Member
Setbacks
My father once told me that to live a truly youthful life meant making mistakes.
It's so that when you're old, when you're ripe and grey, you could pass those lessons learned to your kids, to family, to anyone that would listen and learn.
Though hardly anyone was competent enough let any of that advice sink in, that's the real bitch behind being stubborn, the true meaning of being young.
And now, the pangful setbacks of all the things I did years ago haunt me to this day.
Monday - August 13, 2004. Southern California. Sophomore Year.
My father loved to always give me advice whenever he could. He was a man who understood true hardship, and knew how to deal with personal atrocities though needless to say, I never truly did myself. I could not shamefully say that I was raised in a pretty well and comfortable environment, not having to worry about being stabbed or shot just for wearing the wrong colors, or even being stopped for no reason by police officers like the many stories my father would talk about as an young Hispanic man growing up. "The mark of a true man is self-sufficiency, and to do that is by being stoic", he told me once, in an, what it appeared to me, as an almost embellished principle most men should follow. Though I could say for myself that most kids who grew up in this neighborhood were anything, but stoic, as most has never even endured much hardship in their own lives, even me, I admit.
White suburbia (well, mostly anyway), a true epitome of the perfect American society where many people around the world dream of and a place of pervasively harrowing and perpetual boredom. A place where those born unfortunate enough to be born here could hardly ever feel truly troubled. It was this point of my life, the honors, straight-A student conjured an idea of starting a business, and not a legitimate one. It all started with petty stealing and selling whatever we stole, but it's not like we could ever be caught. We were honor students, and as long as we could get good grades and go out for sports, no one could give two shits about what kind of trouble we could be getting away with. It was at this point in my life, I began to realize the bullshit behind the education system, the maniacal inclination to force students to tend to day-to-day routine is what drove me to be rather maniacal, or at least I'd like to think that's what started it all. But to tell you the truth... It was all just a clusterfuck waiting to happen, 'a deal gone wrong', as the movies say. The only difference is that the dealer who I had shaken hands with was life itself and the repercussions were all the more consequential.
You, know, I wasn't always a bad kid, and if you saw me face-to-face, you wouldn't say I was either. Like the rest of the honor students in our High School, we were pretty 'good' considered being raised in a middle-class, middle-income, average families. There were no rough upbringings, no stories of living in foster-care, or having to see my parents struggle just to make ends meet. For me, my life had simply been a rather dull and tedious one, something most Americans could find contentment with. Just as long as the boring lifestyle of being an picture-perfect American meant having an out, a hobby, and I had many. My friends and I were all academic all-stars and at the time I was in sports, had a job, studied hard when I had time, and overall tried to keep busy as well as emphasizing that in my own efforts to express that 'stoicism' and perseverance to strive well enough to get into the many decent schools such as: Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, UCLA, and other schools a person could be rather impressed by. Getting good grades however made us do whatever the hell we wanted, we could moon the entire school and not be threatened with being expelled because the schools valued us more than other students. Too bad for them I guess, and all of the shit we did were mostly pointed in the directions of who the school considered lesser than us, though not as intentional as you'd think.
There was one teacher who was not only tight with us, but who also was the only school faculty member who even knew about all the petty things we did. My dorky Freshman Geometry professor, Mr. Clarke, who as it turns out wasn't nearly as much of a nerd as you'd think. You see, he also understood the audaciously ridiculousness of both the social stereotypes and norms that were almost as if written in stone for most people. Mr. Clarke would often program while the kids in our class did their homework since he also double majored in software engineering, but was a web developer part-time and knew a few things about cyber-security. He would often hack into Ebay and commit credit card fraud on a separate, throwaway laptop he kept buried behind the bleachers of our High School Football field. Some may call it over-prepared, though there was no reason not to be when you do something like that. As long as he didn't spend over twelve-hundred dollars a month, nobody would suspect him, not even Ebay. Eventually, he taught us a few things about coding which I began to take seriously since I had already been good with computers. "Tricking people is kind of like manipulating code..." he said, "Takes a lot of practice, I've learned, though as long as you could see the reasons behind the motives of a program, even or a person, you can change it to fit your own motives." Wise advice, something I would absorb as I hope you will someday. Mr. Clarke never got caught, and to this day we consider him a part of us.
