Denton: A Wonderland

    I love Denton. It’s a place where protests arise on any topic from abortion, to gay rights, to stopping a limited war.
    I love how the sun shines in between the clock tower of the administration building and rests on the falling leaves of autumn. I’m enamored by the dress style of Denton: the more homeless you look and more facial hair you have, the better.
    I love pipe smoking old folks hanging on by their nails outside of coffee shops, watching the world turn while they are standing still.
    I cannot escape the lights that surround Denton square, and point to everything incredible.
    I love Recycled books, a three story corner store of thousands of years of information, stories, and smells.
    I can taste Roosters burgers and Fuzzy’s Tacos as I speak now. I can savor every bite of beautiful barbeque sushi and pork nachos, respectively.
    I love the rise to the environmental science building and the fall to Wooten hall. I love how there’s more cigarette smoke than oxygen around Bruce, the Language building, and again Wooten Hall. I enjoy running up and tapping people I know, and then embracing them and talking loudly so that we are noticed.
    I cannot avoid checking out hundreds of movies for free in the Chilton Media Library. Thank you for supplying over 200 movies that we have watched without cost. Denton is the zone of freedom: “Discover the power of ideas.” It’s not College Station, or Austin, or Lubbock, or Houston, and THAT’S exactly why we love it.
    I adore having a crappy football team. I adore that as not our definition of a college. I enjoy a world full of people without school pride. Our pride is no pride, we are there to learn, get a degree, and enjoy life. We don’t follow an occult. And even though I hate environmentalism to the most fundamental level, I’m proud that we offer the best doctorate program in the field in the country.
     There’s nothing like perking your ear toward the music building at 1 PM to hear the best jazz you’ll ever hear.
    I cannot help but stare at the alcoholic zombies that exit the bars on Fry, laughing like air raid sirens as their sober buddies struggle to point them in the right direction.
    I laugh at how horrible Eagle Camp was. The little worthless attempts to recruit me as I ventured from activity to activity made me feel oddly powerful as the world grouped up around me.
    I cannot help but look with awe at the Pohl Recreation Center and know that at any time I can run on a treadmill, or ride a stationary bike, or lift free weights, or do resistance, and finish it all off with a hot tub or pool cherry on top.
    Denton’s true form is at night, with lights on every step. Like a spiral galaxy, so many bright things that are noticed loud and soft.
    TWU’s twin towers are almost always in view any way you drive. It’s there, like towers of Babel, refusing to let down as they are accelerated ever onward.
    I’m glad that we have an apartment across the street from an educational marvel, and enlightenment is just a hundred or so yards in a direction.
    I love a neighbor that talks about conspiracy theories and God and angels as aliens completely straight faced…
    I love a people that only ask your previous life once, and then don’t bother with a past that to them is irrelevant.
    The sound that a zippo lighter makes as it clicks through history, signifying that this life is just like the previous ones.
    The greasy side liners that show up at midnight release to Watchmen.
    The wondrous hordes that showed for a midnight with Harry Potter.
    The popcorn throwing, loud mouthed, hilarious nuggets that showed up for midnight Machete.
    The tight polo shirted attendees to a midnight of Inception.
    I love the pizza rivalry of Crooked Crust, and Hot Box, and how I’m actively involved in the production of both as a pizza Pocahontas.
    Nothing feels better than playing video games at Collin Gillespie, Ryan Steele, James Venable, and Chris Dant’s house.
    I love how Verde catering employees are just on the wrong side of crazy.
    I thoroughly miss the OC with Marissa and Marinna.
    I always want a better life that I cannot see or taste or touch.
    I don’t want what is right in front of me.
    I often gawk at the counter in the Environmental Science building as it reads, “World Population.”
    I have sworn to myself as I see sculptures of giant cities and then next to it see, “resource rationing.”
    I have sometimes hated myself for even being in the recreation center.
    I have stared at the moon for a straight thirty minutes, wondering if that’s all there is.
    I always think about the past.
    I miss the Bruce Hall cafeteria.
    I miss the incompetent attempts at communication.
    I wonder how much I’ve changed. I look at myself in the mirror so much because I keep seeing a stranger.
    I love and hate random Break.com videos with Caleb.
    I always love a chat with Zane.
    I look forward to the wrath of history teachers.
    I think back on what I’ve read only to realize I’ve hardly read anything at all.
    I really do feel like I was an idiot in high school. I may still be an idiot.
    Denton brings all these things out. And I wonder if this would’ve happened anywhere else. The aura of Denton is wonderland, with smoking caterpillars around every corner, with a red queen in the classroom, with a Cheshire cat behind every dark alley. There’s some overwhelming force that keeps me coming back. It’s like that old feeling of New York. The city of dreams, the Big Apple. New York now sounds like a dying breed. It’s washed out, dirty, tired. And of course Denton is no New York, but it’s something of an idealistic wonder to me. I cannot escape its dream pull into free fall as I watch the past pull up and the future spring down.
    But then I’ll return home, and home feels so far away that Denton feels like reality. And I’ll do everything to get back here. I’ll do anything to claw and scratch onto what I have left. High School feels so outdated. College would be an awfully big adventure, and after and beyond is no different than the moon. A big expanse that’s so quiet, it can hardly be said to have existed at all. And when you lean over and pick up the gray dust that makes up its surface, you find you’re right back where you started. And even the next layer is dust, and the layer after that. Gray on Gray.
    But Denton will always be there. There will always be Wassail Fest as friends and family gather around some find music and fun. There will always be finals and the promise of a better future. There will always be smokers near Bruce who think they have the world figured out.
    And just like home, I can return and realize that Denton was also just a dream, a wonderland. It lives on, but only in memories, and even those fade away.
    I was young once. Once, when I dreamed of flying ships and fame and fortune and eternity on the lips of men. I was young when thoughts of the sixties sounded better than now. I was young when I lived in Denton, and carved out my story in sand, that spun away the moment I left.
    “All we ever see of stars are their old photographs.” -Dr. Manhattan, on Mars.