I’m currently sitting in an overwarm, moist Starbucks on Lexington Avenue. It’s raining outside and I’m drinking tea and eating some food bar made of what appears to be industrial glue and bird beaks. I’m waiting for a prescription to be filled so I can go home, chat with the cat, and make a list of all the things that are wrong with my life. On that list: foodbars made of glue and bird beaks, overwarm Starbucks and the entirety of Lexington Avenue. Really, it’s the worst street in the world.
When I was a skinny kid in Upstate New York I loathed gym class. I often felt like fresh meat thrown into a chimpanzee cage. What can I say, kids are vicious. After one particularly grim festival of hazing, the gym teacher took me aside and said, “that shouldn’t have happened.” He was right, of course, but also lazy and of the mind that such things were good for building the sort of boys who would don helmets and bring scholastic glory, so he let it keep happening. Eventually I stopped going to gym altogether, instead cultivating my appreciation for inhaled chemicals in the dark room.
Of course, one needs Phys Ed credits to graduate from a public school. When it became apparent that I might not graduate, as I was lacking two years of gym, a compromise was reached wherein I agreed to run the track for six hours and in return the gym credits would be fudged. I walked the track for six hours, listened to the first Garbage record eight times and imagined small birds as they pecked out the eyes of everyone in my small school.
Just a little memory, right now.
One Comment
You’re young enough that the thing you listened to while walking the H.S. track was the first Garbage CD. You should be young enough that stupid things like being allowed to be hazed in gym class don’t happen anymore because we were supposed to be more enlightened than that by now.