The plastic slide at the neighborhood playground is like every slide in America, in that it causes your hair to stand up when you lie on it. It’s also covered in crude graffiti carved with a safety pin or pen.
There’s the normal stuff you’d expect, like a melted crater caused by a Bic lighter, a crude vagina that looks more like a cantaloupe with a slice missing, and an etching that reads “FUCK MAX,” which is so deliciously suburban it hurts. What did you do to deserve such public rancor, Max?
Then there’s one at the top of the slide that reads “REMEMBER ME” with a little heart, which seems like such a sad thing for a kid to engrave into a slide.
But isn’t that the reason we feel compelled to deface things in the first place? Writing our names in the wet concrete or chiseling initials into a tree, it’s just a way of preserving our presence on this planet, regardless of how impermanent it really is. I was alive, I was here. Remember me. And also, fuck Max.
I Don't Belong Here. 