Cody Weber is Things

What does this question even mean?  Are you asking me what my socio-economic background is?  That’s kind of hard to answer.  When I was young and living within a nuclear family that had two working parents, I’d dare to say we were upper-middle class.  At one point my parents had matching Corvettes, my dad’s was a 1978 and my mom’s was a 1986.  To me this was the pinnacle of financial success and it still stands as some kind of symbol for it in my head.  If I am ever to the point where I can afford to buy my lover a matching car, I’ll consider myself a success.

My dad lost his job weeks after his divorce with my mother was finalized.  That was a very odd time in my life and it was strange to go from a nuclear family with full cupboards to DHS officers watching over your home.  That time was especially hard on my father, who really believed he had failed in some fundamental way.  I don’t know if he’s ever really gotten over that feeling, even later on when he found his footing a little.  He’s always at least a little stressed out, and usually about nothing important.  I think that’s a product of the early 2000’s.

Now I’m just broke as shit.  I don’t own a car or a phone and I live the most primitive American lifestyle possible.  Most of the time I eat foods in the noodle variety, they’re cheap and easy, but some days I don’t eat at all.  Oh well.  Comes with the territory.

 I am not convinced this is what you are asking me, though.  Maybe you are asking me, “What social clique did you belong to throughout school?”  To answer that, I have to explain the atmosphere of my educational experience.  I spent the totality of my school years with the same forty-or-so kids and I don’t think any of them liked me much.  I can’t stress how small this school was, nor can I accurately explain how small the entire town seemed even then.  On my first day of school, I embarrassed myself by forcing the teachers to rip me from my mom’s van.  I had never felt so fucking betrayed in my life.  Why was my mom making me hang out with all these assholes?  I didn’t understand it.  A bunch of kids saw this happening and never let it go.  Kids still brought that shit up in high-school.  That’s the kind of environment in which I spent my first seventeen years.

The school was way too small to really have cliques.  There weren’t even any goth kids in my school.  Not a single one, and this is especially noteworthy because it was popular for a long time.  In fact, the closest Hamilton ever got to a goth was this pretty girl who listened to mainstream metal like Slipknot and Mudvayne.  She would paint her nails black and rock out in the gym sometimes.  She wasn’t goth, though, not even close.  She was happy all the fucking time, popular, and didn’t even like The Cure.  No goth, indeed.

Instead the cliques at my high-school were three isolated, non-functioning groups.  That’s it.  We had the athletes, the kids who could never fail a grade because our struggling sports programs depended so much on their presence.  These kids were absolutely stereotypical and terrible, mostly rich and with parents older than my grandparents.  The other group of kids were the dorks and nerds, kids who still rocked Star Wars backpacks in the ninth grade.  They would plan slumber parties, boast about internet girlfriends, and never broke any rules.  They were there to make the school look good, to make up for the idiot jocks.  Or at least, that’s how I saw them anyway.

The third group were the social pariahs, which on the surface seemed like my kind of people.  They got even worse grades than the jocks did, though they were almost proud of it, and all smoked cigarettes between classes.  The problem with these kids was this: they had the worst traits of the other groups combined.  They still talked about mundane bullshit, but they also had internet girlfriends.  They were picked on by the jocks, but they also picked on the nerds.  Worst of all, they were too god damn stupid to notice how similar they were.  They all dressed in unison and pretended to be individualistic.  They were morons.

3.  Close all privatized jail systems.  Jail anybody that helped fund them.

The idea that judges are making money by ruining people’s lives blows my mind.  How do we allow this to happen?  Why aren’t we collectively freaking out about something so barbaric and scummy?

4. Invest in research and development / Infrastructure rebuilding

Our infrastructure is crumbling and needs massive work.  We depend on our infrastructure every single day and it gets shittier every year.  Come to Keokuk, Iowa and take one look at the roads here.  It looks like a borderline third-world country in areas.  

Think of all the things that make your life better.  The internet, cars, phones, television, all of it !  How amazing would it be to lead the world in a new way of thinking?  To make the way of life for each person better!  That should be our primary goal as a species in my opinion.  If you really want your tax dollars to go to something useful, always put it into science and technology.  That might be what destroys us, that’s ultimately true, but I think it is also the only thing that could save us from ourselves.
 

There’s a brief outline on a few things I would do.  I have entire notebooks with ideas about American politics.  I write them for fun, mostly, but those are the key things I would change.

You’re definitely an asshole, but I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t funny.

I sure would.  That’s kind of what I do.

I started drinking. :P

Then I stopped though, and I am awkward all over again.  I like a small, intimate group of people hanging out.  Anything outside of that, though, I have no interest in.  I don’t go to bars anymore, I don’t party, I don’t do any of that shit.  

The only group atmosphere I really care to be part of at this point in my life is when people are watching my band perform.  That’s different, though, because I don’t have to talk to anyone or awkwardly sit at the bar all by my lonesome.