If this place were a town, I'd probably run for mayor.  But it's not.  I would hardly classify this place as habitable, although people DO live here (and lie here).  I don't know why those people who raised me chose to come here.  Of all places that could have crossed their path or their mind, this had to be it.  And now I'm here, at least until the government has proof that I can drive a car.  Then, I won't be sticking around here long.  Well, at least not in my head.  In my head I'll be in those summer beaches, those breezy, bright, hot light beaches. 
As you might think, a person living in Oxwood probably wouldn't have the faintest idea of what a beach is, never mind having been to one.  The only reason I sometimes escape this town is because of my parents' divorce.  When I was eight years young, my parents split up, divorced, ended the terms of their agreement before God and so on and so on.  This affected me more than it should have, because while this whole thing was going on, I said, "Fuck it," and I hit the road with a Nike backpack full of socks and junk food.  The Illinois state police found me two weeks after I had left Oxwood sitting outside of First National Plaza in Chicago.  That's a long way to go for a wilderness-trained boy scout, never mind a nine year-old kid who, as the experts say, was fucked in the head.  Well, wouldn't you know it, all those strange car rides and dirty nights on the way to Chicago made me a little unfit for living life, so I spent two years in a hospital in Manitoba.  I was so dosed up, I hardly remember those years.  And when a kid can't remember two years of his young life, that sets him up for a life of folly.  At least that's what I'm using as my excuse.  Anyway, those sunny beaches are where I want to be.  "I visit my mom and her husband twice a year, and sometimes that warm weather shocks my system into thinking I'll never go back to Oxwood, and then it comes time to leave.  So the plan is to make a trip down there, and skip the part where I leave.  That will make me forget all about Oxwood, and all the nothing that town has to offer.  But first, I have to get through high school."
"Well, Kevin that sounds like a good plan" Dr. Mitchell looks surprised as she checks her watch, "Oh, times up! Well, have a great week, and I will see you next Tuesday.  Enjoy your summer Kevin."
"I will Dr. Mitchell, you too."
The courtesy thing is just something I do because everyone does it.  Courtesy is necessary to blend in with the rest of the clones.  What I really want to say is, "FUCK YOU, YOU MOTHER FUCKING PUPPET OF THE SYSTEM!" If I said that though, it would be back to the hospital.  And no, I'm not crazy, I'm not wacko, I'm not whatever you want to call it.  I know that feeling, and I know that I'm not feeling it now.  What I do feel is that most of the people I know are going to spend their lives meeting the requirements of the people they want to be like.  They are going to waste away trying to play monkey-see monkey-do, and the world is flying by all around them.  Dr. Mitchell, bless her soul, is a tool of the system, a puzzle piece used to keep us under control.  She doesn't know it, but if she took a step back and looked at her life, she would.  Her whole life has been spent preparing, preparing for school, and then at that point preparing for more school, and then at that point preparing for higher education, and then at that point preparing to step into the workforce that she so DESPERATELY wanted to step into, and then helping all those fucked-up kids who are just dying for her help, aching for the one day that this well-trained vice grip comes into their lives.  But, what is she really doing?  When she lies in her well-earned death bed, ungrateful children surrounding her, checking their watches because they've got to ‘hurry this up, I've got tickets to the Celtics game', there will be nothing in her life that will say to her, "You changed the world Eileen Mitchell, if you had not existed, the world would be much worse off."  That's the heart of the matter, right there.  If she had not existed, the world would be EXACTLY the same, save for a few less business cards with Dr. Mitchell printed on them.  Without her, another quack would have taken her place to deal with the children in need like me, and we'd all keep riding that godforsaken wave.  And that's why I dislike my therapy sessions with Dr. Mitchell.  That and the fact that all the chairs in her office are terribly uncomfortable.  So, I get out of one of her token uncomfortable chairs, walk down the hall, wave to her secretary, a girl who was a senior in high school when I was a freshman, and push open the big black door that keeps the wind out. 
June weather is always my favourite, mostly because June weather is the first weather where there isn't any school.  I start walking fairly quickly down the steep hill by her office, because I have some illegal activities to participate in.  I think that's the essence of adolescent life, to break as many laws as possible in the four years that you're at high school.  If someone told me that they didn't break any laws while they were at high school, I would probably never trust them again, simply because I don't trust a liar. In actuality the illegal activities were not secured, because to break the law, my friends and I first had to procure substances that coincide with law breaking.  The substance in question would be marijuana.  Apparently drugs like marijuana are supposed to bring forth past mental problems, but I have been smoking pot for years, and I haven't gone nuts yet.  As I walk up to one of my friend's doorsteps, which is about 15 minutes from the doctor's office, he's waiting outside, sitting in a lawn chair. His name is Andy Fern, and we go way back.  Our mothers were great friends many years ago, and so we were also friends.  That was until my parent's divorce, at which point we didn't see each other until we both got into high school, at which point we became best friends again. Sitting along with him is Mark Gaucho, a tall, gangly guy with a reputation for loving marijuana, and Abraham Thomas, a passive rebel with long, blond hair and a near constant craving for booze.  Together, we comprise the greatest bunch of substance abusers that walked the sad, narrow streets of Oxwood.  "Hey dude," says Andy, "how was it?"
"It was alright..."  "Where were you?" asks Mark.  "Therapy with Dr. Mitchell..."  I always hate talking about therapy; it makes me feel like some kind of slobbering mental case in a straight jacket, so naturally I have always tried to shift conversations when they happen to go near there.  "Let's go score some pot," says Mark, "Cam said he could hook me up, I just need to call him.  Which reminds me, Andy let me use your phone to call him up." "Go for it."  Andy walks inside.

