Thursday, November 17, 2011

rambling incoherence

It’s a busy day. I’ve got some meetings and then I’ve got Falcon practice because we’re playing a show with the mighty Naked Raygun at Metro next Wednesday. Bring your grandmas folks, because this amazing performance by the Falcon is sure to drench the panties bunched around even the most ancient and desiccated vaginas. That’s a moneyback guarantee folks (not valid). So come out to the Metro on the day before thanksgiving and throw your bras and dickslings, eh?

Anyway, last time I rapped at you I was talking about parent/teacher conferences and I was feeling pretty good about the whole thing. Of course, it’s short sighted to feel too good about anything that’s going on in schools when congress is declaring that pizza is a vegetable and making sure that our kids get plenty of delicious fries with every lunch. Not to mention, it seems like there’s been a real spate of child buttrapes in the news lately, which is disheartening, to put it mildly. I mean, don’t get me wrong, whenever I’m showering with a bunch of kids just going about the ins and outs of regular old naked, sudsed up horseplay, a penis can sometimes up and slip right inside someone, (who HASN’T had that awkward experience? Am I right?) but this isn’t about who raped whom or who’s pawning off horrific monstrosities as ‘towel snapping’ (though it bears mentioning that one of the big defenses for Sandusky’s actions is something along the lines of [and I’m paraphrasing his pedophile lawyer here] ‘He’s a big kid, a jock. That’s what jocks do, they take showers after practice and they roughhouse and stuff.” Okay, firstly, I was involved in various organized team sports from the time I was 4 until I was sixteen. In all that time, I NEVER once experienced a team shower. The notion seemed and still seems weird, and no one wanted [wants] to get naked around each other and well, I can’t be alone on this one. I’m pretty sure that the team shower is the stuff of movies. I remember that sophomore year we were ordered to shower after swimming class in gym but realistically only about 2 dudes did it and even then it was in their swimsuits [and they were the dweebs].

(But fine, I’ll accept that maybe it happens. I never played organized football. Maybe team showers are the holy communion of football practice. Maybe [and I’m doubting this seriously] everyone positively LIVES for the team showers afterwards. BUT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The coach is NOT EXERCISING DURING PRACTICE, and therefore DOESN’T REALISTICALLY NEED A SHOWER AT THE END OF PRACTICE [I am, for the sake of giving the benefit of the doubt {barf} ignoring the completely inappropriate nature of being a grown man and jumping into a shower with someone else’s kids]. I don’t think that there’s any way to spin that one. If you’re showering with my son, sorry. I’d like to see you in jail if you’re not my wife or someone age appropriate that he’s dating or at the very least someone he very much wants to bang [you know, once he’s old enough for that kind of thing to become a non-creepy, reasonable idea.] There’s just no reasonable excuse that places a naked old man in a shower with naked kids, right? Right? Okay. Good. Glad we had this talk).

No, my concern is with the fact that they’re beginning to phase out cursive in schools!!!!! Can you believe it! An outmoded, nigh unreadable style of writing that only serves to confound and annoy and then be suddenly forgotten is being phased out of curriculum! What the fuck? But I learned cursive! So did my mom and dad! Holy fucking SHIT!!!! NO CURSIVE? What’s next? Rape showers and force feeding our kids plastic garbage? Oh. Okay, let’s keep some things in perspective, eh?

Cursive is useless. Well, I guess it’s not ENTIRELY useless. Women continue to write in some form of bastardized cursive their entire lives. I suppose it’s technically important to have an exercise that forces children to correctly manipulate their fine motor skills in unplanned ways, but cursive is hardly necessary these days, what with all the typing that people do. I mean, I hardly write shit down at all anymore (and when I do, its not in cursive) but fine. I’ll admit that my ‘cursive is useless’ statement is kind of harsh, but you know what? There are other ways to teach fine motor development. How about a regimented art class? How about music classes with instruments? How about fucking knitting? People make LIVINGS making music and art and scarves, but there’s not a fucking person on the earth who’s paying the bills by writing cursive.

It just infuriates me. Our nation is fat and slovenly, lazy and riddled with diabetes. We construct nothing in this country. Yet we shave off art and gym and shop classes like it’s no big deal at all and then something completely outmoded and antiquated gets put on the chopping block and people lose their fucking minds. I mean, I don’t fucking understand. We had plenty of time to learn cursive along with everything else and now that there’s no gym or art or music, it seems like there’s PLENTY of time for cursive, but whatever. I don’t think it’s worth getting pissy about.

