Your Books Have All Been Read - World Leader Pretend's Punches at 20
Pouting in the backseat. I wonder how much of that I have done in my life. Not recently. No. But when I was much younger. Saturdays spent traveling from the small, economically depressed Illinois town I grew up in, to the next largest city, less than an hour east. The urban sprawl. The strip malls. The chain restaurants and big box stores. The seemingly endless stretches of traffic and intersections and stoplights. My mother in the passenger seat of her own car, driven by whatever man she happened to be involved with at the time. And me, whatever age I happened to be at the moment, folded awkwardly into the backseat. My headphones on. My eyes, often sullen, watching everything moving past. And I would have been 22. Just, like, recently having turned 22. Perhaps too old to be folded into the backseat of a four-door Chevy Cavalier. Perhaps entirely too old to be pouting, or sullen, with headphones on, a battered Discman to my left. And I would have graduated from college, li...