So get out. No more excuses. Get out. Get out of your car. Explain. Explain anything. Tell me about the American Dream. I don't think you can. You used to dream, right? Right? Shut up. You're not listening. Get out of your plush interior. Look at the gutter. You're run-off slime on your way to the mire of souls. Start dreaming or keep drifting. It's your choice.
Hey. Hey. Roll down your window.
It's alright. There's nothing out there. Throw open your gates. Lock the clicker buttons down. No one's staying in here alive. Get out. Get on the street. Kneel down in an oilstained flower crack. It's safe. It's only unsafe because you avoid it like a river of refuse through your TV-tray world. Community means people, not buildings. Throw open your gates. There's nothing in here. This is not Memorex. Live life live.
California: It's the cheese. I drove past the Stop 'n' Shop. Then I walked past the Stop 'n' Shop.
I went shopping for a New World. It was Columbus Day. I figured they'd be on sale.
So I snaked my way between the soda taps, showed the lady at the counter my ID.
She said they were all sold out. Come back next Monday.
Maybe they'll have a clearance sale.
I guess a lot of people want a New World. This one's more than 500 years old. We're getting sick of it. There's nothing new under the sun.
I want a manufacturer's coupon for 30 cents off my world. I want redemption. I want that 1/100th of a cent. I'll save up the chits like Betty Crocker coupons, turn them in for a shiny silver nothing.
I'm not begging for the good old days. Columbus didn't navigate in the good old days, not in any encompassing sense. He raped, killed, pillaged and burned, kicked a few babies, claimed a continent he didn't know the size of for a country he wasn't born in and set off back home to get rich, unwittingly allowing his cartographer to come up with the name for the place. It was a commercial proposition, nothing Moore. The New World was no Utopia; never has been.
So sell me a new world. I'll fill it with nothing but copies of "Everything I Really Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten." Then everyone will be happy. Really happy.
When I graduate with my B.S. in B.S., I'll write my Great American Novel: "Everything I Really Needed to Know I Never Learned." Fifteen years of Fulghumesque school down, and I don't know how to save the world. I don't know how to survive on a desert island. I don't know how to reinvent civilization. I can't even talk the clerk into a rain check.
But I can talk to my stuffed animals. Hey. Roll down your window. Maybe I was wrong.