Perennials for Algernon the Rat

[Gravel PitParticipant 14378]

Kids renting skates at the local rink. Yellow & White Pages used to be a given. Fifty cents a phonebook if you hand them out door to door. Phones had buttons and cords attached to them. There were no screens, much less touchscreens. Cameras were rare and required Kodak film to shoot photographs.

Sunday Newspapers were big. There were no ‘cookies’ sculpting adverts while you browse the Sports column. We read short stories like Flowers for Algernon in school. Now, every short story in the 9th grade English Syllabus was written by a woman with titles like A Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, Culture Shock and Being a Part-Time Indian. But these cooked up themes by academia were nothing new, even then. Grooming psyches.

There were only so many kids to play with in the neighborhood. Prior to the year 2000, you may have had a shot with the brunette from the bus stop. Shes been on Tender for 7 years now, still want to hook up?

The 20th century was narrowed and snuffed out. Now a memory in the mind’s graveyard of the past.
Intelligent, local citizens were sidelined and eliminated from opportunity so that foreigners and less qualified people could live ‘The American Dream.’ My future was revoked and handed out to others. Boys are still punished for being boys, infibulated psychologically. My record was dog-eared. File stamped Need Not Apply. Need not exist, or we’d rather you wouldn’t. Do you mind not existing?

Im not a reader but wish Id read more. I write to you alot. I wish Id start reading more, like Bukowski and the philosophers all you Boomers mention who Ive never read. I like forgotten Ski Fi paperbacks from the 70s and 80s.

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