Youtheater

The Big Ten town where I grew up is nothing  if not a great and gluttonous devourer of youth, harvesting the crops of its inhabitants, plucking the fledgling fruit from the branches of its saplings to feast on what would be considered far from ripe in other parts of the country. The Youtheater pervaded the place like a dense and depressing fog, pouring over the hills and rushing with the streams. I saw it in my parents. I saw it in everyone's parents. I saw it in my friends. I lied awake at night coughing up pieces of it.  It was added with fluoride and chlorine to the drinking water; it floated up from the fields of corn and soy with oxygen into the atmosphere, soaking into the walls of lungs; it was included with every dose of Bovine Growth Hormome, making its way into the cows and onto plates, engulfing the abeyant potential of Midwestern youth indiscriminately like a lunatic killer loose in the calm of the rural night.