Drive By Staring

In 9th grade drive by shootings were big. I mean BIG. My high school - no longer in existence today, at least as I knew it - was the school that started the Students Against Violence (SAV) movement nation-wide. I'm not bragging. It sucked. A bunch of kids - regular kids - got shot down for no reason right in front of my school. Gang shit, territory stuff; really stupid, and yet somehow very "normal." American even. Every year on Students Against Violence day, the most outspoken of all the victim's mothers came to our school and cried in front of the entire student body in the big auditorium.

The following summer I went to summer camp. I loved summer camp and had been going for years. It was a dork camp, a camp for smart kids (Psst: It was where all the cool kids went!). It was a camp where we would take classes with soon-to-be movie stars, take "nature walks" with councilors (read: cigarette breaks), and become acquainted with intelligent discourse and independent thought. Where I learned that you could hide wild berry vodka in fruit punch and exhale smoke into a pillow to avoid detection. I loved it. It was also the place that my friends and I (more my friends than I) began to talk about the "Drive By Staring."

It was a period of, what I would categorize as community devolution. Everyone became a potential threat (am I talking about the mid-1990s or today?), and all contact was to be avoided at all costs, even eye contact. What power, we thought to ourselves. Let's harness that shit, we said. Thus, the Drive By Staring was born.