...i'll never learn...
...undeniable admissions from educations at all ages...
“A learned fool is more a fool than an ignorant fool.”
-Moliere-
I think being a student is the worst paying best job in the entire world. You get to learn for a living but you might also walk away with nothing.
I barely graduated school. Pick a school any school and I would find a way to avoid finding the finish line. In preschool I got kicked out for continually stuffing raisins in the hollow asses of the bright colored playmobil people.
In grade school I got suspended after football tackling the cub scout master’s son after he called me a bitch during a father’s night meeting. On his 54” tubed television the Ultimate Warrior in naked neon spangled glory was zipping a body bag on the Undertaker. I flexed and dove off the ring (a maroon couch with faded yellow petals winding across its lumpen seats). Young dumb Peter’s face felt my elbow, and I felt one of any anonymous hairy-armed dad’s pull my mullet and remove me from a chance at a second body slam. I couldn’t tell if my asshole old man was proud of my buffoonery or not but he smirked underneath a poorly worn mustache he had grown to make my mother upset.
In junior high school I was caught smoking twigs in the mini forest behind the study hall by a librarian named Ms. July, named like a pin-up in a fireman’s calendar, and known for coming to and from school in hand embroidered capes. We inhaled burnt sticks because we couldn’t figure out how to steal cigarettes yet, and as best we knew, all of our current parents didn’t know how to smoke. We were bad and bored.
One Monday morning I got in a fist fight with a dude named Denny. Denny was a dick. Neither of us landed anything close to a punch. I remember smelling like his sweat until I got picked up by my mom. We shared dribbles of fight piss on our matching flat khaki cargos. I feigned tears for my actions, and took a two day suspension from Mrs. Temple, an administrator aged “super old”, memorable for the 18 inches of curled grey hair she wore atop her angry curved forehead. I spent my suspension suspending disbelief and enjoying suspense, rereading a couple of horror novels I had left half finished over the school year. I half finished them all over again.
While I was gone the school had an assembly and a boy band played it, a reward for exceeding our magazine sale fundraising goals. When I came back all the boys at school told me that the band had sung a song called “Rubby Rubby” alongside a choreographed dance where they rubby rubbied themselves. The school girls took turns pretending which member of the boy band they would date. Most of them crushed on the small one, or the yellow haired boy with an ear piercing. Years later the manager of this boy band, a rotund man in glasses who looked like an educated grease, would be found guilty of sexually abusing different boys in the different boy bands he managed. Oh boy.
“We have learned nothing.”
-Pablo Picasso-
In high school I got caught barebacking in a matinee showing of “10 Things I Hate About You”, a teenaged rom com based on William Shakespeare’s “The Taming of The Shrew”. The movie, unlike myself, was not focused on tiny wriggly animals. I escaped my suburban boredom by trying to tame as much shrew as possible.
I was embarrassed, but not arrested, for being half assed and horny in the back row of the theater. The popcorn seller cat called out clown honks as we waddled through the exit blue-balled and red-faced. I missed the climax, the movie ending with a love requited. That relationship ended love wrecked and lying next to an ugly acid trip in a spoon shaped art park.
In college I quit studying to take mushrooms born from C.I.A. sourced spores grown in the attic of a house with rotting floors. I spent one month of that summer sleeping on an aspiring lawyer’s cheese dusted mattress, canned ravioli feeding myself soggy salts of sadness. As the year went on I spent my nights recording in the stairways of the fraternities I drank piss beer in. My band went from four to eight to twenty four track boards inside of the University radio station.
We took too much Robitussin on purpose and I saw a rabbit jump out of my soul. I sang through myself in third person and when we listened back to the tapes everything was (......................). It took a full quarter to finish all 12 songs and when we finally completed it the hard drive capturing our music broke. We sent it off to a covert company that handled data retrieval for governments. They charged us $800 and found nothing. We decided to remake the record two times the next semester and I went back to school to take a class on Italian neorealism.
My senior year I attempted a classics course on katharsis and the teacher failed me four weeks in because I kept making the 7AM class at 7:15AM (or not at all). It was a relief to rid myself from the tension of such an early morning rise. I covered the credits lost by making up my own class, a communesque cult devoted to making up words and ideas (...aella, gusshten, isacarioush, fatcetera…). The students were non-artist-non-musicians who met twice a week to make art and music. The school sponsored it and even let me give people letter grades (…F’n’A…). I failed my friend who played a penguin filled with coins because he quit showing up. He is a child psychologist who does comedy on the weekends now.
I taught at a christian alternative education school on the southwest side of Chicago for a semester. I replaced a teacher who had been partying and sleeping with students. I was twenty two years old and on the first day of school the kids asked me to smoke weed with them after class. I said “Are you kidding me?” and then I smoked a joint with my band later that night thinking “Ah, the kid in me.” Twenty two of the students didn’t finish the semester because they dropped out or went to jail. The school held a fundraiser at a House of Blues and the vice principal sang “Jesus Don’t Let Me Down” with her church band while I ate unlimited syrup soaked pancakes.
I took an internship at an advertising house a block away, my lunch breaks tucked into a po’ boy shop near that loop. My buddy played sax on the street outside of both venues for decades before I got to be there. Now he probably plays sax in heaven. After lunch I would fill the old man editor fridges with cold Old Style and they would drink their way through shoe and sandwich commercials. I thought they might show me how to do what they do, but they didn’t so I never did, and now I don’t either.
I think being a teacher is the worst paying best job in the entire world. I got to learn for a living but I might also have walked away with nothing. I haven’t been inside of a school since.
Thank god you escaped the conventional unlearning process. Your stories never seem to end.
“…a librarian named Ms. July, named like a pin-up in a fireman’s calendar, and known for coming to and from school in hand embroidered capes.”
Hand embroidered CAPES?! Did she fly to school??
Also, I would absolutely join/start a communesque cult with you. (I think this is a compliment?) ((should we start one?))
You didn’t tell me that when you worked at a school it was a “christian alternative education school” — wtf does that even mean???