Life on the Fringe

People ask me why I’m so angry. I can only wonder why they aren’t angry too. This is a generation of fear. Every week there's some new scientific bullshit assertion to declare that everything we use is trying to (and will eventually) kill us all. Cell phones give you tumors; the internet makes you stupid; jerking off causes blindness. Don’t be fooled though, everything is trying to kill us. And why shouldn’t it? We’re terrible.

I grew up on the fringe of suburbia. It’s filled with low income housing and nefarious landlords looking to squeeze out every dime they can. It’s where all the people who were too poor to live in a real house had to go as there was no inner city nearby to hold our kind. It’s the place that people like to forget because there’s nothing in it for them. It’s for the people caught in a social purgatory. People on the Fringe aren’t pathetic enough to warrant sympathy from the powers that be, but those powers that be sure as hell aren’t inviting them to their Tupperware parties either. Instead the residents of the Fringe were forced to wedge their way between worlds where they didn’t belong.

No one in the Fringe really dreams. If you can stay out of prison and manage a C average then that’s as close as a victory as you can come by. The Fringe is where ambition goes to die.

Tired mothers would send their kids off to under-budgeted schools. They’d do their hair big, let their asses get wide and tan their skin to leather all while waiting for their limp-dick husbands to bring home the proverbial bacon from their dead-end, blue collar jobs because he could barely manage the community college he attended for two years before giving up entirely. The teens in the Fringe are the skinny white trash that dress like meth addicts. They stand on street corners tonguing their overstuffed girlfriends, rubbing up against parked cars and ramming their hands into her tightly packed, bargain-bin jeans trying his best to maneuver a decent fingerblast below her sizeable rolls. They stand in the street because it’s better than being inside the tiny apartment with their family who are inside yelling out their mutual resentment of each other.

You’ve probably seen them, the people of the Fringe. They’re the ones you avoid in supermarkets. The neighbors who get the cops called on them. The ones you don’t want your children to be friends with.

I was lucky enough to get out of there. I’m not a particularly nostalgic person, but I still believe that you should never forget where you came from. Whether I like it or not the Fringe is part of me. It’s taken me a while to want to visit it again, afraid it might try to suck me back in. I’ve driven past it for years, working up the courage to visit the streets I knew. Finally, I went to see what had changed, but it had only gotten worse. While I was there I saw a friend of mine that I had grown up with. Now he lives a couple blocks away from the apartment his family lived in. He was recently paroled from prison, too late to see the birth of his daughter. Her name is Celeste and she’ll grow up in the Fringe too. Not the Fringe that I grew up in though, the new one that’s worse.

So, if you ever want to ask me why I’m so angry, this is why: because I’m constantly disappointed.