffy’s would take just as much time and care if not more than the Buffy’s to make sure they looked anti-trendy. A few other groups were there just waiting to suck you in but pretty much you had this base core of cliques that those shot off from.

This further assault to logic and reason as you understood it upon entering high school was the last straw. Now the gig was up and what you had previously only had sneaking suspicions of was totally confirmed. This is a sham. This school thing is a sham and it is making the people I grew up with mentally reflicted. What once had been free thinking human beings were now devoid of individuality and could only identify with the ideals and worldviews, not from their own life experience, rather from the predetermined perspective that was socially acceptable for the type of uniform they were sporting. In addition to this radical mindset of breaking up into classes of people based on frivolous differences it became apparent to you that these classes seemed to always be at odds with one another in some type of warfare. Seeing all this for what it was you simply refused to participate and decided that you would not only become your own person, you would do it with the fervor of a crusader. This meant that cooperating with the puppet masters running this real life “One flew over the cuckoo’s nest” was no longer apart of the equation. You began to buck the system every time you turned around and you drove all the teachers insane who knew you were probably more intelligent than 99.99 percent of the other students but only filled out tests with the names of board games like “Chutes and ladders” or “Candy land”. Nope. You’d had enough of their crap and you weren’t jumping through any more hoops. You were going to stick around this joint until you could legally sign yourself out and move on with life having this little episode of being a guinea pig for the state far in the rear view mirror. Refusing to try and fit in with your peers resulted in you being considered an outcast of the social sphere, unable to be placed under any of the labels all else aspired to live within yet still you managed to have friends within each of the cliques you could never be a part of. This is because you have always chosen to relate to others in terms of human being to human being regardless of worldly stature. You simply did not fit the molds. This same stubborn, rugged individualism (the bane of the frothed one) also kept you on the outs with the authoritarian rulers in the guise of teachers and principals. They always reminded you that you were on their troublemaker list and the first opportunity they got they would see to it that you were expelled from this institution with your flippant little attitude towards what we are trying to do here, mister man.

To be continued…

D.L. Crumpton