Thursday, February 14, 2013

Alma Mater: a last will and testament

A generation X’er’s greatest debt is typically to the cost of the thoughts in our own skull
Years will be assigned to the interest and others to the principle,
Not the corpus of financial liability, but the premise of self-definition resting at the crux. 

Calls for purpose are postponed in the latency of parental affluence affording us
A synthetic threshold of opportune decision floating only as phantom
This decade of seventeen to twenty-seven is a unicorn mare of the night
Quashing rainbows and appearing like coats of many colors  

Northeastern institutes of higher learning and West coast liberal candy-lands
Southern hospitable football stadiums ripe with lager funnels and drenched braziers
The detailed poignancy of credit-hour requirements so masterfully allocated between
Biology, Western-culture, statistics, literature, and music theory crafting the optimum 

Well-rounded, Oh the pinnacle to be well-rounded!
If only the CAFO lots could learn in their six stomachs for digesting grass evolved
And we give them (wait for it) Corn!  We give the heifers and bulls corn!
It is preferable, plump them with sugar-feed and send them to the ecoli-stretch! 

Monsanto mono-crop in collegiate soy-bean plots, a buffet of electives
Does the opposite, perfecting a savant is sidetracked by mandates to cost
So we have two opposing theories on the surface, but in the underbelly we are doing the same 

We are distancing ourselves at every opportunity farther from self-direction, self-definition, and individual decision making.  One is taught not how to think, but what subjects to invest.  Critical self-assessment is bastardized as worshiping in the church of the well-rounded. 

Kill the fucking D.J.!  I know what I want.  I know who I am.  Let me learn what I want to learn and go home.  If you want to help show me the extension of the career associated with your major, your batch of classes BEFORE I enter your system or escalate my commitment into the entrails of your dominion.  (Step it up junior-high schools, yeah that early with career videos.) 

No! You seek to imprison me sir and yet you come as a Trojan with your Southern California pheromones.  I see the sweatshirt, the brochure and your price tag.  You are most upfront and I see it fit to eat the lotus-flower Sysco commissary meal-plan.  I shack up in your dormitory Chateau d’If waiting for my priest to teach me, but the ground never rumbles.  There is no grand awakening!  I slurp from your bowls and take study of your brick and mortar and exit with a bill! 

How long to pay off this debt in my skull?  How long to realize I have been taught the great lesson of capitalism via extortion?  There are other options, other ways, to put the knowledge in this geometry between my cochlear tubes and yet I default not to your professors, but to your elephantine administration flattening us all with the cult of the well-rounded!  

I need not this nor that, but a digital video and the occasional account to email.  I need not your building or your stadium of Saturday night gladiators.  While amusing the hangover bill has crimpled my financial freedoms for decades.  I am taught desperation to be unique to stand out in the populace, yet my circular-major makes me identical!  Damn you cruel irony, I went in for differentiation and I have exited as a genetically-engineered soybean!  Round-up won’t kill me, but my degree in English lit or sociology is strangling me lost in these weeds of impracticality!

So sir this is my final remitted payment.  I have no home.  I cannot afford procreation or health insurance.  I am returning my decapitated head as evidence of un-retained product.  I expect the additional value of my other thoughts, biomass, beautiful optical lobes, and ear canals I have done the decency of de-waxing for you, being now in your possession and unfortunately previously un-severable from your precious knowledge, to be auctioned off to pay the debts of my fellow Gen X’ers. 

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