faceberg 4 revised

	The barren wasteland of rural America conceals a lot of somewhat disturbing secrets in the day to day habits of its inhabitants. The longer I stay in it, the more traits and commonalities I tend to uncover with the people up here. These discoveries, inconsistent and anecdotal though they may be to the average person, present patterns that would remain undiscovered to the average psychologist or sociologist looking to analyze them.
	It’s like poetry, except it doesn’t rhyme and is more dependent on the individual than it is anything.
	See, fluoride, consumerism and electronic entertainment keeps the city inhabitants inebriated, the drugs tend to agree well with the Suburbanite, but rural America has a voodoo-esque way it manifests itself into people, pushing people to suppress various emotions and habits the longer one resides in the area. It breeds the weakest, the strongest, but simultaneously, sometimes some of the most spiritually damaged people in existence.
	And even if you’re strong, it takes a toll on you. Mentally. Physically. Even emotionally. It leads decent people to drug addiction, to abuse their children or spouses. It’s lead to gambling problems. Alcoholism. Constant urge to move away, to participate in hedonism.
	What all of these things have in common is the mental, physical, and spiritual abuse of one’s self. To do anything at all that produces Dopamine, Stimulation, at the risk of anything the person sees viable to lose at the time.
	The Urbanite is to the average person a no one, but that person is never alone. The Suburbanite is someone who has a sense and knowledge of self in their community, they are never alone, but they are bored.
	To the rural American?
	You are no one.
	You are bored.
	You are alone.
	And you seek relief.
	This aforementioned toll presides upon everyone. Hell, call it what you want. A darkness, a presence. It takes many forms, but it’s been out there for as long as I can remember. It exists anywhere from the woods of Northern Wisconsin to the fields of Montana to the plains of Nebraska. All segregated areas albeit, but those areas combined are larger than that of a country.
	These areas are full of case studies that would baffle the minds of twenty something psychologist. It doesn’t, however take a psychology degree to figure out why the people up here have these problems.
	All it takes is residence in it.
	Dalton was a nice kid. Pothead sure, had his run ins with the “law” (be it Teachers, Principles, Parents, etc..) but he was the average 2.6 Student Athlete that  knew everyone, but left few to genuinely know him and the person he was.
	Where I came into the picture.
	I was studying at one point when he had struck up a conversation to me about school. He was flunking two classes and complained to be about reading.
	He could “read” just fine. What his problem was lied within was his attention span. He was doing poorly and looked to me for wisdom, yet I couldn’t give it to him without knowing more about himself.
	I never really thought of ADD as more of a proverbial term for Average Child Syndrome or as an actual disease. But I did, however, see its aftereffects on people up here. Medication abuse ran rampant in the college level as well as high school. “Our Child, who art in nada, hallowed be thine adderall. Thy focus come, the pharmacist comes, on Earth as it is in nada.”
	You know this story by now.
	But to Dalton, the meds did nothing. The very foundation of his brain was cemented off. He felt like he was running at 5% of what a normal person’s brain would be operating at. The check engine light was on but the engine was there. He was, for lack of a better metaphor, a shadow of his former self.
	His problem was he couldn’t see text.
	He saw walls of black and white that he couldn’t ever hope to comprehend or read. It was an effort issue as much as it was a comprehension problem. Existing to him was like being stoned in the Islamic sense of the word. You’re working. Constantly. You realize that your whole life will consist of even more work. You compromise a bit here and there. You stop caring about school in general. You feel like there is no hope for you, there is no out. It is death by piling marble slabs upon your back the longer you exist in not only school, but in the workplace and in life.
	And to Dalton, that terrified him. College was coming up. He had a girlfriend who was going to leave him if he didn’t get his shit together with her and parents that were going to kick him out on his drug habit.
	I asked him what made him like this.
	He stopped, yet knew what he was going to say before he said it.
	Porn made him like that.
	He told me how the male students, be it athletes or nerds, were like him in the fact that their endocrine systems, and ergo, mental capabilities were shot from excess exposure to drugs or sex in general. Partaking in it wasn’t abnormal to the average American teenage boy, but in the most quintessential point of developing as a human, adjusting normal chemical impulses lead to dire, lasting consequences on the rest of the developmental cycle and, ergo, one’s self and mental state.
	This condition I call now “dysexia”.
	Where the dopamine receptors in your brain shut down to the point in which you remain completely neutral or depressed, never happy from excess “use”. Your brain becomes damaged to the point that remembering becomes difficult. Where focusing, ergo reading, became impossible to him.
	Warranting any splinter of effort you may have created throughout the day and designating that short lived effort to something was for naught. To commit to completing something simple becomes the hardest task of your life.
	And, going back to the Marble Slab/stoning metaphor I mentioned earlier, Dalton, for fear of being seen as weak to his social circle, would Giles Corey it.
	You say, “More”, not because you want to, but because you have too. Your spinal column is about a slab away from breaking in two. You think of suicide. How nice it’d be to end it all. Mediocrity does not exist as an adjective in the world. It exists as a state of being. And if you’re mediocre, you do not have a future. Suicide is mediocre. To the state, you are a piece of governmental property and potential revenue. The state wants you alive.
	The state, however cannot see out the problems of every “mediocre” or, under the weather person. They can’t see every veteran, every drug addict, every teenager like Dalton.
	So, what do they do?
	They give them prescriptions and send them on their way.
	The American male, brought to his knees at the hands of dopamine deprivation.

	Dalton is a byproduct of his surroundings in Rural America. Abysses don’t stare back in Rural America; they exist in every nook and corner in every room in every building. They have been there longer than the trees and lakes and wheat fields have, and they will continue to exist and creep into the souls of everyone, from the most innocuous person to the most hardened. Morals have no authority if they are expected to be placed before human sanity and identity to remain pure in a religious sense. And to people, compromises will be made in the name of sanity.
	Morals will continue to have no authority when the people are isolated, shackled to the Cave and told to tolerate their existence. The idle mind is the devils plaything, and only when the people are arrested, their families broken apart and fractured, their education abandoned, their existence and future confined to a convenient store job and trailer park home, or found in the corner of an abandoned building with a heroin syringe in arm, then and only then will they have realized that death by gunshot in the city would have been swifter and more painless than succumbing to weakness and became a statistic in rural America.