The College-Caust.

When I was a young sprog on his way to the big city to attend the big college in the big university, I couldn't wait to find the people there, not necessarily of like mind, although that was part of the dream; no, I expected to find my betters, people who were smarter than me,better than me in every way, braver, more mature, the kind of people who would be able to show me the way forward.

I was severely disappointed.


To begin with there was an overwhelming air of timidity; the kids weren't able to know what they wanted to do.
They thrashed around, trying to appear to be doing something;there were clubs and societies for them to join, places to which they could belong.
Essentially they recreated high-school but with public funding of their social ambitions.
The only bravery I encountered was the chancer's courage of those who decided to become group leaders of these little packets of aimlessness.
There was no grand scale society, no overarching community of the intellect.
We were left to do what we wanted, and most of them didn't do anything much.

It was the massacre of ambition. Too afraid to imagine, too scared of rejection to reject, they came to the time when they felt comfortable with their young deaths, and could look down on me with a sneer, or if they were kind, with a patronising smile.

There were a few like me; I didn't know it, but more than a few felt this without knowing how or why, and I only saw them when they sold out or made terms.

I didn't start to come to terms until my final year, when I could see an end to it.
My so-called 'friends' decided(arbitrarily, but actually at the pleading of their English group leader), to say that they had all 'gone through a process' at university-they hesitated to call it growth, or indeed to name it at all-but that I had not.
They asserted the superiority I already knew didn't exist-like maniacs drowning in a swamp and clutching at straws of self-esteem, the most pathetic failures of all.
So just as I was coming through it all, I was relegated to non-person.

It wasn't pretty.
I didn't get my soul back until after I learned to fly, escaped from 'college' and met my first Californian girl.

She showed me that they had been the non-persons.

But the traffic drove, the trains ran, the buildings were lit, so I still harboured illusions of the world; it took a further ten years to find it.
Elsewhere.