UW-Parkside was a small school in the middle of somewhere. And somewhere was nowhere else other than Kenosha. It’s a rusty place; it’s grey and cheese curds and chipped bricks and maintains a year-round malaise. My northside neighborhood by campus held a plaza within walking distance, but almost everyone had a car. The Domino’s was next to a Pizza Hut and laundry mat. The main attraction for me was a Pick n’ Save. I used to work there and can say nothing interesting ever happened at work. Also, this story isn’t about me; But I lived above the laundry mat.
Somewhere was a parking lot, at night, after work, when everything had begun to close. It was almost self-referential. And it was almost like everywhere else. Kenosha isn’t lying about the cracks in its pavement or the cognitive dissonance of having to understand itself through another lens. It’s King of The Hill and Halloween Town and Manchester by The Sea and Shameless. Kenosha is a parking lot over the border in Waukegan and the very same parking lot in Joliet. It’s the episode of How I Met Your Mother where they keep digressing from the main topic, “boogie boarding”. And somehow, I feel as though I were there and worked at the Pick n’ Save. But like I said this story probably isn’t about me.
Kurt Vonnegut sat in the back of a lecture hall. The seats had not been updated since the 70’s. Someone said something about no phones allowed in class and Kurt was utterly disinterested. The evergreen chalkboard and flickering red exit sign both said something that no one wanted to hear. The sound of chalk on a chalk board was grating, like nails on a chalkboard. And with a fresh piece of chalk the professor standing in front of 50 or 60 students, began to write. “Welcome to asking questions 101” was scribbled on the board as the professor began his lecture. “This class will be entirely about questions; you will learn what it means to ask dumb questions…”
Kurt almost began to nod off as the professor continued to talk. He had eaten an entire Little Caesars pizza before class, and stone cold sober none the less. It was a feat in and of itself to make it to class, let alone eat the whole pizza. I think when Kurt signed up for the class, he just kind of let his guidance counselor tell him what to do because he was a little stoned and was more concerned with proving the existence of a great lakes whale.
See, Kurt had long hypothesized that there was an interdimensional space whale living within the great lakes, exactly like the one from Futurama and he had yet to prove it. But Kurt wasn’t a wealthy man, that’s why he lived in Kenosha. And he could barely afford rent in the middle of somewhere let alone a dream. Dreams are expensive and we need geographers, or at least what the guidance consoler told him. Kurt wanted to major in Interdimensional space whaling, but he spaced out during the conversation and apparently UW-Parkside doesn’t teach that subject. And Kurt was many things but he wasn’t a coward nor a realist.
And so, Kurt still held onto his dream. He didn’t really tell anyone about it. His dream was a deeply personal endeavor, one that he was so sure of that it almost seemed real. He was almost certain he would one day find the whale and almost definitely saw himself as an Ishmael type or maybe more like captain Ahab. I can’t tell either way but he liked to keep that hidden. I don’t know why he thought his dream was a secret; he had been kicked out of class several times for bringing a harpoon. But he was a likeable and imaginative man and a skilled writer too, so who were we to say anything. We had nothing to say to him or about his apparent dream.
But it wasn’t just a regular dream. It was an apparition of the future in visions of a whale that Kurt would see at night. The eyepatch tucked under a beanie that had been rolled up one too many times and blue shirt jacket soaked from waves as he chased after the whale. He stood at the rear of the boat, harpoon in hand, as wind whipped the sea over the side. Kurt made a move and the whale evaded and maneuvered without honor or any honesty. It was truly a sight to behold the gold gateway accented by red and bronze and blue had just opened in an instant. It looked almost like an interdimensional kind of gateway. Kurt knew that it was so and this was his only one chance to save himself from cliché, so he took it. This was his destiny. “Excuse me!” the professor said aloud “you in the back”
Kurt awoke from his short slumber as the professor was pointing at the question on the board. It read “Why do we see ourselves as individuals?”. And in his dazed state Kurt responded almost shouting “I’m not…” it could’ve been an accident or the correct answer for all he knew. And the professor satisfied with that response went back on about his lecture. Meanwhile, the students were engaged in a lively unsanctioned and unsanctimonious discussion. Discussing the idea that they could not be separated from the trees and the flowers and the lake and the lake. And then Kurt drifted back off to sleep.
I had been busy drawing a portrait of Kurt and looking up often enough to make sure the professor didn’t call on me. Kurt was a row or two in front of me and to the left. He smelled like pizza and sleep. I liked to imagine him as Lorde Jim, a coward a deserter. And I liked to depict as such; Kurt was constructed “As a man born to be what he is”. And I looked down at the pencil doodle and realized that I’d been seeing him all wrong and then metaphor collapsed abruptly. Kurt Vonnegut, the metaphor fell in on itself and I fell over, hitting my head on the way down.
I don’t really understand why we need to be someone, or anyone if only for a moment. I’m not Kurt Vonnegut or the narrator or Ishmael trying not to be captain Ahab. And if someone asked me to leave Kenosha and Id replied “I’ve already left”. I left to be closer to middle of somewhere and nowhere at all.