Adolescence. Coming of Age. The Wonder Years. Self-Discovery. Puberty. Call it what you will. Its been done before, many times over, and by better hands than mine. Somewhere between jacking-off and getting your driver’s license you find yourself, or a suitable facsimile.

You go to the mall and you get yourself a couple of uniforms. You go to Sam Goody and you buy off the rack they put right out front for your convenience. You take your IQ and you divide that by your relative attractiveness on a scale of one to ten (please be honest). Then you add to that the total number of surnames employed by yourself, your siblings and your parents. Award bonus points if you were a bed-wetter and/or like to hurt small animals, and now you’re getting somewhere. If your number is between zero and ten, throw your hat into the Homecoming race. If it’s between ten and twenty, do your homework and try not to draw any attention to yourself, you’ll be issued a Taurus and a three-bedroom ranch on a quarter acre lot. If your number is between twenty and thirty, consult Karl Marx and/or your favorite angst-ridden musician. If your number is above thirty, write a novel.

You take the shiniest parts of yourself and, if you haven’t found your authorial voice yet, you pick a writer and you basically mad-lib in the names and dates. Since I have by now realized there are no authorial voices left, I've decided on F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Something about the way he writes his prose like poetry. I can’t explain it. Read the end of Gatsby. I don’t care if you don’t read a single word in chapters one through seven, read the last five fucking paragraphs in Chapter 8. The beauty. The trance-inducing, pins-and-needles, capricious and consciously ignorant beauty of the thing. Fuck. There is a foreboding hope, a nihilistic belief in those words that I don’t think any of Gen-X’s bittersweet overtures can match. It isn't beautiful because it's true, it's TRUE because it's BEAUTIFUL. Literary masturbation at its comeliest.


If you can just write it well enough it is. If you can only convince people of it it, its real. Step right up and get your identity. It’s the objectification of subjectivity.

Now I know, of course, that the preceding is bullshit. And in two years I’ll know that the following is bullshit too. But at ____teen you want to believe it, you NEED to believe it. You need to make your name in someone else’s brand, because the prospect of doing it naked and cold and all alone is stupefying. If you thought it’d make people understand you, you’d kill yourself. But then you’d be dead and they might not get it at all anyway. No, the problem with suicide is you can only do it once.

So instead you pick your scabs and you go on. Instead you wear a clever t-shirt. Instead you listen to the leading unpopular band. Instead you spend. Instead you booze. Instead you toke. Instead you fuck. Instead you live.

The point is I am not now, nor have I ever been a member of the Communist Party. Beyond that I don’t fucking know.

--Daniel "Vitamin" Foster