The Tragic Age Read Free

people expect things of you. I just hate it.

 
    4
    â€œAll hope abandon, ye who enter in!”
    Dante Alighieri wrote The Divine Comedy in 1308. The most famous part describes the poet’s journey through the nine circles of hell. He got it wrong.
    Hell is high school.
    High School High is a public school. Originally Mom and Dad wanted me to go to this big-deal private high school that cost about forty grand a year and where the students wear uniforms but I refused. I’d already gone to a big-deal private middle school that cost about fifty grand a year and I’d absolutely hated it. Being surrounded by oblivious, hormone-crazed nitwits is bad enough. Being surrounded by oblivious, hormone-crazed nitwits in identical blazers, chinos, and plaid skirts had made me want to climb an electrical tower and cauterize myself.
    Still, we have a lot of well-to-do, self-entitled kids at good ol’ High School High, and the ones that aren’t, the ones that are mostly bused in and ignored, the social mutants, the Mexicans, and the black kids who have been recruited to play football and basketball, wish they were.
    Because I wouldn’t get a driver’s license if they were giving them away, I ride a skateboard to school. I consider it nothing more than an acceptable means of transportation. If you ever see me hanging around a parking lot doing ollies, for God’s sake, or attempting to destroy my testicles by sliding down a banister with the board sideways, please shoot me.
    I will confess to the occasional game of chicken.
    It’s like this. At the top of a decent hill you wait until a car is coming up from the bottom. You take a moment to consider the fact that the wheel is a circular device capable of rotating on its axis. It’s one of man’s oldest and most important inventions. You push off, aiming down the middle of the approaching car’s lane. You do a little side-to-side to establish a rhythm. The car is getting closer now and usually the driver is leaning on the horn. You go into a crouch to gain speed. The car swerves. You swerve with it. It starts to turn. Too late. You go into the grille. You hurtle forward into the windshield, which crumples with the force of your body. You’re aware of the driver screaming as you’re thrown up and over the roof and then you’re airborne, aware of the street flying beneath you, aware of how rough it is and how much it’s going to hurt your already badly broken bones when you land.
    Of course, that isn’t remotely what happens.
    The car either stops, in which case you ride around it, or the car swerves and you keep going. Either way, you’ve won. Stupid, really. Crazy even. But here’s the thing. Starting around the age of fourteen, human beings become certifiably insane. Really, they’ve done tests. A teenager’s brain waves are the same as that of a psychotic’s. They used to think this was a temporary condition, that if you made it to your twenties, you’d straighten out. But starting around the beginning of the twenty-first century, mostly due to the deleterious effects of twenty-four-hour global news coverage, not to mention the iPod, Netflix, and the Twilight Saga, young people started hitting puberty and never got over it. Ten percent of all teenagers today have been prescribed medication for depression. Eight out of every one hundred thousand teenagers commit suicide. Sixteen percent of all teenagers actively consider it. We are, as a generation, a bunch of deranged, isolated neurotics destined to live long lives of self-medicated, Internet-addicted lunacy. I’m not immune to the statistics but I do consider it a personal challenge to fight my generation’s psychosis as much as possible.
    And so I do.
    I start by being not popular. The need for attention and celebrity based on questionable achievement is a dangerous drug. No. Better to avoid attention. Make no waves. Stay under the radar.