When the Prom Queen Falls

I returned to Milwaukee about two weeks ago.  I was visiting friends and family because I had to drop off my girlfriend in the middle of Wisconsin and it was convenient to continue on to the east side of the state.  There was my old baby sitter, my dad, my best friend and my cousins, but in terms of real worth to my life and care, nothing else.

After meeting with my cousins, my friend, and a fan of Cappy Cap, at a cigar lounge on the west side, the only thing I had left to do was kill time, maybe revisit some old haunts, visit my dad and attend a "charity" event where a handful of old school mates would be.  There was nothing, and I mean, nothing left in Milwaukee for me.  So inbetween visiting my dad and going salsa dancing with my best friend, I was killing time, which landed me at a bar all of 200 yards from my old middle school.

At this bar was a "fund raiser."  It was for kids with Asbergers syndrome.  Everybody was very friendly and a nice girl who was a friend of mine back in the day was kind enough to invite me to it, so I showed.  But when I showed, it was sad.  Not sad because anybody was mean or unpolite, but because it showed we were 200 yards from my former middle school.  I couldn't remember names, but I remembered faces.  They were older now, decrepit, certainly not as handsome or cute as they used to be, but the ultimately sad thing was, was that they were still 200 yards away from the middle school.  They hadn't left.  They never left.  They were still living in this wretched shithole of trailer trash Milwaukee.  They were dating the same people and (after conversation) I realized they had bred and inbred resulting in children from multiple fathers/mothers, lines of which you could connect on the old high school year book. 

If anything I took from it, it wasn't the stereotypical

"Yeah man, I was the nerd and I proved to be more successful than all of them."

That was a foregone conclusion I knew in '91.

It was the shock at just how utterly low class, trailer trash and shitty people I had attended school with AND how they never escaped it, DESPITE being on the precipice of a major metropolitan area.  They had ALL of the opportunities a modern metro area provided and they still insisted on being and remaining trailer trash.  Not just the people I saw, but the stories I heard about former friends and acquiantences.  One went to jail, the other was dealing drugs.  Single parents about, and divorces were standard.  If anything it provided a lot of hindsight and proof that I wasn't insane back in the 80's and 90's, that these people (both present and in reference) were genuinely lower class.

The reason I bring this story up is not for revenge or "I told you so-ism," but rather to make a very important point for younger folk, especially kids who are in the current environment where all of their world seems commanded and controlled by the temporary and faux hierarchy of their school.

It is a FLEETING and TEMPORARY aberration.

I didn't believe it when I was in the thick of it, but when you graduate these people will be forced into the real world in one regard or another.  And in the end a person's true temerity, salt and worth is what is going to separate the wheat from the chaff.  Even with parental or government subsidy they will fail because it is the person, and their low caliber, that will fail them, not society.  And besides, you won't remember them as your life becomes preoccupied with more important shit and more important people. 

I didn't believe it, but it will happen.  The prom queen will fall.  The jocks will get fat.  And it isn't because of universal karma or "divine intervention," but because society, especially at the public school level, creates a a huge bubble of popularity, fakeness, and bullshit.  It is systematic and predictable.  It will prop up young kids to certain heights.  Kids with short term skills (throwing a ball, big boobs at an early age, etc.), but no long term ones (mathematics, logic, science).  Skills that only serve in that short lived environment.  And once that environment is taken away from your peers they will deflate like funding from Dotcoms in 2000 and their true value will show.

For years you will think that you want revenge, but if and when you see them you'll realize their real lives are all the revenge you'll need.  It will be so much revenge, you'll actually pity them.

And then you'll leave the bar and continue on with your life.