Yesterday I went into a Duane Reade a local drug chain. I go shopping for food items there but only after filling my prescription of Klonopin and popping a couple for good measure. I hate shopping and have anxiety being around crowds, lines and it makes me anxious to have too many choices for products... Read More

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PUBLIC EDUCATION     PART THREE

 

 

So, Education, Education, Education.  What's to be done?

Our politicians talk more and more about accountability and less and less about what it means to be an educated person.

This is the second year that some of my friends and I have run a tutoring group in my house for students who need extra help with their English classes, specifically in reading and writing.  We don't pretend to have all the answers, but it is clear that  the extra attention works.

So, the situation we find ourselves in now is that government programs, whether it's No Child Left Behind (NCLB) or Race To The Top (RTTT), have only one goal -  performance on test scores, which is the opposite of the goal of getting an education.

Paradoxically, the cry for higher test scores seems to increase proportionate to the decrease in education funding.  This means that class sizes are bigger - too big for serious learning.  Yet somehow in these deteriorating conditions test scores are supposed to increase.  There is only two ways they can:  cheat or teach solely to the test.  Both of these are going on.

I hope that we can change this, but in the meantime I encourage any who have an interest to tutor.  It's rewarding for the tutor and the student.  For some extra encouragement, please watch Dave Eggers' inspirational speech about the tutoring center he set up.

http://www.ted.com/talks/dave_eggers_makes_his_ted_prize_wish_once_upon_a_school.html

Here it is:

It's the first chapter of a book that still has just the one chapter.  It's a little blue, as they say (or said) on the vaudeville circuit.  Maybe if people like it, I'll write a second chapter.



ADVENTURES IN BOWLING

"Yo, Fuck Fag! You comin' or going? Get in the car, Sir Faggot of Fuckopolis!"

Edwin says cool stuff like that a lot, which is not what you might expect from a guy in college. Or a guy who would be in college if he wanted to be there right now and wasn't taking a break. I wish kids could see me with him, so they'd just see who I can hang with. But we never go where kids from my school go. "Fuck Fag" isn't my name, of course. It's Gerald. Never "Gerry" cuz my brother's name was Jerome, and some people called him Jerry, which would have been confusing, even though it's spelled different. But Edwin always called him Jerome.

 

Edwin drives a little crazy. Fun-crazy normally, but I'm kinda worried tonight because the streets are all icy, and our streetlights have been broken for like twenty months, so it's dark till you get to Main Street. But I'm not gonna tell Edwin to drive careful. That would just make him drive crazier.

My dad says he's going to complain to the city about the lights. That's the sort of thing he would have freaked about before, but now he just tries to get through his day, and all this shit doesn't get done and piles up around him. It's like he's just trying to make it from the time he gets out of his bed to the time he gets back in. Before he probably would have had a problem with Edwin and me hanging out. But now he's happy I'm just somewhere - accounted for - like I'm one thing to check off his list of all the shit he can't handle.

"Check it." Edwin has a massive gun in his lap. Like the size of his lap. Like the gun's a baby that he's breast feeding.

Fuck!

He's brought beers and shit before, but now a gun?

Fu-huuuck!

I get a buzz from this. Wherever we're going tonight is gonna be crazy! Down some dark highway with a gun, and fuck everybody in our way, man!

"It doesn't work," Edwin says. "It was my Uncle's, from World War Two." Seems to me Edwin isn't old enough to have an uncle from World War Two, which was like, what, forty years ago? "He brought it back from Germany," Edwin tells me. "He killed three NAZI's with his hands, even though they all had guns and whips and shit. He was this total MMA dude before they even had MMA. It's a Magnum 475; you get hit with this shit man, it puts a fucking window in your chest and they find your heart a mile down the road!" He smiles at the thought. I picture a Valentine-shaped heart beating before freezing over into one of those candy hearts with the messages written on them.

We both sit there looking at the gun until the inside car light goes out. Edwin has to ask his question, the question, before we can go. I don't know if he seriously forgets the answer every time, or if it's just something he needs to say before we can leave. Like a ritual or a tic. "Jerome coming with us?"

"Nah, man. Jerome's dead, remember?" Edwin nods his head like he's just figured out how to do a math problem. Not sad, just putting it all together for the thousandth time.

"His loss. Let's hit it or quit it!" The car fishtails before the tires get a grip and attack the street. "Fuck you, ice! You my bitch, ice!" Edwin always screams out something before we start driving - like a battle cry. I usually yell it back most times. But yelling at the ice seems maybe kind of retarded, and I can't really go along.

He's got a twenty-year-old Corolla with a stick shift. He's promised to teach me to drive a stick in a parking lot sometime, but he's souped up his car so it has over three thousand horsepower. And he also put tork in it to go with the horsepower. The tork is what other cars don't have. He's explained what it does, but I don't totally understand, and I don't want to ask again because he gets irritated. Point is that it's a hard car for my first lesson -- anyone's first lesson. But then sometimes he'll change his mind and say that he's gonna teach me on a highway going like a hundred and twenty, cuz it's the only way to really learn.

It's league night at Wenaheeken Lanes and most of the bowling lanes are taken, except for our usual one. Edwin says they set it aside for him cuz it's warped in the middle like a canyon, just like he likes it. Even if someone else asked for it, they wouldn't be able to get it. The Bowling Lane Guy would say it's reserved. That's one of the perks of being with Edwin.

Still, I wish we'd done something else tonight, though. It's like that dark highway that could have taken us anywhere always decides to take us to the same place. But Edwin likes bowling, and I did bring my new ball. My dad bought it for me because none of the balls here fit my fingers. Guess I kind of knew we were going bowling after all. It's kind of cool. Except he had my name and address engraved on it. Gay squared.

