Blacksburg: At a glance

People move around me in sped up motion like a cliched time lapse. In all honesty, I expect Blacksburg to have a lot more life in it on a Saturday night but it turns out to be just as dead as any other dreary collegiate metropolis. The women drag their feet in uncomfortable looking heels and pumps, traveling from one money hungry purveyor of booze to the next.

The packs of hungry male dogs look just as voracious for the properly dolled up princesses as they all meander the nether looking for casual conversation and the occasional banging together mindlessly, like a boy scout's flint attempting to start a fire on a pile of ashes.

When you're a casual observer (outside the circuit), you can observe how stupid it all looks but when you're in it, you feel as though it were all one big carnival. I, however, find myself neither in or out but rather like a child lost in that carnival: surrounded by people and utterly alone; searching for some semblance of recognition: a parent, a friend a relative...

It's different for an adult male of 25, because instead of looking for mom and dad like the child, you become the average 5'8" person: lost amongst the giants and trolls laughing hysterically and maniacally; under the influence of sex and "happy", ironically-depressant, mystery serum.

At a glance, this seems to be my individual feeling about the outside genesis of the youthful class of Blacksburg. Inside, I have to more research which lead me to:

Tuesday night: TOTS: Karaoke night: Walking through the crowd, the vibes are louder than the music. The radiant rebellion flows through a crowd fueled by alcohol and jubilation; no doubt, a temporary reprieve from their otherwise, "tainted by the 'harsh' realities of their day," lives.

Sex, love, marijuana, and simply the ability to wake up and live the mundane and circuitous existence that we all lead; what does it all amount to? The most interesting people who evade routine will eventually fall into the routine of evading routine. Chaos is always fueled by order or we'd cease to exist.

The hikikomori of Japan are some of the few people in the world that can claim to truly live an order-free existence because they refuse to interact with the outside world or even, in some cases, the people in their immediate existences respectively. Even hikikomori, however, subscribe to other people's order for survival or they would cease to exist.

So what is freedom? I would be an idiot to claim to know the answer but I can say that it seems to have something to do with how we have the individual right to choose who we are.