Fast cars and drugs.

Going back to visit my parents in the wealthy suburban area they inhabit became a bit bleak when I started thinking about how tragic it is that so many teenagers find themselves victim of the restlessness that they channel into racing their expensive sports cars, and burning through a huge amount of their parents money to fuel their drug habits. Indeed, these are separate problems. But I believe they're both rooted in the same cause... the burn-out, the numbing that comes from a life of hazy excess.

These are the kids I saw in high school driving too fast just for something to do, spending money simply to kill the time, popping painkillers and always always smoking. "Nothing to do," the mantra and the excuse for doing nothing worthwhile. Too many students' lives cut short by it. Hell, multiple preventable deaths of my high school peers should not have occurred in the few short years I spent there. No wonder we hated high school. That's the pressure to escape, because every single person that stayed is now working a dead-end job, unhappy, or addicted... at least that's how it seems. Seemed. It's why we invented so many terrible nicknames for our town, in reference to the wealth-flaunting we came to resent and embrace simultaneously. Or to distance ourselves from everything that was associated with the place, a "yeah I'm living here, no I would not be if I had had a choice." There we are: none of us had a choice, and those who did got out.

And I'm feeling myself more and more a product of that world of apathy, the world of feeling and emotion reduced to dollar signs - never clear in the head, moving too much, stumbling over all my words. My new focus is to reset my focus. I could learn a lot from mucking around in my memories.
I'm young but I have my starting-point. Know the saying, "nip the problem in the bud"? Yeah, I am so relieved that I recognize this vacancy.