Escalator to Nowhere, No thank you.

To further touch on what was written last time, being diagnosed as having bipolar disorder was not my choice, however passing on many a socioeconomic “privilege” has been.

Again as is often the case we have to take it back in order to go forward. I was fortunate enough to receive some of the finest education the New England Prep School circuit has to offer. Beginning in kindergarten at the Meadowbrook School, I was found myself at the crossroads of privilege and opportunity. Though I always appreciated the friends made (with whom many I have reconnected via facebook- including my first girlfriend, and yes, she was the prettiest girl in the class :) and later came to cherish the intellectual/academic bootcamp that Meadowbrook provided, the track upon which it set me led to a veritable vortex of khakis and cardigans. Despite being young I sensed that this track would take me on a special ride, one that would separate me from my neighborhood friends, who didn't have to go to school in fifth and sixth grade, with the option of a turtleneck or tie under their blazer (note: to this day, I have an especial aversion towards neckties, and only wear them when I must (read: never). Despite their seemingly innocuous origins from many centuries ago (the particulars of which I'm too lazy to google and relay) as yet another accessory that has form, but no function, having something akin to a dangling phallus hanging around my neck that can be turned easily into a noose-like hanging mechanism never sat well with me, as a young black male. 

After graduating Meadowbrook, I went to an all-boys school for seventh grade, in retrospect only because my best friend was going. Yet in the limited foresight of my twelve years, I failed to see the foolishness and foulness that comprise the daily goings on of hormone fueled, pubescent boys with no natural outlet for their nonsense.

Aside from seeing everything from feces being transported from the john to a literal hole in the homeroom wall for an especially foul-smelling start to many  morning, farting contests in class,  games of soggy cookie (google it, if you must) to hearing about cocaine and champagne fueled parties of the upper class boiys  while parents were out of town, I was out of place from jumpstreet. The misery that gripped me during that year was reflected in an uncharacteristic underachievement in the classroom, save for Latin, the only class I enjoyed.

As it relates to “privilege” however, I quickly realized these were not my type of people. While generalizations can be risky business, on the whole, in relation to the people I’ve met since, at Belmont Hill I had the misfortune of meeting some of most overprivileged and underexposed dirt bags this side of the Mississippi. I didn’t care then what office their daddy held, what which sports team he owned, what fortune 500 company he founded, whose Ivy league admissions board he oversaw and still don’t today. At that age, with no young girls to occupy a young boys mind, about the only thing I cared about was whether their daddy taught them how to throw a decent spiral.

Enough with the nonsense, I said, I quickly opted for a degree of normalcy, and left the prep school bullshit behind and went to public school, where I had the privilege of having my social skills nurtured by a cross-section of the population that was far more reflective than those I had or would meet along the escalator to nowhere.