Edwin's taught me how to do the scoring, which could be a handy thing to know if I ever went on a bowling date. Or not a date, more like with a group of people, but there'd be a girl I liked there in the group, and then no one else would know how to score the game. They'd be pretending it was no big deal, but it would be boring after a while since they didn't know the rules, and then I'd be the guy who'd say, "oh, yeah, here's how you do it.' Maybe the girl, the one that I would maybe like as a possible girlfriend in this scenario (or just a 'friend' who's a 'girl', but not a 'girlfriend'), would lean over me to see how you do it. Some girls like to giggle and pretend they're dumber than they are so they have an excuse to flirt with you. Her breasts might touch me. When I have a girlfriend, she'll definitely have breasts, not tits. Breasts stay under sweaters until you and their owner agree they can be touched. Tits hang out in the air without being asked. Slag-whores have tits. Princesses have breasts.

"Down, bitch! Go down on me!" Edwin is screaming at the ten pin to make it fall. He always says "go down on me," which I think is something about sex, but I'm not sure what. Maybe toe sucking? Cracks him up every time he says it, so I laugh like I know what it means.

"You mind keeping it clean, buddy?" I got my boy with me tonight." It's one of the bowling league guys in the lane next to us. He's wearing one of their stupid league jerseys, white with candy-red stripes down the side. They have a team name printed on the back that I can't remember, and the guy's facing us so I can't see it. He seems a little like my dad, but younger. Friendly pot-belly under the red-and-white bowling shirt. I don't think his son is bothered too much about Edwin or his language. He's laughing like he understands what "go down on me" means better than I do. I should look it up on Wikipedia.

"Sorry brother." Edwin nods at him. "Just got a little carried away." Bowling League Guy holds up his hand like everything's cool now. "You fucking faggot," Edwin continues. Everything's not cool.

"You for real kid?" Now Bowling League Guy looks a lot tougher. He walks over to our lane, slow and steady. He's one of those guys who can walk toward you and you just know he's not going to back off. So it's fight or flight. I'm all for flight.

"How's this? Real enough for you, bitch?" Edwin's pointing the Magnum at him. I thought the Magnum was in the car. Apparently not. "Why don't you come suck me off and see how your boy likes that? Huh? Time he knows daddy's a faggot, right?" Bowling League Guy puts up his hands and backs up a couple of steps, falling backwards over the thingy in between the lanes that holds the bowling balls. That cracks Edwin up. I can only stare. I have no reaction available to me. The bowling lanes are practically silent, no balls rolling down the lanes, just the sound of the conveyor belts that bring the balls back up. A radio crackles, and up by the bar there's a security guard with a walkie talkie.

Edwin grabs me around the neck, and puts the gun at my head. I'm pretty sure he said it was unloaded. But right now I'm not all that confident in Edwin's assessment of things. "Put that down or I blow his head into brain vomit!" His head? My head? Brain vomit? What the fuck? The Security Guard throws his radio down. Edwin walks me out to the parking lot. No one follows us, so he takes the gun away from my head. "Sorry, guy." Just had to do what I had to do."

"S'okay, I'm cool." I'm not so cool actually. There's some warmth in my pants, and I can only hope it's pee and not shit. Edwin will think I'm gay for shitting my pants. You'd think I'd be mad at him for putting a gun to my head. That's the way a normal brain should work. Not mine. In the back of my mind I'm hoping that somehow this gets back to my school. Somehow that doesn't get me in trouble.

Five, maybe six cop cars go flying by us in the other direction toward the lanes. The red lights brighter in the darkness of this poorly lit section of Route One. "Be cool," Edwin tells me. They don't know my car. Edwin holds up the gun. "Is this what they're looking for? You think this is what they're looking for?" He giggles so hard he can barely hold the wheel.

Then I'm deaf. There's a hole in the roof of the car and freezing air numbs my deaf face. I can no longer hear the wail of the sirens behind us. Edwin looks at the gun in amazement. I can't hear the laugh shaking his shoulders. Then my hearing comes back just in time to hear him say, "Shit, I could swear that wasn't loaded. I gotta read up on this fucker."

By the time we get back to my house the cold air has dried my pants. Definitely pee and not shit, at least I can't smell anything. Edwin smacks me on the back of my head as I'm getting out. "Good times, Sir Fuckster of Faganation, good times -- we're probably gonna have to wait a couple of months before we go back there." A couple of months. Right. "Hey don't forget your ball." A sweat breaks out on me through the ten-degree air. My ball is still at Wenaheeken Lanes.

With my name and address on it.

"Can you pay half to fix this roof, man?" Says Edwin, pointing at the mangled metal that once topped his car. "That's fair, right?"

“Sarah Styles” A Fashion Shouldn't

COVET
Shannon South Mink Accessories
What: Furry protectors ($89-$285) for your fancy gadgets. The handbag designer constructs made-to-order (each one takes two weeks) clutches, pouches, and sleeves from fur repurposed from vintage fashions.
Why: Treat your smartphone the way you want to be treated.
Where: Online at shannonsouth.com.

*** Please contact Daily Candy and express your outrage that they would promote any company using fur form minks ... or any fur!  But we all know how cruelly minks are farmed to be turned into luxury fashion items!  It doesn't matter that these furs are "repurposed," their existence brings fur back into fashion consciousness.

"Lost in Paradise Lost"

To: Fred

From: Keeton Geer

Fred,

Carol tells me that you’re a Milton reader and would have some advice on reading PARADISE LOST.  I read the first 25-30 pages a couple of months ago and was fairly lost with it.  It wasn’t building any momentum for me.  So would I be better off reading Cliff Notes summaries along with each chapter to help it make more sense?

 

Oddly, Fred is also "lost."  When we find him, we are sure he will have a lot to say about one of his favorite poets.

 …