Did You Ever Get Busted For Boppin?

One of the responsibilities of a high school teacher is to chaperone school dances. One of the responsibilities of a high school teacher's spouse is to be annually dragged to a high school dance in a four hour marathon of revulsion that resembles being exiled to a leper colony, except instead of laying around and dying like a decent human being, all the lepers were dry humping each other off tempo to a Britney Spears song.

I mean, I think we're being a little disingenuous here to be calling this pagan ritual "a dance," because nothing of the sort takes place. For instance, I can't dance at all, but I can slowly rotate in a circle while holding a girl at roughly arm's length. Room was left for the Holy Ghost, and as a result I was able to hold onto God's approval and my virginity well into college. My point is it that whatever else it was, it wasn't dancing. And while I'm happy to see this most sacred of traditions persevere amidst "the youth," one wonders if the little rascals actually think what they're doing is somehow breaking the mold. Hymens and parental illusions, perhaps, if one judges by the proximity with which they writhe, but these kids certainly aren't dancing. All they do is bend their knees slightly and shift their weight from heel to heel with varying degrees of velocity and success. Then they just stack on each other like legos: a few of this, a few more of that, click that last piece in, and you have a perfect model of the herpes simplex virus. Isn't that wonderful? And filthy. Don't forget filthy.


But I doubt you need me to remind you of these things. So let's instead, dearest reader, talk about the particulars of this latest bacchanalia. It was held in a car museum, and....no, that pretty much says it all. Hundreds of teens congregated in a stew of ProActiv, Axe Body spray, and flop sweat, surrounded by millions of dollars of pristine classic and luxury automobiles. Security was on hand, of course, but I'm unsure if the revelers appreciated that additional bodies were hired to see to the cars' safety while they themselves merited no such expenditure. After all, that's what we were there for. But apart from the ass-beating Kelly and I handed out on the Rock Band set up on the premises, at no other time were students in any significant danger.

I could go on and on, so I'll keep it to my top five favorite aspects of the dance, in no particular order:

1) A pack of five freshman boys who wandered around looking like Brendan Frasier in Blast From the Past: utterly fascinated by their surroundings and having no fucking idea how to proceed from there. Among them was a kid my height wearing a purple suit and a bowler hat, and another kid half as tall with feathered hair and a pure white tuxedo. Tre, tre magnifique.

2) The delicious irony that a significant fraction of the attendees were probably conceived in ill-considered bouts of fleeting passion on similar back-seats, hoods, perhaps even trunks, not two decades ago. And that a subsequent generation would be coming along in predictably similar fashion that very night.

3) A group of 43 students showed up in a chartered party bus. Because, you know, sometimes a Hummer limo just isn't ostentatious enough.

4) Amidst the many limos, a minivan drove up with a bemused father at the wheel. As he cued up behind a limo to drop off his young passengers, his head whipped around to the back seat, as if a shrill voice was asking him at that very moment why he was so determined to commit social suicide on his son / daughter's behalf. Looking mildly abashed, he quickly began to reverse in an attempt to leave the queue, and in so doing nearly hit a young couple walking behind him. The remainder of his time in my field of view was spent grimly staring ahead, knuckles white at the wheel, conducting an impromptu investigation into if a man might actually will himself from existence entirely through sheer force of determination. Much to his chagrin, he survived.

5) The venue also contained a horse made from melted down bumpers and proudly stood, its metallic hide glowing golden in the dim light, conspicuously between the boys' and girls' bathrooms. If any intrepid students had taken a page from their classical literature and stowed away inside the beast to avoid paying the price for admission, their desperate, muffled screams for release were obscured by the DJ's "dope-ass mix."


Kelly and I always take a picture together at these things, both because they're free for the chaperones, and because I have to do what she tells me, especially on her turf (and the earf is her turf). This time, however, despite her best efforts to maintain the tradition, we weren't able to do so. As a compensation, I have instead scanned and posted pictures of others at their high school dances. Yes, I still have these. No, I don't know exactly why. Yes, it is a good thing others of you didn't know me thirteen years ago. A damn good thing.


I wish I knew who started the rumor that any high school dance was a magical night. If you want a magical night, go see a Harry Potter movie or huff some paint. And if you want a terrifyingly magical night, do both.

