The Loser Boy Blues

00. Prologue

     South Park was where dreams went to die and ambitions already rotted six feet below the ground.

     Is that too cynical to start a story?

     South Park was not renowned for being a town where good people emerged from. Few people ever left the town and even fewer went on to be known by anyone, and those who were known were not known for any positive reason. Their names were lost in the yellowing pages of phone books hidden in the back of closets and their faces rotted in memory with years passing. Their voices blurred and distorted until you could no longer understand what they said.
South Park was not renowned for opportunities and prospects, either. The nearest college was across the state and they had no interest in the students unless they made their names known. Even after schooling, all the decent jobs were up in Denver, far away from family. All businesses within the town were small and family-owned, passed from father to son to grandson, leaving kids with no choice in their future.

     And South Park was not a place where youth faded peacefully with age. Death had a familiar face to many. Stan Marsh had lost count of the kids he knew as dead, and he did not want to remember them either. Their newspaper headlines seemed to blur together in his memory, the ink left melting off of the page from the morning rain. He forgot their faces and their names. It was not completely infeasible to see blood dragged across the road or a severed human part on someone's lawn.

     South Park was, however, renowned for the impossible situations it saw every day. There was never a dull moment, never a lesson unlearned. Not a day went by without a stoned towel, a self-sacrificing satanic rabbit, or a talking turd being spotted somewhere.

     Stan thought that perhaps the obscenity would cease when his family moved out onto the farm. Stan was wrong and probably stupid, but what’s changed?

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