Thursday, May 19, 2011

RETURN TO SNAKELAND - Thirty-Eighth Fragment

* This is a fictionalized account of some shit that actually happened. All the names, locations, etc. have been changed to protect the innocent as well as the guilty. – JG *

There was always a mysterious friction in the air in Kenton, especially in the evening, in all the dusks that haunted that strange season of new sex and old death. Some of it was just the reliable excitement prior to going out, that scratchy rush of the unknown, of possibility, of Innocence rubbing up against Experience. But it seemed like there was more to it than that in Kenton, in that autumnal adolescent dusk-world, the shady place between adulthood and childhood. Two poles created that electricity, the good and the bad, the white and the black – two literal places: the Record Mine and Snakeland. Why Kenton? Why those two places? I don’t think we’ll ever know but of all the experiences I have had in my life, in all the places that I have ever been, nothing quite compares to feeling that teenage electric charge running through me, through us, between those two channels, crackling in the air, radiating out and down, in me, through me, back around twenty years later, here to you, the circuit complete.