August 23, 2004Ah Jeez, guys. I feel like the Mrs. Garrett of a wading pool full of retarded children. You fuckers are all too young to remember who Mrs. Garrett was, I bet. Well, google it.
Anyway. My esteemed co-Evanstonian Claire Zulkey reminded me of something important today -- nearly everything I am now (for instance: hyperactive, selfish, inattentive, rude, prone to self-mutilation, and in general totally frothy and unhealthily hellbent on revenge) is because I spent four years in a giant brick vomitorium called Evanston Township High School.
Now, we've all seen on the internet how when people say bad things about high schools that suddenly the police show up at their doors and cuff 'em. So I'm not going to say anything like BURN THE FUCKER DOWN or KILL EVERYONE WHO'S EVER WORKED THERE.
But.
Evanston Township High School was a feces souffle so foul that it's a miracle I still retain a sense of smell. Ah yes, way back when... in the class of '89, I graduated in the top 65% of my class of 950-odd students. And that includes the pregnant chicks who didn't speak English.
In particular, I despise my last English teacher, who was evidently a failure in the newspaper world and was deeply bitter about returning to the Chicago suburbs to teach ratty-face children about the do's and don't's of writing ledes. He was an arrogant cock. If I could remember his name I'd put it here. The worst punishment I could wish on him is that he still teaches there.
Still, there were happy times. My favorite teacher, for American History my junior (I think) year, once photocopied and distributed one of my papers (on like the American colonies and how America was now a fascist state or something half-baked like that) and basically was the only teacher to praise my classwork. (Well, that was the only time I ever did classwork.) Anyway: he was the only teacher who thought I was any good, and then he had to go and kill himself at the end of the school year. Seriously.
After being excused from high school at the age of 17 -- it was a pity diploma, the administration literally said they were letting me graduate because I "had potential" (translated: white skin) even though I was only taking THREE classes my senior year, and one of them was gym -- I suddenly realized: why the FUCK didn't anyone tell me I could have gotten a GED?
So, to the youth of today, I say -- fuck high school. Take the equivalency test. All high school will do for you is force you to socialize with snotty nitwits and wannabe gang members and, if you're not having fun, leave now and never look back. Yeah, you'll have some shitty jobs after you graduate. Don't worry about it.
Sure, if I'd left, I would have missed out on some fun with my pals in Bacon Cafeteria, which was the stoner wing with the smoking courtyard. (Yes, youngsters, we used to smoke in high school. At high school.) That gang was awesome, seriously it was like a John Hughes movie in there but with mohawks and lesbians and disenfranchised East Asian people. Totally rad. We should have all dropped out together.
But fun reject-pals or not, I swear: if I could have done anything different with my teenage years, I would have A) smoked even MORE pot than I did and B) gotten the hell out of that prison the day I turned 16 and was GED-eligible.
Anyway, enough of that. For the record, how stupid am I? I am so stupid that I was just eating green apple-flavored gourmet faux-Twizzlers in one hand and smoking in the other and I just mixed up my hands and took a bite out of my cigarette. I'm serious. I don't know how Jabba the Hut managed to shovel food in his face and control chained-up scantily-clad princesses. I can't even eat and type and smoke. But, hey! Me and these faux-Twizzlers are carbo-loading for a race -- a race to a really wide and really early grave!
In any event, I'm sure I'll remember this moment in eight or nine months, when I'm scrubbing floors for a living or telling fellow SRO-living ex-cons, "Yeah, I used to write once in a while for the New York Times. Wait, quit laughing! What? Oh yeah, well, now I work as a professional SM dominant in Studio City and sell a little acid on the side."
Or at the very least I'll remember this moment when I'm applying for jobs at Starbucks and they google me and find out what a potty-mouthed high-school-burnout half-wit I am. That'll rock.
