Vogue (a short story)

the cut and pasted yet slightly edited version of an egocentric rant where i tried to pose poetic so let's strike a pose and VOGUE by me where i'm from, in the BIG C.T. (some people try to say that with a straight face) , its actually pretty sad. i grew up and was fortunate enough to be a boy in a white suburb with a good patch of woods behind my house. the white suburb part isn't where i consider myself fortunate. it's the woods. and i would spend like ALL THE TIME back there, walking around by myself and exploring - probably wishing i had friends or something (a.k.a. romanticizing my self pity) but mostly finding fascinating junk back there like old abandoned mopeds and dirtbikes and pickup truck caps and stuff. gosh, it was so cool. that stuff was like treasure to me, which is probably why i collect junky old tvs and electronics still today. anyway, there was this place over by this big old tobacco field where there was this old schoolbus and a seriously old and abandoned house. my friends and i used to trip around back there and look through the bus and smash the windows with hammers and bricks thrown from the second story of the windowless house. someone had lived there or still lived there and we pretty much rifled through everything they had left behind like the good samaritans we were. Ohh, there were the bicycles and the clothes and the weird rambling notebooks and the 40 oz. bottles and the stacks and the stacks and the stacks of pornos in the back of the old Datsun truck. How much closer to heaven could a 13 or 14 year old boy feel? We'd trip over there on our bikes with one mission and one mission only: TO BEAT THE CRAP OUT OF ANYTHING BREAKABLE. and we did and we did and we did and we did. the cops rolled up on us one time much to our surprise. the moment was perfect. my friend had just turned to me with a child-like glimmer in his eye and exclaimed "This is the Teenage American Dream!!!!!" We were virtually floating in the euphoric atmosphere of our boyish fantasyland when a voice from behind us, all dead and emotionless and cutting in on our junkyard waltz, surprised us like gunshots from a mouth with the proclaimation of the end of the season of fantasy and the return to the weight of reality: "Well boys, that dream is now over," said the man with the gun and the club and the cuffs. we turned around and it was the cops and the first thing they did, naturally, was tell us to drop our weapons (hammer, bat, etc). We did. Then they told us not to run. We didn't. Then they asked us what we were doing back there. We both claimed "nothing," as we stood there next to a bent up bicycle frame that we'd hung on the side of the busted up bus, while the literal last pieces of window fell to the ground like perfectly timed raindrops falling from a sky with glass clouds. ahh, it was great. those were the days. Then, five years later, the tobacco fields became a huge suburbanite golfcourse. and the woods behind my old house got smaller and smaller. and one of the nation's biggest mall areas moved in down the street. and then the old strip malls went out of business as new strip malls , suburbs of the Mall-City, sprawled. Farms dried up with a foul monetary stench like piss, evaporating into thin air and then replaced by the Babylonian-esque abercrombie and fitches and american eagles. now everybody drives an SUV. now everybody is on paxil. now everybody has forgotten the way they used to be... exchanged the truth for a lie. walked away from the land. sold out their children to the devils with the big money guns. a loss forgotten traded in for a fake found. dimly we watched as the men of the house became birds of the nest all squawking for the worm... ...wood.