And when we were good
You just closed you eyes
So when we are bad
We'll scar your minds

"Fight Song", Marilyn Manson

"What do you want to do with your life?"

Life starts the moment your birth certificate is signed.

Before that, you were a nameless lump of undeveloped bone and transparent skin. As soon as your manilla document is filed in that rusty cabinet, you belong to the goverment. You no longer have privacy, you no longer have freedom, your no longer your own person. You belong to your country, and you will be reminded as such for the rest of your newly documented life. This is how it will go on for years, and then you will die, which will also be layed to rest in a manilla document filed in that rusty cabinet.

Before that file is signed, your free.

The rest of your life is a series of files and documents and learning. Learning not what is meant to be learned, or what is important, or what will help you in dire situations. You learn what this goverment tells you to learn, what they feel is important.

You will be a file, stacked atop your designated group. You will go to elementary school, where you'll be put with classmates, told to share what is yours and cross out what does not belong. These children around you will grow into what they believe to be their own people, praised for their minor accomplishments in the sport of their chosing, and you will be left behind in what sparse individuality you can stur up, though it will be crushed by the time you turn thirteen.

Everything is in files, and more files. No action can be carried out if it does not have it's file, it's place. You really learn this during your first midterm.

Questions, too many of them. Questions you've never heard. Questions you know, but you can't explain why. You know them because you know them, and that's what you've been taught. But the same hand that fed this too you is now demanding more, more they knew you should have known, but refused to teach it.

You need examples. How would you carry out this procedure in a real situation?

You wouldn't.

Johnny would never need to split his cookie with Sarah and Timmy. He would shove it in his fat little mouth and not say a word about it. You would never need to know how to spit a circle into three. Nobody does, and your told otherwise until they throw you out, and you had no idea you wouldn't.

You fill out more forms, making sure to put nothing suspicious. No one watches you, they watch your documents. If a document says you went on trial for murder, they don't look to see that you were found not guilty because you were at your mother's funeral. They look to see what other dirty little secrets you have. Nothing is sacred.

Filed Republican. You are now a Nazi.

Your life is your document.

And now, after three hours of filling out paper work for a job you hate, at the expense of a girlfriend you, and three more months of starting the job you get but you still hate, you go out to a seven eleven at night because your hungry and your credit card has been halted because the number was stolen. You buy what you can with what remains of your paycheck that you had to fill out another document to receive. Now your outside, on your knees,a gun to your head. You not afraid, because it is in this moment you have nothing to live for, nothing to see. You have nothing you even want to live for, nothing you want to see. If you died because of this gun at the back of your head, it would just be yet another document filed in this file obsessed world.

"I ask you again, John F. Nonan," a mad man says, "what do you want to do with your life?"

What do you want to do with your life? You have no life. your life is a series of documents and questions that you don't know the answer too but am somehow required to learn, or you are thrown in the backburner and forgotten, because such rebellion cannot be tolerated in this great nation.

The mad man argues with himself. I swallow.

You say it before you think it, and it requires no documentation.

"I don't know and I probably never will," is what you say, "Life, as I see it, is something I should grab. Why be tied down with a well paying job before I'm ready to appreciate it?"

He pauses, and says, "Go on."

You lick your lips, your voice wavering, "I don't think I'll ever know what I want until I reach rock bottom, and, amazingly," you inwardly laugh, "this isn't it."

The man laughs to himself, and the gun is lifted from my skull.

"You can go, John F. Nonan," he says, and you barely get a glimpse of his sunken, tired face. "And I'll see you tomarrow at Lou's Place."

The mad man, walking off and berating himself for doing such a stupid thing in a public place, drops your wallet, and his voice fades away.

You wish he shot you.

Maybe tomarrow at Lou's Place you'll get lucky.

You shake your head and think about how fucked up everything is, taking your wallet and walking to your car.

Your going to beat the shit out of somebody, and you know it.