For many of you, this walk down memory lane may require the direct oversight of a professional councilor…or bartender. Personally, I hadn’t realized how many traumas from my middle school experience I had erased from memory until the wife brought the matter up the other day.
My oldest son is in the throes of middle school, and my youngest is about to crash headlong into it, thus leaving the innocence and joy of elementary school behind, forever. As is to be expected, my oldest son hates middle school. His life is spinning apart for a number of middle school related reasons. His classes are forcing him to do stupid things in the name of stupid learning. His classmates are dillweeds doing stupid things for stupidity’s sake. And even subjects he used to enjoy are robbed of all pleasure by being scrutinized in order to deduct life essence for every little mistake.
On top of it all, the wife and I have endeavored to teach our sons to respect other people no matter their differences. This makes it even harder to adapt and fit in at the middle school “Lord-of-the-Flies” level at a time in our society when grown-ass adults are slapping each other in unending Foghorn Leghorn style bouts of “Sir, I say sir, you have insulted my honor.”
Still, after dredging through my sketchy middle-school memories, my conservative estimate is that my kids are considerably better off in their middle school of 2021 than I was in my middle school of 1987. Please allow me to enumerate the reasons:
Chief among my daily concerns in seventh grade was surviving first period athletics (ie. football). Mind you, at the age of thirteen I was around 5’9” and 110 pounds. I was a bean pole with ribs and elbows. But I had decent, God-given athletic ability. So when it came to the football hierarchy, I fell somewhere in the middle. I ranked above the tackling dummy fodder. But, I fell well below the prized bulls with killer instinct.
And I suffered from asthma. So that meant I regularly redlined during gladiatorial exercises like “Bull in the Ring” or “The Gauntlet.” This resulted in me blacking out only to awaken to my coach pounding my helmet on the ground while repeating “You ain’t dead, Brown. You ain’t dead, Brown.” The fear in his eyes was worth the splitting headache.
After surviving first period, my next chief concern was avoiding Todd at my locker. Todd’s locker was next to mine. He enjoyed knocking me around and scattering my things…until midway through the first semester I freaked out, slammed his head into his locker door several times, and left him slumped on the linoleum tile floor. My chief memory of this event was the embarrassment I felt when attempting to explain to my third period teacher why I had come to class without a blessed thing—not my books, not a binder, not even a pencil. By the time I returned to my locker to gather my things for class, Todd had gone.
By lunchtime, my key concern was to use the boy’s restroom and escape without traumatic embarrassment in the form of: 1) being pushed into the hall with my pants around my ankles or 2) being urinated on by some neanderthal and then being pushed into the hallway. On good days, I remained dehydrated enough from first period athletics to not need to use the restroom until after school.
All in all, I think my eldest is pulling through seventh grade pretty damn well. The frequency of his declaration that he hates us is decreasing from daily to weekly. And his willingness to share his deeper thoughts on the stupidity of life is increasing. I’ll take that parenting win and work on forgetting the little I remember from my middle school days before my younger son reaches the dreaded landmark.
At the Desk This Week
More progress accomplished on The Green Ones, Episode Five this week. I established the setting for the final show down (of this episode) between Oleg’s twitchers and my protags. I decided to go with the cutsie-poo town of Manitou Springs since I’ve been there a few times, and it’s relatively close to Denver. Now I just need to see how much damage I can do to the historic hotel, The Cliff House, before all the action winds down. No doubt there will be at least a few holes in the walls…if not a missing floor. Such a shame [shrug].
Meanwhile, I’m continuing to play around with the plot and overall story arc for my next project, which will be much more closely related to Lost DMB Files. I’m almost certain the main character/protag will be McCutchen (the Reefer Ranger). This project will almost certainly take the ranger on a character arc from seeing the world in black and white to seeing the world in shades of blood red. I’m thinking he’s gonna go to even darker places before he’s able to emerge as somewhat reborn. Won’t that be fun:)
If You Wish to Start Reading The Green Ones…
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