Volume 11, Issue 3 (1998) Chota: A Midwestern Review (India's Got The Bomb!)

It's time for some of us to be sailing out into the sick sad sea. Or just selling out, period, our eyes & brains having been pre-packaged for the local friendly coffee khaki corporations with their signing bonuses & mysterious lifetimes worth of busywork. & if you don't have a job, you're doing even worse (better?) because you just wasted a whole lotta money & time on useless poppycock like Civic Society 101, listening to some baldheaded redfaces talk shit about a world they've never lived in with their weepy souls of Harvard bookdust.

If you're lucky you just read lit & philosophy & drank things & smoked things & sucked things & generally had a fine old time. Of course, you probably could have done all of that a lot more cheaply somewhere else. So you got robbed. Yes, friend, you could have forged that porky résumé.

I'm thinking all of these thoughts because I just read over everything you're about to read & I'm reminded of how so many folks who create in college just cease & desist from art once they're plunged into the world. That is an odd reaction to reality, methinks. Sure, life in a corporate park or on a park bench can be horrific & time consuming but, hell, Anne Frank & Albert Camus scribbled their thoughts with the Nazis tromping all around them. So we hardly have any excuses. Part of me thinks that anyone who is enough of a sheep to believe that all of this has to end once you walk across that stage isn't sharp enough to merit a distinct voice anyhow. Maybe it's some bizarre form of Artistic Darwinism at work — the creative survival of those who realize that they can creatively survive.

If anything, the Real World should finally provide some of us with Real Things to write about. No more of those poems & stories about lying in beer like blood on some fratparty floor (pieces which go straight into the trashcan, if you want to know the truth).

Despite the pervasive naivete, this was the prime time. Think of everyone you've had in any way here — whether you've had their minds or their bodies or both. Well, you've probably had them in their prime. Don't you feel godlike & accomplished? Your friends start getting old & paranoid now — they'll start marrying each other this summer. Some of them are already well down the path to crochety. Old age begins the first time you drop mini-thins or down two McClure's cappuccinos just to stay awake all night & write that paper. Next thing you know you've got varicose veins & you've joined the Republican party.

What I'm trying to say is that while some of the writers in this issue may very well stop writing when they leave this place, at least you've got them now, young & fresh, with eyes & brains intact.

All of that being said, this issue is shaped to my prejudice — it's loaded with poetry. I read through the poems & threw in the ones that hit the hardest. Same with the prose pieces. There are more than a few notable works here. It feels good to know that you've copped a squat in the general vicinity of some of these folks & their thoughts like pictures (&, in the cases of our photographers, pictures like thoughts).

This is the last issue of Chota. Who knows what Walt & Josh will call it next year, but whatever they call it, you can bet that they will succeed in having one issue each semester, just like god intended. I wish I could say it's been fun, but it's just been work & worry. & now it's all over with, the end of May & it's hotter outside than it's been in a long time. India's got The Bomb & my muffler's about to fall off. The whole world could use a nap. Goodbye, goodluck, & watch what you go peddling out in that thar marketplace, ya hear?