Entertainment Keeps You Frozen in Childhood and Trapped in a Fantasy World
by Sabrina Dawkins
He sits on his front porch in full view of every passerby as if he were eternally waiting for someone to come by and relieve him of his boredom. No book is in his hands. He’s just looking out into the distance. I guess he enjoys the warm weather. When company does arrive, they curse, laugh, and discuss sports. They critique and/or praise professional athletes whom they will never meet. For many hours they sit, talking or watching the movie screen that consists of open air. They sit in one place moving nothing but their mouths. They sit out there until it becomes too dark to see one another, and then they stay out a little longer. Various kids are brought to the house to apparently spend time with their father(s) because the mother and father don’t live together.
It’s the gathering spot for local friends, family, gamblers, alcoholics, drug dealers, and drug addicts, a place where they can forget about their worries and relax on the front porch with alcohol and friends to discuss television entertainment. Sometimes the kids even play in the tiny front yard. Often there are so many cars there that they ruin the for-sale grass lot across the street that they’ve converted it into a parking lot; and deep tire grooves in the grass, exposing red dirt, and plastic trash scattered all over the once perfectly manicured green lawn shows careless misuse. The once intact for sale sign is now partially broken off, missing its top two corners and looking more like a triangle than a rectangle.
The regular landscaper must have gotten tired of picking up the trash because now shredded paper and plastic is occasionally spread across the open lot, where he just ran the lawnmower over the trash without bothering to pick it up. A weekly deposit of new trash scattered over a large, unattended lot builds up. But the residents of the house don’t seem to care, don’t seem to connect the fact that their guests regularly park on the for-sale lot and trash ends up there, in the same spots as their guests’ cars were parked, and also deep grooves in the ground where the grass has been destroyed.
Cigarettes, and talking, and a lot of people crammed into a small house throughout the night seems to be their entertainment on weekends in particular. Trash also finds its way onto neighbors’ front lawns after the large get-togethers. But rarely does the party house have trash on its front lawn.
Once five cop cars showed up there at night. Flashing blue lights lit up the black sky, but there was no sound, as if the police wanted to catch the occupants off guard. But a few weeks later, the large gatherings resumed, and strange men up to about 65 years old again would sit out front cursing while doing nothing but talking about the potential of celebrity athletes. The highlight of their week seemed to be to do nothing at all but sit and dream. I assumed they had jobs, and at around 3:00, 4:00, or 5:00 when they got off, they would go hang out and relax as a reward for a hard day’s work for someone else.
Young males show up blasting vacuous rap music with sexual lyrics, cursing, and the n-word, demonic music that anyone with a minuscule amount of self-respect and ability to feel shame would be embarrassed to be heard listening to. But I guess among young adults, that kind of music is considered fashionable.
Another house a few houses down was also a party house with music, talk of getting high, and soda cans that littered their front yard after parties. A moveable basketball goal was stationed in front of the house at the road, the road being the basketball court. A large outdoor trampoline was in the backyard. Different people went in and out, and the front porch was a place to sit for hours staring at nothing. But one day at least 50 boxes of belongings were put out by the road. And they remained there for weeks, and even through rain. After those boxes had been picked up by the city trash collectors presumably, even more things from the now vacated house were put out on the side of the road, seemingly more than could’ve fit in the house. The occupants had seemingly left quickly and without a plan. The children and young adults no longer played basketball there, but the basketball goal remained longer than any of the other possessions: Their mode of entertainment had outlived them at that residence.
Moving forward and improving is impossible when a person is stuck in a dream world of laziness, irresponsibility, and carelessness: empty beer and soda cans, plastic Black & Mild wrappers and mouthpieces, and fast-food containers littering the front lawns of strangers, regularly thrown there as the culprit slowly destroys his or her own body. The hell within slowly overtakes the whole internal environment. The adult is frozen in a childhood of watching exciting professional sports games and going to teenage house parties where the attendees snuck and drank alcohol while listening to filthy music.
The trash they carelessly threw to someone else to deal with in the dead of night when no judging eyes would fall upon them ended up hidden in their own bodies and contributing to the hell within, along with the sports games and demonic music, a wilderness forever, a Neverland eternal childhood land for the soul where the reality of the outside world fades away and the person shrivels inside like a long-dead fallen leaf, detached from the source of life; drugs and alcohol, fiction TV, and false-reality fast music to disguise the slow death, the shriveled soul, the child who never grew up to experience adulthood and responsibility, but remained in a fun world, a make-believe world where reality was routinely and then permanently rejected. And in the end, when the host was dead, all that remained was the entertainment, like the plastic wrappers that held the poison that was self-administered.