12:30 a.m. - 2001-10-25
Hope
I worked last Sunday. At Daks.
I made a promise when I decided to move back here... that I wouldn't fall into the same stale Virginia pattern of living that had begun to define me before I left. On any given night for a few years, I could be found in one of three places: Daks. My apartment (less than a mile from Daks). Or Denny�s (less than four blocks from my apartment).
When I decided to move back from San Diego, I told myself that I would not, under any circumstances, go back to work there. It�s not the people (not really). It was more the mentality. It seems like I am swept into the proverbial land before time whenever I yank open those wooden doors. The same trusty bartenders, the same resigned regulars osmosing into their barseats, the same managers doing sales reports and playing solitaire in the back office. It is comforting, and disturbing. It is Route One.
However, I am in school. Kicking ass, taking names, isn't that what they say? I have an innate sense that my teachers like me, I am not afraid to open my mouth in the classroom, and with each paper I turn in on time, and each test I study for, it becomes less daunting and more real.
Basically, I am different. Not in some overly dramatic, girlishly cliched way, but in the sense that I am have finally set out to do the things that I used to dream of when I sat at the bar booth, reading and waiting for my boyfriend to get off. When I get off work, I know that the next day will bring something different than the events of the day before. Germanna Community College may not seem like much, but to me, it is everything. It is my ticket to the kind of existence that doesn't revolve around non-stop bong hits and trips to Denny�s, hacky-sacking my years away in some ghetto McDonald�s parking lot. I want more from my life. I want to be writing in Kenya, or hiking in Tibet, or photographing sunsets in Rangoon or Assisi, not clocking out to go drink a bottle of Boone�s in someone's two room apartment, with gun shots echoing like firecrackers rattling the windowpanes.
That�s what I thought they were when I first heard them, you know. Firecrackers. And the first time I heard a woman state, in all seriousness, that she was considering having the baby she had been knocked up with because the fucking white man politician owed her, and she would take any check she could get� I truly, sincerely believed she was talking shit. As those types of occurrences grew less noteworthy (except as a jaded highway-life anecdote one might mention in passing), I began to tire of the affectations I had so superciliously donned. Namely, I got sick of pretending that I would somehow inadvertently rise above my fellow man in squalor, and make something of myself instead of reading all about it in the local newspaper or my dusty, dog-eared copy of The Great Gatsby. That�s what everyone who hasn�t resigned themselves quite yet does on the highway. The jewel-encrusted excuse of an American Dream sustains you; creates diversions and even allowances for the weeks, months, and years that are, somehow, just passing through. Like the bi-annual carnival stopping in, temporarily reforming the gangs� usual stomping grounds: fall (or winter, or spring) has once again arrived. All this you watch absentmindedly from your restaurant window, while the old couple that always sits on table thirteen asks for the hundredth time if they can get their Old Italy Pasta al dente.
The sunsets are beautiful in the valley. And there is something poetic in the way the cheap Ames sign stands tall and stalwart in the face of something so picturesque, as if it were mankind�s answer to nature�s inevitable nightly handiwork. That�s all there is on Rt. One, actually. A shitload of inevitability. Or, I should say� that�s all there was for me.
The most enjoyable part of my working hours nowadays: sitting down at the end of the night, opening a textbook that beckons, and fortifying my 3.7 GPA with a glass of cranberry pineapple juice, and some Old Italy Pasta. Al Dente.
