The
Scene This is dedicated to the ones who are illiterate,
But can still read the writing on the walls...
The scene is set in the most powerful nation in the world, in a tiny state which has been accurately predicting presidential nominees in primary elections for the past 200 years. Despite its uncanny precognizance in this regard, the state is otherwise weak and inconsequential. So inconsequential, in fact, that policy makers in the state determine it to be least affected by the placement of a nuclear waste dump, its population so unfortunately stupid that cancer and genetic mutations would not be noticed or affect the course of daily life there.
The state is riddled with granite, white pines, and mosquitos: three ubiquitous attributes (not in the tourist brochures). The state has a few parks, a pretty significant mountain range, one beach on the ocean, one nuclear power plant, and about 1 million personal-size satellite dishes to receive television and radio waves, as there are otherwise no cultural/technological activities occurring within its borders. For all intents and purposes, this is redneck country.
The state government is made impotent by being comprised mostly of the state's top 5% of stupid people, as would be expected from any cursory glance at the dynamics of social mobility. The people are mostly unaware of any representation afforded them.
The state's people are hinged rigidly to the ideas of the early pioneers, and demographically consist mostly of elderly (and incapable) farmers, yuppies who are neither young, urban, nor wealthy, deer hunters (in season), and love children of the long lost hippy rebellion.
In this state, if you examine the true power structure, it is in essence the children who rule. Children, as we define here, range in age from 2 to 28 (children under 2 are not yet sufficiently independent to make waves, and children over 28 stop considering the eternal questions and largely begin to drift into the working uninformed class). Children rule by forcing upon the adults their "own way" with no less than the most effective, well-informed psychological warfare known to man. By the time most children reach the age of 14, they have acquired truly self-interested and far-reaching goals. And they have the clarity and intent required to carry out the pursuit of these goals. They are anarchists, punks, hunters (out of season), drug dealers, musicians, whores, pimps, gang leaders, and thieves.
The kids are almost uniformly pissed off at themselves, their friends, their parents, their schools, their government, their country, their music, and the nuclear waste dump. They are so pissed off that they kill each other and themselves, refuse to attend school, refuse employment opportunities afforded them, and generally spend their time and energy on sex and drugs and music and mayhem. Eventually they reach a point of no return in this downward spiral, and lose all desire to leave the state.
The crucial fall from power for the children comes at about age 28 with the dawn of a hazy brain climate brought on, no doubt, by self-induced chemical damage. They begin to take Nature into consideration. They climb mountains, take walks in the autumn leaves, grow flower gardens, eat vegetables, go fishing, make friends with the coin collector at the laundromat, grow beards (male), refuse to shave their armpits (female), marry the first woolly mammoth that comes along, get jobs at the local mill, take healthy snack breaks, join the town council, vote for laws of protest against the nuclear waste dump, and die of cancer. Not once do they consider moving way from their beautiful state.
Through bitter-cold winters, jungle-hot summers, and black fly season, the people insist that there are advantages to living in this state: they can always hang their laundry to dry in the backyard without feeling ashamed of underwear which drifts over the neighbor's fence. They need not pale as the townspeople slow to view their rusty car collection on the front lawn. "Everybody does it" is a common state motto and makes for safety in numbers somehow. Well worth the costs, they argue.
Despite the fact that they despise people who are not white, into nature, or insane with stupidity, they believe they are the most unprejudiced people in the entire country. As implied earlier, few have ever left the state. They are supremely and self-righteously convinced that the rest of the world bears a striking resemblance to their own backyard.
Wisdom here is measured by the ability to survive cold winters while employing a wide array of techniques for amusing oneself without electricity. Along with the ability to purify water made from melted snow on the cast iron stove. Political knowledge is limited to pictures on government pamphlets which arrive in mailboxes every few days.
But everyone knows about the nuclear waste dump. Except for the farmers, who claim complete ignorance, especially when selling their milk or meat at the state auction or to the market. There have even been photographs of cows which have keeled over dead after drinking water contaminated by radioactive runoff. But nobody claims to have seen them, and the negatives mysteriously disappeared.
As regards the nuclear waste dump, there are many paradoxes. If only someone knew what "paradoxes" meant (school was just someplace to get stoned, meet a sex partner, show off the latest Metallica sticker, and learn how to conceal and operate a wide variety of firearms). By way of example, most children remember being told in grade school that their state is built on granite filled with uranium ore, from which the background radiation is so high that it's likely they will all die or suffer horribly from cancer, baring some large dose of amazing luck. Nonetheless, they complain to each other daily about the nuclear waste dump.
Not more than 20 minutes by car from the nuclear waste deposit site (and directly down river) is a small granite hill covered in white pines. The top is densely infested with mosquitos, and covered by what used to be farmland and cow pastures (but is now an orchard). The pioneers once divided the top of the hill with stone walls and dragged their cows over the crest, leaving a path which became a road segmenting the hill into four quadrants. The stone walls and the tar road are made from crushed granite and embedded mosquito bodies. Halfway down the hill lies a stinky fascist pig farm. And opposite it, the place where a twenty-year-old child molester masturbates daily.
At the bottom of the hill is a small store from which it is easy to steal all manner of alcohol, cigarettes, candy, porno mags, and strange birth control devices. Children collect stamps as rare as can be found and bought at the nearby Post Office. One mailman covers the town's whole postal route in just 5 hours on an average day. Houses closest to the P.O. get their mail last, conforming to the the state's legal requirement of fascination with paradoxes.