In fact, I think the whole thing is fucking stupid, but you know what? This is what we’ve sown. The last forty years has been a systematic pillaging of the social and physical infrastructure that the ‘greatest generation’ (an infuriating but shockingly apt moniker, at least in terms of what I’ve seen) by my parents’ generation. And the worst part is that they didn’t even raise us well enough to give a fuck or fix it. Look around. We’re all visionary geniuses now, myself included. Everyone’s great and no one fails and OUR kids are EVEN WORSE. We’re fucked, people. They’re dumping mercury in lake Michigan and running out of money in Detroit. Prisons are now legal slave labor camps that have created a powerful slavery lobby (in the name of the drug war) and nobody has a job and the only fuckers getting rich are the same dicks that got us into this mess in the first place.

Fucking cursive. Fuck cursive. I’m moving to Uruguay.

14 comments:

Blake said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Blake said...

Somebody needs an Its-It.

Donnie said...

I think doing away with all the vocational classes is pretty crazy. Learning how to change a tire, use a saw, and cook seem more important than memorizing dates.

coler me bad said...

I had to write a check the other day, and had trouble with the cursive part. I couldnt remember a bunch of letters. But i smoke way too much weed. Anyhoo it ended up being half cursive half print. I think they should teach typing instead.

doormat said...

I just wanted to point out the irony of "paying the bills by writing cursive" since people often sign checks in cursive

It's A-Me, Martucci said...

hehe

nicetits! said...

hey kids. my friend told me I should be a fellow sock do to my desire to suck bks dong. hit me up on facebook. Im new to all this bullshit

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100003176744696

doormat said...

perhaps I should have said "the irony of not needing to know cursive to pay the bills when you have to sign the check"

fortunately, technology in the form of eChecks and auto bill-paying can cover up our deficiencies... unfortunately, most just use it for porn, though I suppose that's covering up a deficiency, too

Dollar said...

@thedollardrafts says ^^^ that chick is hot

Unknown said...

You're right, your generation is absolutely fucked and it's not going to get better anytime soon. What passes for news is shite and only serves to distract people from the reality of what is really going on in the country. Congressmen have been buying stock based on legislation the intend to pass, the banks have yet to disclose the amount of bad credit card debt they are carrying, the jobless rate is increasing, states are running out of money and are about to pull the tit out of the mouth of 3 generations of welfare families. Maybe the schools realize that there will be no need to write cursive in a country where people won't be able to afford to buy paper anymore.

DoctorBenwayOperates said...

SOMEBODY read "The New Jim Crow."

sheila said...

gooooooooood one!

Anonymous said...

To be fair, apparently studies have indicated that writing in cursive can enhance the writer’s levels of expression, comprehension, creativity, etc. Also, for that minority who try at their writing and thereby achieve a result that doesn’t suck, I imagine it can be quite a good way to express individuality and whatnot. So, it’s not wholly the useless anachronism that readers may infer it to be from this post.

Personally, my writing isn’t that great, but I enjoy trying to develop it on the rare occasion that I make an effort. One of my friends has probably the most elegant writing I’ve ever seen.

JennyXV said...

I'll start off my saying that I primarily write in cursive. That being said, when I write in "print" all of my R's are capitalized with no regard to their spot in a word. Nothing really matters.

What I wanted to say is in defense of my public school experience in Southeast Michigan. I went to the most disgusting looking high school in the entire district, that literally chained and padlocked the students inside. As far as creativity was concerned, I hit the jackpot.

We had a full darkroom for photography; a graphic arts class where we learned screen printing (and that you could cook a frozen pizza in the t-shirt dryer); Creative Metals, in which we actually carved rings, belt buckles etc. out of wax and had them cast in silver; Every level of pottery imaginable; a multitude of different art classes depending on if you were a painter or into charcoal; Drafting for those who were good at math and wanted to rebuild Detroit; 4 different writing classes where you actually sat on bean bag chairs, lit candles, and had poetry slams every Friday; and (for some reason) an equestrian team.

Here is the catch. You had to decide in 9th grade between having access to those electives OR being in band. You could not be in band, and have the option of making baseball bats in shop class. I chose art, but really wished I could have learned an instrument. Not even an option.
You were required to have only one semester of gym in your entire four-year stint. I chose gymnastics where my final involved showing my teacher that I could do a tri-pod for one minute.
We didn't have a pool, a real baseball diamond, the most popular girls were the hockey cheerleaders, but we were the only school that allowed students from other high schools to come for half the day to do art. Not to mention we had a 3 level cafeteria that served Taco Bell on the second tuesday of every month.

This is a SUPER long comment, Brendan, and I apologize. But the point is, I went to a really shitty high school that had no money, but I came out with a NOFX belt buckle that I had made myself, and had made enough back patches in graphic arts to have made 150 bucks at Michigan Fest in 1998 to buy all the cigarettes I wanted. But I still don't know how to play the guitar.

I would be really interested in knowing how other high schools in the late 80's and 90's handled giving poor kids with no hope a reason to go to school. Because I have to admit, I actually had fun every day.

Anyone else?