So if you were hoping to read my ramblings on getting older, or leaving the teen years and moving on to the ... more mature years, you may be right. Like I said, "IT'S RAMBLING, MAN!" So anyway, here goes...
When I was younger, ... er, lemme back up...
In Lake Orion, there is a state highway that runs through the middle of town. M-24. M-24 is the Main Street and Broadway of this little town, (as well as the rest of the little towns on the way to Lapeer) and as such, there is very little of interest on one side of M-24 for the people who live on the other side, so there is very little "crossover" of culture. Now, where was I? Oh, yeah...
When I was younger, I lived on the west side of M-24. Way on the west side. It was almost Clarkston. It was, in fact, so far west of Lake Orion proper, 'twas a ville all to itself. Gingellville. Anyway, I, as a result, don't remember ever being east of M-24 in all my younger years. I mean, I had been --east of 24--, but not in that area. I worked, lived, ate, went out and went to school west of 24.
Lake Orion High school was (is) ON the west side of M-24. There, (senior year,) I met a wonderful girl who lived on the east side. So far to the east, in fact, that she lived in a township entirely different from Lake Orion. Joy lived in Oakland Township.
Long story short, Joy and I started dating. She had to give me very explicit instructions as to how to get to her house. While she was in the car with me. This is how inexperienced I was with east Lake Orion. There, (in eastern Lake Orion, not necessarily her house,) I discovered a world and culture entirely unto itself (from what I had known.)
In experiencing this new world, I wondered why I had never known the rest of Lake Orion. I wondered why there was such a divide between us. There had been such a divide that there had been two junior high schools, east and west. West was just north of Gingellville, and East was, you guessed it, right next to the High School, on the east side of M-24. They ended up axing West and turning it into a "Middle School" because of the division it caused between the students. The student body was actually getting into gang rumbles along junior high attendance lines. It was ugly. ... Oh, yeah, why the divide... So I thought I'd do a study on identity and cultural division and how they related to political and (percieved) physical boundaries. I would call it ...
LifeAnd I was fairly certain that it would sell like hotcakes.