Traveling up the hill on the mailman's route, one comes first to a dirt road, seemingly leading nowhere important. But at the end of this one is a secret — an abandoned open-pit uranium mine with a deep rock quarry. At the bottom of the quarry is a pool of radioactive (orange) water devoid of life. Birds avoid it. Despite this treasure, the mailman bypasses the dirt road and stops at a white mailbox under an old gingko tree (which drops foul-smelling fruit on his car, if the season is right).
The house belonging to the mailbox is a large white colonial with nontraditional turquoise shutters and trim (rather odd for these here parts). The tree in front is imported from a Japanese rock garden. Surrounding the house are a granite/tar/mosquito road, granite stone walls, ancient trees (several types), a weedy pasture, a pine forest, extensive vegetable gardens, some half-clean laundry hung on a line, lilac bushes in full bloom, and two cars (both a bit rusty).
The architecture consists of a large two-story house, a larger barn, and a tiny well-house, in which is said a child once killed himself with a razor blade stolen from the general store at the bottom of the hill. This has never been substantiated. The well-house is screened-in and provides refuge from mosquitos, but is infested with a larger breed of wolf spider than is found in the garden. The edge of the well-house divides "the lawn" from "the field." One is apparently mowed more regularly, though this is not always apparent. The field blends seamlessly into a white pine forest. The lawn is littered with randomly dispersed flower beds, berry patches, and assorted trees of distinction (willow, maple, oak, spruce, weeping birch, ash, juniper, sumac, and crab apple).
On the south side is a glassed-in porch spanning the entire length of the house, which provides a generous view of the lawn, field, and forest. From one corner can be seen the daily passage of the (average of) 5 cars a day. Succumbing to popular statewide belief that the south side of the house is warmest and brightest, the porch is known familiarly as the "sun porch," although a winter inhabitant would be highly skeptical of this generous term. In May, as a result of routinely forgetting spring cleaning, the porch becomes a popular haven for a vast multitude of insect species.
The porch houses a television, radio, fold-out sofa-bed, several rocking chairs, a low table, and coasters for beer mugs and shot glasses (two sizes). There is also an amplifier (in need of repair), a small portable heater, a sewing machine, a painting easel, half a record collection, a drum set, trampoline, and a few large plants. An economy-sized can of RAID sits on the coffee table next to a spilled bag of corn chips.
A spider crawls across the floor, and a hand grasps the can, which is quickly uncapped and shaken. A white spot evaporates from the floor and a shriveled black object is kicked out the back door gingerly with a bare toe. The hand tunes in the radio station and, satisfied with 104.1, returns to the sofa.
On a white sofa-bed sits a white girl in a white porch adjacent to a white house waiting for an important white envelope addressed to her white mailbox, to be delivered by a white mailman in a white mail truck. Very white.
The mailman drops a government pamphlet into the mailbox under the gingko tree and, narrowly avoiding falling fruit, drives on to the next house on the top of the granite hill. As he drives between houses, he notices the half-clean laundry hanging on the line, knowing the family whose underwear hangs thus owns a washer and a dryer. But he simply remarks aloud, "Everybody does it," and drops another government pamphlet into the neighbor's box.
The white girl leaps up from the sofa, passes from the porch to the back hall, to the front hall and out the front door, down the steps, under the gingko tree, and opens the mailbox. Expectantly she looks in, and disappointed, sees only the government pamphlet addressed to "Resident." Reading the front cover she sees that the last public appeal against the nuclear waste dump has been denied, and the dump is now a permanent installation in her county, not more than 20 minutes by car and directly upriver from her house, threatening her with a greatly increased risk of cancer.
She tilts her head back and laughs hysterically and runs back to the porch, changing the radio station to 107.3 and sitting herself huffily down on the sofa-bed. Another spider has managed to find itself to a sofa cushion. Once again the RAID comes in handy. She stands at the back door of the porch, where once she stood taunting her locked-out brother (until he punched through the glass to get at her — and required several stitches to his arm), and kicks a black, curled thing out onto the lawn. She is pissed off at her country, her state, her government, her parents, her music, and herself.
The only thing left to do is kill something. She thinks of that kid in the well-house and stares at the little building expectantly. She then scans the field, as though looking for a victim to appear. Nothing comes out of the line between the forest and the field, and she sighs heavily in exasperation. She gives up and then accidentally kills herself.
How? you may well ask. Well, in a sudden uncontrollable (teenage hormones) fit of rage, she crams the government pamphlet about the nuclear waste dump into her mouth and eats it. The ink happens to be poisonous.
A teenager working in the state capitol printing warehouse, where he held a summer job (which he hated), dropped a cyanide pill, along with the color tablet, into the ink bath. He had been looking at the line between the two horizons for a victim to pacify his rage, and somehow hatched a plan. Once he had seen his older brother eat half of the telephone book on a dare, and at the time, he had wished the ink was poisoned. He hoped someone like his brother would eat the government pamphlet and die.
So, a girl on a hill one day passed away, unlike a teenager's brother, from eating a government pamphlet. The scene was set in this little state, and the vicious truths, paradoxes, and circular cycles followed in their inexorable patterns. So inconsequential. This ends nothing.