Tuesday, November 19, 2013

Please Insert your logical explanation.


I walked out onto the sky-walk.  the network of bridges connection the 2nd and 3rd stories of PSU's main buildings.  In the distance was someone yelling.  I pass the sign that prohibits painting on the sky-walk.  Is that a thing?  Following the sound to the intersection I see another section of the bridge parallel to me at the next light.  The adjunct teachers are demonstrating.  There are rumors about a strike.  The tenured teachers are supposedly behind them, roomers about a bigger strike.  The student union is also involved.  I'm a part of the union.  *Smile for the NSA.*

The air is brilliantly vibrating.  With finals, foreign tongues, and people trying to change things.  It's the kind of thing that makes the idealist crazy.  Contract season for teachers is like mating season for jumping gazelle.  A frenzy of want.  As if this week, of all weeks, the culmination of injustice leading us here could all stop soon.

The skeptic wants for hope.  But in a school of single mothers, two job holders, and foreign exchange, who has time to haggle tuition?  The teacher's union will demand fair pay, the administrative staff will demand bonuses, and the students won't show up to the rally, too busy paying for child care and your mothers SSI.

The Occupy-brand-name students will call and scream and refuse to shower. While others will borrow money from their parents to dye deep blue hair.  The rest will simply live in struggle.  They will not sleep until Christmas.  Their finals will count for only one small portion of life on the agenda.  All too well they know the world will not end.  Like a bike gear shifting up wards their legs will again buckle, they will stand to the peddle, to the hill, to the mountain.  They will go onward.  There's is indeed not to wonder why.  "Why" is a privilege for kids with free time.  There's is but to do, in ever onward hope for something better than today.

It's cold.  I retrace my steps.  From a window near by is a set of signs reading, "Please Insert Your Logical Explanation."  I follow it inside.  The room is bare with a few small art installations.  Some interesting techniques lacking difficulty.  All plain and seen and done before. I hear a banging sound from a small room adjacent to the room.  A TV plays on loop as the only item in the dim lit little space.  A man stands a moment on the film.  He, stark naked, begins hitting the walls and floor of the concrete room he abides with a giant bar of twisted mettle. Over and over and over.

Please Insert your logical explanation.

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