wherever you go today

Sixty dollar buy-ins and embalming fluid blunts. Shitty Grateful Dead and Led Zeppelin cover bands and "skeet little bitch ass hippies stuck in the 60s." These are the things that Sean, now at basic in San Diego, introduced me to. He showed me the paradoxes of life here and now, compared to the times we celebrate. That now instead of running from war, we turn to it as an escape. The quiet, draining desperation of the Midwest is the force that has pushed so many of the people I love to take up arms. Everything is dead here, the grass is bleached yellow, the yellow of the trailer park dye jobs that walk around my school before dropping out to birth the next generation of trailer park dye jobs, and the sky is never blue enough.

We know the war is stupid, the bumper stickers on sale at the head shops we so often conduct business at tell us so after all, but the deserts of the Middle East seem more full of life than the deserts of Missouri. Ever the achiever in school, outside of it I have always preferred the company of the people you would least link me to, the stoners, the fuck-ups, the ones who didn't go to college and never will over the homecoming queens and readers of the morning announcements. Yes, I befriend the people who will rail against Republicans for hours, and know that part of the reason why is because the Republicans have and we have not. Sure, we still live spoiled by our parents, in grand castles on streets named after rocks and trees, so we can't pinpoint exactly what they have that we don't, but we know it's there. These people, my friends, hate the war, but love it because it takes them away from this land, removed of color, like an overexposed photograph.

On New Years, a friend, one of the few conservatives I assosciate with, was 10 days away from boot camp. He was asking about college, what I wanted to major in, where I wanted to go. "Middle Eastern Studies and Political Science." "I guess we'll both be involved in Middle Eastern politics," he grinned.

Fleet Foxes - Mykonos

stop, hey, what's that sound

I guess an introduction is in order. My name is Sara, the addition of a middle name instantly turns my blank slate to country bumpkin, and I just recently made my way to eighteen. I am a philosopher not jaded by a philosophy education, I know the Arabic alphabet, and I evolve through absorption. Yes I'm still in high school, and yes I'm still in college. On my walls hang three Bob Dylan posters, a Hindu leaf-elephant tribute to Vishna, and a collection of Tijuana brass records and their shells. My favorite book is The Darling by Russell Banks, followed shortly by Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. I have a fake I.D. that surpasses McLovin's in lack of believability but I am tall enough and dark enough and worldly-looking enough that it doesn't matter. I do not believe in an Abrahamic religion. I do, however, believe in Eastern religious principles. I think Jimmie surpasses Stevie Ray in guitar playing skill, and I once had an assignment in English class to write about the end of the world. I want to drink peyote tea on the Native American burial mound, Cahokia.

Most of all, I want to pen the memoir of this life before it ends when I whisk away from Missouri to start college in the fall.

Buffalo Springfield - For What It's Worth