Dead is Dead

Catherine Ault 1897-1984
David Marshall 1915-2009
Laura Tate 1968-2011
Mother, son, father, daughter, friend.

I spent quite a bit of time walking through a cemetery in Lincoln today. Why? Because it was there. It looked pretty from where I was sitting, and I had nothing better to do than to take a walk. Honestly, I still childishly hold my breath sometimes when I drive past cemeteries, but today I was drawn there. I didn’t intend on actually walking through there, but I found myself darting across six lanes of traffic to get to the right side of the street so I could visit the dead.

The sun was shining and the trees were flowering and the grass was green and the graves were decorated with fake bouquets. Before I knew it, I was walking through the grass, peering down at the beginning and ending points of all those lives. Dates and titles chiseled into stone forever. There’s something so falsely comforting about those headstones. They encompass a whole life, but in the most superficial way possible. I kept randomly tearing up at the death of total strangers. I sat on a bench and when I looked down, there were words engraved in it. I was on a headstone.

Part of me wished I had a blanket so I could throw it down and have a picnic, and the other part wanted to get the hell out of there before the ghosts started to ramble about. Because the sun was hot, I wandered to the sheltered area – a beautiful crypt. Smooth and solid and permanent. Name after name. And then the names started coming faster – the spaces were more compacted and I was struggling to figure out why they were so close together.

Cremated. Ashes to ashes. And I immediately thought back to A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius when he describes sticking his hand into his mother’s ashes and feeling the chunks and ash mixed together. Burned to ash and then stuck in a crypt until the crypt disintegrates with time. Please no. I want to be in the water with the eternal cycle of the sea, rock-hopping off the coast of Monterey where (if my family feels the need) people can “visit” me. Somehow the idea of an eternal resting place that consists of a six foot box is not terribly comforting.

It was a beautiful place, and those people create a remarkable historical landmark, but I don’t want to join the party. Let me go, and don’t think about me any more unless it’s for a fleeting moment when you get the first whiff of salt from the ocean air pounding into the shore.

Fuck Kony

I have been wanting … expecting … to die early my whole life. What is this bullshit that is keeping me alive?! I have done almost everything in my power (passive-aggressively) to kill myself since I was 16-years-old, and somehow I am still alive. To what end? Am I supposed to help during the zombie apocalypse? Because I’m pretty sure I’d be a huge waste of resources, considering that I would simply find a liquor store, drink myself into a stupor, and then wander into the zombies.

It’s ridiculous that a vagrant, discombobulated, narcissistic, selfish person like myself didn’t die of either an overdose, a car accident, or a school shooting by now. Thus, my life premise is that life is fucking RANDOM. So many more people are better people than me – as shown through their selfless service to others, survival of disease, and/or general positive attitude – and yet I am the asshole who is still alive. Not only does that defy logic, it sort of disproves that whole god-dilemma, because I should have been sucked into the vortex of hell a long time ago. Or something. Simply the fact that I was driving past St Columbkille today bitching to myself about traffic and caught myself saying the phrase “Jesus fucking Christ” seems to indicate that I’m a bad apple.

God, if you’re up there, just take me. Or spite me. Or strike me down with lightening or something, because this life is getting pretty fucking useless and petty if you ask me. When useless, pretentious, self-absorbed, self-important hipsters come to my place of work and talk about saving Ugandan children, I want to throw up. I want to shout, “where does all your money go?” I want to demand, “what will happen to all those ‘invisible children” when they have no one to follow, no family, and no future? The point is that the Invisible Children organization doesn’t give a flying fuck; they just want to make a name for themselves, and the hipsters want another blip on their application to grad school. Fuck them. Find a troubled child in America and make a difference rather than pretending that Joseph Kony is still relevant. If the world wanted Kony dead, he’d be dead. A single bullet to the head, just like bin Laden and the Somali pirates. Bottom Line: nobody really cares about starving, homeless African children, because if they DID, we would have intervened twenty years ago when Kony started spewing his misplaced messianic message. He’s a fucking loser who needs to be killed. Stop making posters and send in a hit man. Get it over with, you Invisible Children pussies. Stop selling your rhetoric and just make a difference. No more buttons that look like campaign posters. No more tshirts. No more stickers. Just FIX THE PROBLEM. Don’t market it to high school students. Capitalism at its worst. Especially when only 30% of the money actually goes to the CAUSE rather than the van and the merchandise and the video and the travel expenses.

Assholes.

Education is Broken, part 72

                Here’s a good one … I have 10 years experience teaching Advanced Placement English and 10 years experience teaching and coaching Debate, but my school has decided in their infinite wisdom that my talent would be better used in teaching a generic, undeveloped English 12 equivalency class as community college dual enrollment credit.  Why?   The answer is as simple as the bottom-line destruction of education in general:  they are after an elusive end product which looks good on paper.  The decision (made by the people with education degrees of course, not content-area degrees) nods to the proliferate idea that education is a commodity to be bought and sold.  Just as Machiavelli said the citizens of a state were inert, so are the students in the public school system.  They don’t matter in the larger scheme of things.  Results matter.  Test scores matter.  It seems like the results and the test scores would be directly related to the students, but that’s an illusion.  Teachers record scores; students don’t necessarily earn them.  If a teacher is told to hit 75% proficiency, you bet your ass 75% of the students will hit that number.  It’s just a number.  It means nothing. 

                An interesting fact to insert here is that most teachers have degrees in education.  Why?  Those degrees are incredibly easy to get.  Online.  Cheap.  English degrees aren’t easy to get.  I guess that’s why I am one of only two people in the department with a subject area degree.  Hmm.   So the teachers are just like the students they bitch about every day?  Taking the easiest route?  Shocking.  Who would have thought … ?

                Currently, my students are embarking on one of the hardest books we read all year:  Plato’s Republic.  While much of what Socrates and Plato espoused was too idealized to ever work in practice, they had one thing down rock solid:  education should be about argumentation, discussion, questioning, debate, and rabble-rousing.    Thinking should be the most important thing a student gets from education.  If a person can’t THINK, they are going to suck at life in general.  It has nothing to do with test scores or college or job markets; it has everything to do with having common sense and not just doing what you’re told or thinking what you’re told to think.  Life is too important to hand over to the direction of other people.  What are we telling our students when we give them college credit for a regular English class that is NOT college level work?!  We’re telling them that there are always shortcuts to be found.  Always exploit the system as much as you can, because college is the same as high school is the same as life.  But nothing could be further from the truth. 

                If Socrates were put in my position, he’d drink the hemlock.  Bloody hell.