Part III Extra credit: writing for myself

Wandering slowly in case disappointment is my destiny, I feign interest in the new books section laid out temptingly for the adults. Look but don’t read, a sign informs those who aren’t yet the magic age of 18. No doubt s-e-x is the main ingredient of the stories within. One tempts me with its small size and single word title. As I reach for it wondering if some alarm will sound or how it will be known that I’ve breached the age divide, the pages part beneath my fingers. 

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night...

Naked for sure is in the stream of words whose meaning I understand individually, just not in this order. Since it isn’t the language that makes this adult reading, it must be the pictures. Quickly I flip through the pages. There are misspellings and the punctuation seems wrong, in ways that would surely cause my teacher to give me no credit for the work and direction to rewrite such stuff. Placing the book back on the table, I wonder what adults think about kid readers. How could this book have any of those harmful values, as the nuns at catechism would say?