Seven AM and I find myself throwing open the shade to my window. My head hurts and I find myself wanting a cigarette, though I’m not a smoker. I haven’t been sleeping. I haven’t been drinking. I haven’t been doing anything but crawling across a lazy town in cars with people I know, but somehow barely know. Because in one year, we all change for the better. Its not that bad though. I connect with a few. I’m just finding as hard as I run through town and burrow through shopping malls with a mother who has no understanding of what success means to me that that particular feeling has come to me once again. The sort of beckoning of another place and maybe another time, where day to day is not futile and the moments of sheer doldrums are the fleeting ones, rather then the sheer trembling moments of youth flying by. Full of wanderlust, I’m a nineteen year old girl and I do not understand nineteen year old girls. I can’t think about hair or makeup or boys(ok, that’s a lie) like they do. I can’t think about loving this place or not wanting the next semester to roll on by. I’ve been skipping out on parties and social occasion left and right. I’ve just been too tired of the redundant to care. Who keeps up appearances anyways? I’m not a stage actor in that game. This isn’t Ibsen or Miller. This is life. And I’ll let my part go to the understudy for now.

Lately, I have been beckoning and scraping at the pages of the calendar to move by as soon as they can, more quickly. Promising emails from professors and calls from dear friends of the campus are the only things that take a crack at this need I am feeling constantly and with worry to just fuck the town I’m in and take the jeep to a state where I don’t know the alleyways and cobbled roads and shitty graffiti like the back of my hand. But somehow that cynicism of mine tells me that in these other fabled cities with other shitty graffiti that the infestation of bullshit kids has as well taken its toll. Stopping by Vertigo music about what I believe was two days ago, I saw nothing but a crawling crutch of what we now know as scene kids. Everywhere with the tight pants, egotism and matching tattoos. They look at the same ten cds and then sway out and about. I hate them, I do. And the Rob Gordon inside of me wants to bunker down behind the blues section and use Coltrane for cavalry and crash the plastic CDs into their brains. It’d be the only substance they’d ever come into contact with. I am trying my best to break the feeling that all the real cool cats have crawled into their lofts and pulled down the shades. It’s a rainy decade for them and they’re doing their best to wait this storm of uninteresting dialogue out.

And then again, I envy them in some particular ways, these scene kids. I envy them because in all this bullshit they’re caught up in and as they lay dormant in the web of disgusting deceit of manufactured neo-hipster nonsense, they’ve got connection. They’ve got each other. They’ve got camaraderie in that world. I find myself wondering if they want to run away to New York or San Francisco in search of the ghosts of past genius. Somehow I doubt they do. They’ve got heroes now of corporeal form. And when you look up to some scene queen or Fall Out boy, I can’t crack the feeling that they may not struggle with the existential funk that they aren’t driven by the need to compare to anything unattainable. You’re no Pete Wentz just does not have the same ring as you’re no Coltrane or you’re no Kerouac, kid. So yeah, they may lack substance but I think they might have happiness, unadulterated by a nagging feeling of social conscience. Maybe sometimes I’d trade it up, if I could. I can give a million opinions of foreign affairs and have done my share to help the children in Uganda. These things fulfill to an extent, but they also make a hole in the heart in the realization that the world is a sick, sad song and that LP is one we’ve all got to share. Thing is the ignorant just aren’t listening. They’ve got their headphones rewired to comforting lies.

And this is why I crave a cigarette. A cigarette is carcinogen numbness and a communal connection. With smoke billowing through bars and coffee shops and midnight revelations, I can see Kerouac, Bukowski, Hemingway and the whole crew in the constant tremble of thought. Smoke lets the ghosts settle in the air for just a moment. I exhale and so do they, somewhere, watching. We’re all bidding our time for the next big shot of honesty and it scares me to say that I’m one of the few that needs it.