 

2

 

Cam is the notorious drug user in Oxwood.  Well, there are a lot of notorious drug users in Oxwood.  For the size of the town, Oxwood has a lot of drugs in it or in the bodies of the residents at least.  Cam is just one of the guys in Oxwood who has done it all and is willing to get it for you for a price, and we usually pay that price.  Cam is the type to wear sunglasses at night.  Well, Andy, Mark, Abraham and I are also the type to wear sunglasses at night; I guess Cam's are just a darker shade.  Anyway, he usually comes through for us when we want something to change the shape of reality, so we overlook it when he starts abusing whatever strange drug he happens to get his hands on that week.  That's sort of how it is in Oxwood: nobody has a problem until they're doing more than you are.  Anyway, Mark comes back out, and he says that Cam has some grass, we just need to walk into town to meet him.  So we get on the sidewalk and start moving our feet.  "Yeah, Cam sounded a little spacey when he was talking to me, I wonder what he's on."  Says Mark, and I can tell that he is genuinely wondering, none of that fake conversational bullshit.  We walk and listen while Abraham discusses his theories on the state of politics in Canada right now.  "What we need is thirty percent more Marxists in our society, and everything would work out perfectly!"  "It's not that simple man, politics is an extremely complex thing." I say, even though I know he knows more about it than I do.  You see, Abraham is a strange guy for his age.  He has read encyclopedias, history text books, and he knows just about every archaic piece of history anyone wouldn't want to know.  He always reminds me of a university professor trapped in a punk rockers body, and maybe someday he will turn into both.  But for now, he's just a weird, weird guy.  And he loves his booze, as I must have already mentioned.

