The Lost Excerpts from the Barack Obama memoirs
I spent the last two years of high school in a daze, blocking away the questions that life, and my Mr. Natural blacklight poster, seemed insistent on posing. I attended class sparingly, played foosball heavily, and smoked weed enthusiastically. So enthusiastically that my nickname was "Bogart." Okay, maybe it was the last four years of high school.
Most of that daze happened at a little strip mall foosball parlor on the Eastside of HonoluIu. Inside that dingy flourescent sanctuary I discovered it really didn't matter if you were black or white, a surfer or a hodad, whether you had enough money to buy air shocks for your Camaro. Everyone was welcome in our club of disaffection, as long you had a pukka shell necklace and a roll of quarters and a spray can of silicon lube for the old table that had a sticky goalie shaft. Under those buzzing lights I practiced my wicked crossover corner shot and contemplated the big questions: life, justice, how many matchbooks it really took to level the air hockey table. Should a bounce-out count as a goal?
Sometimes the questions got to be too much and I would escape to the solitude of the Bally Wizard machine. I was living in the moment, channeling my disaffected rage though its erratic flipper buttons -- the left one always seemed to short out just as I was nearing a free game -- and thought about the words of Dr. King and Eldridge Cleaver while Boston and Head East blared on the Seeberg jukebox. Sometimes we'd go out to the parking lot and blaze a one hitter in the back of Kip's Econoline. We talked about the unfulfilled promises of America, and Todd, the guy who claimed he could get us fake Nevada IDs. And if the high didn’t solve whatever it was that was getting you down, it could at least help you laugh at the world’s ongoing folly and hypocrisy and bullshit, and those busloads of tourists you mooned from Kip's van porthole.
Also, did I mention we were disaffected?
Much more there, not here.
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