DY - NO - MYTE ! ! !

I've actually been sitting on this one for a while, what with the survey results laying bare my inherent disdain for anyone who doesn't have to coat themselves in SPF 30 before walking through the dappled sunlight in their own living room. But thanks to this movie trailer, I've realized I'm just being a jive honkey.

Yes, you read that right: I've reached an existential turning point. No more will I and my white brothers (probably not the right noun in this context, come to think of it) destroy urban communities by selling drugs to, what appears to be, a nine year old boy. No more will I use my insidious contacts to hire egregious stereotypes of Chinese kung fu masters and, confusingly, ninja to assassinate the glorious, play-by-his-own-rules-with-an-afro-that-won't-quit protagonist who seeks to thwart my dastardly Caucasian plans. No more will I....

I'm going to practice a shred of self restraint and stop right there, but trust me when I say I could have gone on a lot longer than that (not something I'm able to say in other areas of my social life). Besides, nothing I say could speak nearly so eloquently as the blacksploitation satire Black Dynamite, or at least, the red-band trailer for said opus. Be warned, there are boobies and egregious racial stereotypes in here, but as it's all conspicuously self-aware, I'm told that makes it okay. Did I mention I was self-aware when I failed that racism test?




This post is dedicated to Anthony "Pudding" Alvarez, who, if boiled down to his liquid essence and then injected into the tear duct of a talented filmmaker, would invariably create a movie exactly like this one. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to see his name in the credits somewhere. Okay, actually, I would; he's a mattress salesman and spends all his time with degenerates, so yes, I would be surprised if he somehow was involved in a major motion picture.

Kickin' It Like It's 1399

So it seems a go-getter in central California made international news this week when he, according to the headlines, sold his 14 year old daughter for $16,000, over a hundred cases of beer, and an undisclosed amount of meat. If you're anything like me, two things flashed through your brain in quick succession upon hearing this: 1) That's awesome! and 2) Wait a minute....what kind of beer are we talking about here? While I applaud the quantity, I won't pretend that there were any surprises in the list: 100 cases of Corona, 50 cases of Negro Modelo, and six bottles of wine. I know, I know: why so much wine?

Of course, anyone with a high school education should recognize this as the dowry that it is, barring the minor detail that dowries typically come from the bride's family to the groom's, but the fact remains that marriage arrangements have historically involved far more than the transfer of children. Secondly, the meat and drink was clearly for the wedding reception. And the $16,000....well, yeah, now you're selling your kid.

As ever, though, the devil's in the details. The groom who was expected to pay all this is only 18 years old, and when, not surprisingly, he didn't deliver in full, the father complained to the police and that's how he got himself arrested. And maybe it's just me, but I particularly enjoy the article's fumbling grasp at political correctness. The father, they write, "is a member of an indigenous Mexican Trique community. Greenfield police Chief Joe Grebmeier said the case highlights an issue confronting local authorities in that arranged marriages with girls as young as 12 are not uncommon among the Trique." Actually, asshole, it's not uncommon for any culture on the face of the planet; this isn't just something that brown people do. Sure, it was far more explicit in centuries past, but where do you think our little tradition about the bride's family paying for the wedding comes from?

But despite all this - even the obscene quantities of wine at play, not seen by mortal man since the vomitoriums of ancient Rome - this story spoke to me because it hits so close to home. Greenfield, CA, ground zero for this hilarity, is a mere 12.6 miles from King City, CA, the hometown of a dear friend's bride. We all see now that this friend - we'll call him Schmeg Schmallagher - really dodged a bullet on this one. He could have very well been stuck paying off his father-in-law for years to come, pulling off the road during family vacations to see if the local butcher has anything on sale. Come to think of it, they have recently gotten into home-brewing beer...a lot. Oh no. Dearest Schmeg, do you suffer under the oppressive yoke of a delicious "meat and mead" debt? Do you spend long nights staring blankly at the receipt creeping from an old-timey calculator, wondering how you'll hit next month's quota? Must you buy the largest Christmas goose in the shop window, not because you are filled with holiday spirit like a rejuvenated Scrooge, but because you hear the ghostly chains of debt rattling in the distance?

Persevere, you Prince of Harlem, you king of New York. Persevere.

Phun Wif Wordz!!!

