An entry or two back I wrote about an incident in high school where this guy fell through a plate glass window tilting a pinball machine. I tried fitting other shit in there and failed to mention it was all my opinion, except for the guy falling through the window. I didn’t finish high school I’m sure I had a lot of reasonable rationalizations at the time, good excuses and selective silences and/or active omissions.
I was a good student, I mean I tested well and scored well. Top of the class in things I was interested in, middle of the class in things I was not interested in. I’m not bragging, if I were I’d be the first to point out that if I was so fucking smart why didn’t I do anything smart with my life. One could come up with the common argument that raising kids and public service is noble or some such shit. I’m really just stating a fact, not arguing the point.
And it’s not like I was good at English and bad at math, I liked geometry and hated Fennimore cooper, so in those instances I’d show up for geometry and skip cooper. No, that’s not entirely true, I’d skip both and then ace both. Geometry because I liked it, Fennimore cooper because a five paragraph essay is a five paragraph essay and I could write one of those blind folded about a thing I’d never heard of. Which is sort of the gist of why I stopped going altogether. That and timing.
The idea of a bucket list, an idea I’m not championing, is getting around to shit to hadn’t managed to before. The phrase hadn’t been coined but I thought as a young man it was much timing to drop acid and hang off a train trestle while a hundred car long freight rumbled overhead than write one more fucking five paragraph essay some stupid shit that’d been in the curriculum since Teddy Roosevelt was in office. Again, not boasting, I’m not sure I was correct, but if you have drop acid and hang off a trestle on your bucket list and you are my age it would sure seem like my timing was better than yours, um, unless you just got a million bucks for an essay on Fennimore fucking Cooper.
Again, not boasting, might even be a bit reductive in giving a single for instance. Not everything that involved not going to high school involved drugs and trains, some involved Sex and trains, Rock and Roll and trains and sex, drugs and rock roll without trains. Oh, and perhaps some other stuff too. My humble opinion at the time was that 17 was a better time to do that stuff than, say, 57. Now that I’m a few weeks shy of 57, my opinion hasn’t changed much except that maybe I’ll do some of that again. I mean I haven’t done acid for at least 25 years, but I’ve been managing some sex and rock and roll all along. They built some condos near the trestle so I think it involves hopping a fence or two now. Seems like a bad place to have a condo. The freight trains still run regularly through there.
A few years back I saw these giant propellers with odd shaped phalanges on the back of flat bed cars while waiting for a train to pass. I asked people, perhaps the wrong question, and no one could tell me what they were. Um, I asked if any of the auto factories had been converted to military as I was sure they were for nuclear subs or something. A year ago I figured it out, I drove through some of the agricultural north (as opposed to local agricultural areas) and saw these giant windmills. I was used to the west where they are much smaller but there are a lot more of them. So, see? That’s what I get for skipping high school windmill class.
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