I'm wearing a bright new yellow hat

posted by jeremy on December 19, 2003

& I've got 30lbs of groceries in my bag. I'm sitting on the 33rd street bus & this bus is chugging its way north towards my Killingworth abode. It's a beautiful day outside these windows, cold & clear. The only potential down-side is that the schools have let out & at every stop more & more adolescents scamper aboard. The visions of HP Lovecraft & Stephen King combined never held a fraction of the horror to be found in the interactions of our lovely American youth.

Three jock/hip-hop hybrids strut onto the bus, swaggering like so many bad MTV videos have surely told them they should, radiating stupidity & menace towards the other students on board. Bullies without doubt. "Outta da way, bee-atch." hisses one of them at a gangly 14-ish but pretty black girl who's standing in the aisle & she complies instantly, eyes on the floor. "Damn nigga." He mutters as he shoves by her.

I watch all of this fairly objectively, an anthropologist momentarily chucked into a wildly intense if parallel culture. I am a scientist, a voyeur, fascinated & horrified, analyzing everything. I am also invisible; I don't exist for these kids. When they look at me, I think that they must see only a vague shadow, ancient, of no use to them.

I'm trying to imagine how many high school clique/caste exist thruout the spectrum in this Year of our Lord 2003, millennial media clusterfuck that it is. How many details, subtle indicators of status are there, that my blundering eyes must surely miss? The smell of ferocious competition permeates the air, nearly pheromonal. But what are they competing for? The old standby, popularity? I think so, but it seems a meaner more vicious beast than I remember it. Bigger claws, smaller brain. Of course, every out-moded generation says something akin to this. I find myself no different suddenly. I don't feel geriatric yet, but I can see it coming, the out-of-touchness that touches everyone sooner or later. Still, I can sense the discord, the insecurity in all of these kids. An elemental confusion that comes with being new in the world & painfully self-aware. It is a difficult time for most mammals, let alone for humans. The process of figuring out who you are is a fucking bitch in an static agrarian society, I have to imagine... & our dynamic techno-anarchistic society is a neon nightmare, a blur of fashions, fads, advertising saturating the background with increased cross-marketing, kamikaze tactics, everything mutating faster & faster. Shit, I'm thinking, do these kids even have a chance? Of course, how can they not? Life adapts. That's what life does. It fucking adapts.

The bus stops again & three of the biggest dorks I've seen in my life lumber aboard & sit directly across from me. The first, a black kid who is the nearly the biggest human I have ever seen. Over six feet & half as wide, he takes up over two seats when he plops his ass down. He is huge; I mean fucking blue whale huge. The second is a kid who looks like he's just this side of having Down Syndrome, tho his voice is confident & intelligent. The third is a bezitted, uni-browed wonder of a kid & radiates the vibe of being the alpha of this trio, total commandant.

They immediately pull out some D&D books & begin excitedly debating stratagems of a complexity idling somewhere genius & utterly insane. It's all I can do to keep from laughing out loud, tho not a laugh of malice but of sheer delight. I'm on their team. I want them to succeed. I want them to take over the whole fucking world. All of them together in one spot at the same time, it warms my cold cold heart.

Suddenly they are whispering something amongst themselves & it is of a different tone, a different intensity. "Where is she?" asks Bright-Downs Boy. "She'll be here, don't worry." soothes Commander. "There she is!" whispers Giant triumphantly & sure enough, at the next stop she climbs aboard & sits down next to me, facing them. Maybe every high-school misfits dream girl. A very pretty but obviously awkward goth of a human. Trenchcoat, badass boots & a torn-up backpack. She says nothing to them & they say nothing to her but I can feel a form of energy buzzing in the air, a connection... But of what?

The trio inconspicuously resumes D&D shoptalk. "In that situation you would obviously need a six-two elemental fire charm to ward off the sewer orcs, or a maybe an invisible ice-demon summonance spell." says Giant. "No, no... A solar-dragon sword is all you would need & I think..." begins Commander but Goth Girl! cuts in with some advice on the subject. She nearly whispers it, yet whispers with a knowing smile... "No, he's right, a fire charm would do it. It's not that difficult. Just think about it." The boys stare at her with a combined look of adoration & baffled terror, like three deer caught in the headlights of a car & I simply want to yell, "That's it! That's it! D&D is the connection, the energy!" but I don't & the trio says nothing to her, not a word, they just go back to their intricate game theory. Out of the corner of my eye, I can see her following their conversation & she cuts in again & then again. Each time, the jack lighted terror, each time, no response. She doesn't lose her patience. She seems as desperate for some kind of contact as they, maybe more so. At least she keeps trying.

Personally, I start developing the urge to slap one of the three mucketeers upside the head. "When a lovely girl talks to you, fucking engage her desires for verbal communication, just fucking go for it, goddam it!" I resist the urge to scream this bit of wisdom as well. I realize it might be years or never before any of these amazing creatures develop the ability to woo anything more than their right or left hand.

But fuck, may existence favor the underdog in all his or her ridiculous glory. I want this rag-tag ugly-ass assemblage to spit in the face of every bullshit pop-dream generator of perfection this nation has thus far produced. Fuck People magazine & fuck Maxim too. Fuck what your mother thinks. Fuck fake boobs & fuck every photo-shopped image that ever stared at you in the checkout aisle of a Fred Meyers. It is all glammer, glimmer, illusion. Stare at it long enough & you'll go blind.

We pass Alberta & I signal the bus driver. I take a long look at my friends & bid them farewell & good luck. I grab my bike from the front of the bus & begin walking home, thinking about what I've just witnessed. Nothing short of the future of us all, encapsulated. Wondrous anticipation, devastating fear, potential victory, easy defeat. Life is ugly as hell & in that ugliness is more beauty than we could ever hope for.

The sun is shining on Portland & everything, absolutely everything begins to sing.