Any teacher who comes into contact with student writing is routinely treated to new and exciting ways to brutalize our poor language. I realize that the academy offers merely one style of communication and that my job is, in no small part, rather an exercise in helping these neophytes code switch. That said, a number of these students have the English language cast down in a well, filthy and scared, and are threatening it with the hose if it doesn't put the lotion in the basket. Which, come to think of it, kinda makes me Clarice in this little metaphor, which in turns ends with me being stalked by students wearing night vision goggles in a pitch-black meth den...and then I shoot them? With....knowledge?

While I stare aghast at the tattered remnants of my unraveled metaphor encircling my feet, console yourself with the fact that this post isn't about freshman composition. Rather, it's about adventures in reading, or to be more precise, adventures in reading others' mistakes.

Exhibit A:


And to think the man from Galilee would take the time to ensure my dinner was served delicious, hot, and in a timely manner. I've been told all my life that Jesus loves me (well, all of us, actually - except Spencer of Hills fame, loathed of God, who is clearly an emissary of Satan), but I didn't know it was in a "Mom making sure you've had a good meal" sort of way. Of course, his last act with all his disciples together was a supper, so I suppose I shouldn't have let that one sneak up on me. Of course, in retrospect, I maybe should have become a little more suspicious when the delivery guy told me that visiting that one internet site was most definitely a sin. You know...the one Greg's on.

That, however, was merely the appetizer, my friends. Allow me to pull back my (faux) silver tray cover in a dramatic fashion to reveal your main course:


I had this little gem waiting for me on the wall outside my office when I got to campus Tuesday morning. My eyes lit up as they did when I charged into the living room on Christmas morning so many years ago, and just like that beloved holiday ritual, I wasn't quite sure I'd been a good enough boy all year to deserve this. In their defense, there's no false advertising at play here; ever since we determined keeping an attack monkey in the Writing Center was a violation of virtually every University health statute (even after we took back the knife and gave that vicious simian a week to let the Wild Turkey leech out of its system), there have been only human breasts in and around the University Writing Program. Of course, I can't speak for the Creative Writing department.

If I were compelled to glean some sort of lesson from all this, I suppose it would be this: if you're going to commit something to print, make sure it says what the hell you want it to say. Otherwise you're going to look like a jackoff, and nobody wants that.

Wait...who the hell is Hannibal Lector then?

Buy Me a Double-Wide and Hand Me a Pabst

Shortly before the holiday break, a friend of mine in the department took a moment to say how glad he was that I came to our school and how much he appreciates our friendship. I was rather taken aback, as the culture I come from is built upon the idea that such sentiment, or any such expression of emotion, is never voiced aloud. I've always felt this works in my favor in matters of psychological duress, when I simply push things deep down and idly wonder how it'll manage to work it's way out (lately, it's been swearing in my sleep, if you're curious), but genuine affection or appreciation for anyone must be communicated solely through the gaze...which, unfortunately, usually earns me the adjective "squinty." Like an amorous pirate, I like to think, but the point remains I don't communicate affection well.

Perhaps the reason is because, it turns out, I am utterly without it. Yes, according to the flyspeck institutions of Harvard, Yale, and the National Institute of Mental Health, I am a seething cauldron of hate waiting to attack my African American brothers and sisters. You see, they have created an online test on racism you can take, and my end result was that I "strongly prefer people of European descent." "Strongly" isn't all that bad, you might (insincerely) say, but let me give you the scale: No preference, Minor Preference; Moderate Preference; Strong Preference. Yup. And to think I've always been such a good test taker otherwise.

I don't mean to make light of this result, but I just don't think it's all that accurate. I mean, I genuinely fear or dislike every creature on God's green earth; no one demographic really has a lock on my special attentions. More to the point, I've always found such tests a novelty more than anything else. Still, the majority of you are probably sagely nodding your heads, having expected nothing less, and I'm sure a choir of Irish ancestors are smiling apologetically in Purgatory for having pushed me down this dark path. I wish I had the good grace to feel more embarrassed about the results, but I really don't have time for that amidst my frantic campaign to prove Obama's Hawaiian birth certificate is a fake. In the meantime, pop over to More Rants than Raves to find the link and take this test yourself. I solemnly pray you'll all do better than I did.