illegitimized

so hangin out with some friends the other day made me realize something. i'm not in touch with "hood" culture. at all. and the fact that i was in a car riding around with them for most of the night didn't make the connection any stronger. i found myself thinking what the fuck? why can't i do this? what's different? and to be honest a lot of the ground work between was the same. poor families. debtor parents. public schools up through highschool. growing up in bad neighborhoods. plenty of fighting (giving and getting ass beatings). violence at home. difficult pasts... blah blah blah.... so where did they split off from me. when did the toughness of where i came from become totally illegitimate. practically laughable. when did that happen?

but i know now exactly when it happend. i should have known it would happen because its not the first time. it goes like this: once you get into middle school no one cares what you did in elementary school or where you went. once you get into highschool no one cares what you did in middle school. when you get into undergrad no one- and so on and so on. the older you get the less people care about what happend to get you there. and thats how it should be because what matters isnt what lead up to where youre at as much as where you go from there. (which feels like a weird matrix quote but its true i guess).

and you know what else- being "gangsta" and being educated do not go together at all unless you can consider having a "gangsta" mentality the only requisite for a thug to call himself such. all the time that goes into building credibility, all the time that goes into learning how to make a drug deal, how to protect yourself, how to build networks, how to- all of the time is time taken away from academic pursuits. And it cuts the other way. all the time that goes into learning poets and poetry, learning rhetoric, argument, interpretation, calculus, programming, painting, information architecture, archiving, musicianship, editing, and on and on, directly takes away from time spent on the street learning how to "hustle." so with an education beyond highschool you are not gangsta, you are what would commonly be called a poser. and if youre okay with that then go ahead.

maybe im missing it altogether though. maybe there are gradations of gangsta. maybe they come in different flavors. different aspects of "hustlin" that pair well with book learnin. maybe i was just raised to hate that whole subculture. and if not hate than simply reject for a path i consider more valuable in the long run. its totally possible. but maybe the whole point of the illegitimization of past events by virtue of current developments is that it allows you to let go. you're not the same person you were six months ago let alone six years ago and if you are you might have to ask yourself how much of what you are is defined from the outside in and how much is from the inside out. so let it go and move on. i felt awkward hanging out with these people and thats because i should have. there's nothing wrong with differences. im not them. simple as that. and thats where im going to let it rest. well i ll go one step more. i was wrong. they put their time into their lives and i put my time into mine and the only judge of the value of what either of us did will be us when we are far enough away in time to look on our past selves as different people. and THAT is where im going to let it rest.