Icon Do It

Leaving home was hard back when home could be left. Now you're born without a home so you can never leave. The only way we distance ourselves from our birthplace is through personal upheaval and pain. Used to be folks went off to college to experience another environment. Not anymore. Today you go to college to get your heart broken.

Whitworth was your average guy in high school. Meaning he was unique and anonymous. Girls liked him from time to time and occasionally he liked one of them back enough to ask her out. Things would get a bit hot and heavy in a cinema parking lot and then the girl didn't seem familiar to him anymore. Sensing this gap the girl would reveal more of herself, but that only heightened his disconnect. Then he'd go back to hanging out with his friends, who always seemed familiar, never changed.

Lots of sports on TV with pizza and soda. Waiting for everyone to fall asleep so he could be alone for a little while. Never having enough sleep. College would be different, he'd hear people say. He doubted the transformative power of higher education but longed to see what it was all about.

It sounds same-ol' same ol', but things were different then, only 20 years ago. Catching a glimpse of the naked female form was a big deal, people still got freaked out when musicians screamed instead of sang, and cable TV was a novelty NBC/ABC/CBS pooh-poohed. If you wanted to find out about a band, you had to ask someone who might know. The last truly local generation.

All of a sudden, college. Whitworth now longed to traverse the unfamiliarity that opened up upon physical contact with a girl. The girl seemed to be shocked by this transformation from her high school equivalent. Boys and girls walk around campuses in a constant state of shock at their first unedited contact with the opposite sex. Tragedy and lust now coexist with morning coffee.

Them brains and hearts is exploding all the time. Today? They've been ash and debris since age 3. Zero to sixty in utero. Oh these poor children and the world they'll always know.

Whitworth ordered his first legal beer with no ceremony and punched the window out of his Honda Civic a mere 45 minutes later. They said he couldn't go in there anymore but why would he want to hang out with a bunch of frat boys and coke sluts? He'd quit the whole damn shebang but these were the best times he was ever going to have.