It was in the seventh grade when we started it all, and where it truly started was with a bag of weed that was left at a party my brother headed out of just as we were heading in to make sure he did not catch us coming in. The lucky part of that little voyage was that everyone in that party was far too lit to even notice a couple of kids sneaking into a party to steal booze and that same weed we found in a room three people had fallen asleep. We ended up selling it to a group of older Hispanic kids living a few blocks from us and made sixty dollars that day. It was from there on that our life of petty criminality took off. We stole baseball cards, computer parts, toys, anything we could get our hands on just to sell it and split the cash. I think I've made over thousands of dollars from that little 'business' we set up for ourselves at the school every semester or so.
Hell, we even thought of ourselves as the secret school mafia, this thing of ours that we had established at the school, and nobody thought it would ever be us. We could steal hundreds of thousands of dollars in school supplies, rob a store in the millions, and vandalize public property all in the same week and nobody would suspect it was us, the honor, straight-A students, smiling in our yearbook photos innocently. The cool thing about looking and acting this innocent is that often that you could get away with something so much, even you could even trick yourself into thinking you're the innocent one. And that's how things went on for us those few years. Being the picture perfect student, with a shady background nobody else but my friends and I only knew.
Though even that wasn't enough to satisfy my hunger to pursue a life of being 'self-sufficient'. I can't recall where the saying comes from, but it goes something like "hard times create hard men, hard men create good times, and good times create weak men". Maybe those hippy transcendentalists like Thoreau, Emerson, and Whitman were right when they stated that mankind's divinity was expressed by all of nature, we being an animal on this diverse planet of many. The meaning of being truly individualistic meant persevering though that indomitable sea of troubles before finding peace from within oneself as paraphrased from Marcus Aurelius and written in later folk songs by Bob Dylan, Peter Paul and Mary, John Denver, and many others. I take that philosophy both to heart and consideration, even to this day - I just wish I had made a wiser decision on how to do so.
Setting, Plot, and Applications
As you've read in the introduction, the setting of this story takes place in a mostly white suburban neighborhood during the mid 2000s, a time where the internet was just about to explode with popularity and an era which stood on the precipice of a technological revolution (it also a time where people still used Myspace!). This plot (if you haven't already guessed) is a crime story of high-achieving high school students in the honors program who begin to take part in petty criminal activities that soon begin to spiral out of their own control. The idea for this story sprung up of some personal things I went through in High School as well as being heavily derived from the movie Better Luck Tomorrow, a movie I highly encourage you to see. The plot would be dramatic, there will be romance, and above all, there will be crime and the repercussions I mentioned before.
I will require three or four main characters for the story as the plot is bound to be centered around them. I also will accept additional characters and could think of a way to put you somewhere, just don't expect to have to write as often. If you're the type of person who wants to contribute lightly, then roleplaying as a side character would be the ideal position for you, though don't let it mean to you that it's unimportant since they are almost just as important as the main characters. Characters in this story are potentially dead men/women as the plot will progress, so maybe one of those side characters could fill for the deceased. And yes, you can write more than one character, just not more than one MAIN character (unless this RP gets very little attention as I'm suspecting it might).
With character development, try to be as realistic as possible. I don't want to see a handsome, tall guy with big muscles playing as some shy nerd whose only flaw is that he only sometimes gets girls. You and I both know that doesn't happen in the real world, people are much more complicated and diverse than that. Sure it would be good to have a tough looking guy play a side character who sells drugs to high school students, but since it's revolved around a bunch of academically inclined high school dweebs I don't really expect much though that doesn't mean they should look entirely pathetic either as stereotyped. Ask yourselves questions like: What is their GPA like? Are they in sports, if so are they just bench-warmers or are they also good at what they play? Be creative, though again, realism is also key. The main characters are going to be students with at least a 3.4 or higher. As a side character, you may choose whoever you want to be though keep in mind I may have a position for you maybe another time in the story as the plot and the conflict begins to unfold in this story.
As for how the story will be written itself - it's entirely in the third person with the exception of my own character, the narrator who occasionally talks in past tense as well as being symbolized by italic text. I've thought about this idea for the past three days now since leaving high school almost three years ago. I will, as in tradition, write the first post before letting the players decide what to do from there and I have yet to think of an idea (you are welcome to help and do collabs together as well).