So, we get to the corner where Cam said he would meet us, and Mark's suspicions seem like an understatement.  Cam is surely on something, most definitely something hard.  There is visible sweat on his face, and he looks distressed, but yet happy at the same time.  Almost manic, if that's the word.  "Hey Cam, you don't look too good. Are you on something?" I ask him, already knowing the answer. "Ha..Ha..Hahaha....Haha," he laughs strangely, "Yeah man, I ate like four hits of acid about two hours ago!" As he says this, he has to count the hits on his fingers.  "But, I got the weed for you guys, and don't worry I'm having a good fuckin' time!"  "Here, give me your five bucks Abe," Says Mark, and Abe hands him the wrinkled bill.  Cam pulls the pot out of his pocket, and obviously high out of his mind on acid, throws the pot at us for some reason.  "I gotta go..." He mumbles and jogs quickly away without taking our money.  I pick it up off the ground, and it's much more than we were going to pay for.  "Fuckin' right," says Andy, "That is awesome.  I hope Cam doesn't do anything he will regret."  "Well, he just did." I say, and then we quickly move on, walking towards Marks to smoke the freshly acquired ganja.  Marks parents are divorced, he lives with his mom, and his mom works during the day, so no mom.  We get to his house and he runs inside to get his bong, so we just wait outside.  He comes out, and we smoke it up.  His bong has a tendency to irritate my throat (maybe it's just the fact that we're inhaling smoke), so I cough a lot.  After we finish smoking, we sit in his garage and make unintelligent conversation.  These conversations usually change topics with, "What was I just talking about?" so naturally there can't be much intellectual effort put into them.  "Have you read any Hemingway?" Abraham asks me.  "No." I reply, very stoned.  "Neither have I." He reveals.  We decide to go get some pizza, so we once again we get on the sidewalk.  When we're about 200 feet from the pizza parlour, we notice Cam walking by on the other side of the road.  "Cam, come over here!" Yells Andy from across the road.  Cam turns his head sharply like a scared animal, recognizes us, and without looking, runs across the road.  It was a miracle that the oncoming traffic didn't strike him down in the middle of the road on this hot summer day of all days.  "Hey guys, I saw this... Thing.  And the vibrations man, the vibrations!  I can see grid patterns as far as the eye can see and it's all.... Mine man! Mine!"  Says Cam, struggling to maintain a grip on the remnants of reality that he has left in his skull.  He came with us to the pizza place, sat down, put on his sunglasses, and stared at his hand while we ate our slices.

There are only three pizza stores in our town.  Actually, that's quite a lot of pizza stores compared to other kinds of stores. There is only one wine bar, only one pet shop, only two convenience stores, and no gun stores.  I guess as a town we love our pizza, and that's how they all stay open.  So we eat our pizza, make small talk with a spaced-out Cam, and then we leave.  Cam decides he is going to go to the park and walk around, and we decide to go back to Andy's house and play videogames.  Because hey, its summer in Oxwood, and there isn't much else to do.  We get to his house, his parents are gone, and there's a note on the door.

 

 

Went shopping.

                                                Will be back in 1 ½ hours.

 

We go inside, and go down into the basement, which is Andy's room.  The consensus is that we are bored, so we play videogames while deciding what to do with the rest of the day.  By this time the clock reads 3:30pm.  This is what usually comes out of summer. Boredom.  During the winter months you wish and wish for summer to come because you don't have to go to school, and you don't have to freeze your ass off every day, and you don't have to do much of anything.  And then summer comes, and you don't have to do much of anything, and then you don't do much of anything, and boredom sets in.  It's not the kind of boredom that you get on some lazy Sunday in October when you don't have any homework or you just aren't going to do it, and you sit around and watch T.V because you know that tomorrow you're going to be busy anyway.  This is the kind of feeling where you aren't doing anything, but you know that for the next two months, nothing is going to get busy, so you'd better get busy, or you're going to go fucking nuts.

 

3

I wake up drooling on my pillow.  We all ended up walking into the green, green grasses of Orchard field and smoking the rest of the grass we had.  I ended up leaving, going home, and listening to Oasis while reading Naked Lunch.  I fell asleep sometime around 10.  I guess that's how I spend most of my days now, reading a lot, A LOT, and falling asleep early.  If I don't have to go to school, I simply don't see the point in waking my ass up, getting my ass out of bed, and tiring out the limbs below my ass by walking around all day.  Maybe if the world could see that everything has already been decided, to there isn't much point in trying, then I wouldn't have to deal with being hassled about my laziness. Well hey, it sure beats craziness.  And I'm sure the parents wouldn't want that, I'm sure they wouldn't want me going stark FUCKING MAD! Now would they.  So I just bide my time, and listen for the bells to ring.  And when that time comes, I'll get out of this town, this province, this country, to another place, a better place.  The bells are going to lead me, out there.  Out there, wherever that is. I'm sure that's where I want to be.  All I know is that out there isn't in here, and that's the only criteria that crosses my mind.  That's the only criteria I'll need when I take the train, plain, automobile and zoom!  And that yellow line will guide my path, that will be the only guidance or therapy I need, just the yellow line.  The yellow line, that fucking bastard.  Always leading me to trouble, always up to no good.  I always tried to stay away, but it keeps calling me back, calling me back to where I know I want to be.  And so I get up, wash the resin out of my mouth with toothpaste and a toothbrush, and start a brand new day.