I remember reading that. It's a good story, well-written. I don't
think our current discourse comes up to that level. I'm sure it took
more than one day to write.
It seems like maybe if our posts came less frequently we could write
better ones. Sometimes I feel I get off a pretty good one, but
sometimes the muse is not whispering in my ear and I dash it off with
one eye on the clock because I want to get to my painting or whatever.
On the other hand I always look forward to seeing your new post first
thing every morning. It's like breakfast. I digest it and begin to
formulate my reply, and then my fingers get to typing. If I only got a
post every other day, or every third day, I don't think I would like it
that well.
I don't remember anything like that in Tonti. If we had a student
council, I never heard of it. I wasn't paying much attention to clothes
then, but I don't remember anybody wearing blue jeans. It seems like I
had good clothes and play clothes. I hated it when I got a little
older and my mother was still calling them that. Maybe those were the
wash pants you were talking about. Probably when they were new that's
what I wore to school, and probably when they got beat up they became
play clothes.
Good clothes would be what I wore when I was forced to attend Elsdon
Methodist Church. I hated them. I hated the feel of them, and I hated
the way I knew I had to stay straight on the sidewalk and not veer off
into anything interesting.
I probably didn't get to wearing nothing but blue jeans until I got to
college. I only started wearing dress pants (and these were generally
pants I bought at the thrift store) when I started working those office
jobs around 1985. Still hated them, would tear them off as soon as I
got home. They stank of work.
I wonder whose hare-brained scheme that blue jeans vote was. Maybe the
principal, or at least somebody in his office. Wouldn't it be nice if
we got the kids to vote against blue jeans, then we could get rid of
blue jeans and at the same time not get the blame for it, and what a
nice little story if the kids voted it themselves. Dollars to doughnuts
that mild mannered teacher was not in the teachers' lounge that
afternoon and that's how she got stuck with that unpleasant chore.
I was just speaking of juvenile delinquents in the last post. JDs they
were sometimes called. We shortened hoodlums to hoods. Later they
would be called greasers. It wasn't so much that the boy hoods wore
jeans as it was that the girl hoods did too. Jeans on a girl was pretty
racy. And there was that whole thing about the fly. Girls' pants
always had the fly on the side, and I think it was kind of shocking when
they started wearing jeans with the fly in the front.
Pretty sharp move on your teachers' part to declare that your vote
didn't count due to the previously unknown rule that being out of order
earlier negates one's voting rights. I am sure she never had any
intention of staying late after those fifteen minutes when school let
out.
See, being a substitute teacher has changed my outlook. Formerly I
would be all for Beagles standing up for his rights against authority,
but once I was a sub I became authority. I was the embodiment of
Western Civilization, and they were the rabble that rose every year.
You finish up with one sixth grade and the next year last year's fifth
graders are ready to take their place, and behind them fourth graders,
the third graders, and it just goes all the way back to the maternity
wards of the nation where the docs are smacking the backsides of savages
looking forward to a hunter gatherer life of rapine and violence, who
will need to learn the new enlightened strictures of Western Civ.
And there are maybe thirty of them, and there is one of you. You are
stronger, but you can't hit them. But you are smarter too, and
bamboozling is fine because isn't that one of the principles of Western
Civ? And threats like keeping them, and yourself, past the bell, which
you have no intention of carrying out, are just another form of
bamboozlement, and making up that rule on the spot, bravo.
Well shit, more to say on this subject, but the hour is getting late.
As far as that bible study stuff, oh hell, that will have to wait over the weekend too
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