The Ramblings of a Madman (2/20)

It's all there below. Had a long day. Threw words at the page. I don't know if I reread a single sentence more than once.

            I had a very long day today. I woke up on the wrong side of the bed. The following is a mad dash sprint to the finish line. Real Mrs Dalloway hours going on here. Keep an eye out for a dog with the face of a man!* I will get 1,000 words if it kills me. As directly as I can, I’m putting thoughts to page.

“If it kills me,” is the last line of the chorus of The Mountain Goats’ This Year. “I am gonna make it through this year/if it kills me,”. I’ve spent a lot of time listening to that song. I’ve had a lot of years I felt that way, or thought I felt that way. Hindsight does wonders for the severity of crises. I’ve done a lot of growing up. Not to say I’m a perfect human, I just mean it’s insane that this mind once inhabited a six year old. We’re talking about a child who doesn’t exist anymore! And now I’m here, and I’ve got my eyes on the rearview and I can see how many of the times the world was ending it would be fine.

There’s a lot of misery in hindsight. Lots of potholes that could’ve easily been sidestepped.

*Okay we’re talking about Mrs Dalloway. I really liked this book. I had a teacher who i believe taught it well. The work was tedious. We had a worksheet that had a dozen questions to a page, each about simple plot details. Things to the effect of “Who thought that Clarissa looked like xyz?” or “Who is the POV character in this specific paragraph? When does it switch?”, things that you had to keep your eye open for. And I hated it at first, but then I realized that, oh shit! the constant attention was letting me understand the plot so I could appreciate the form of the text.

I have to reread it some day, because I’m sure there’s much I’ve forgotten and would have new opinions on. But, this is just to say, that I liked it. I appreciate the time and care to pick apart that knot. I think it helped me understand it a lot better, and was a much more rewarding experience than other assignments in school were. Teachers are the best! Public Education is the greatest good that humanity has ever cooked up. It’s up there, at least. There’s a lot of issues with it and there are ideological biases that make their way in to what we teach our kids and how. It’s not perfect. But I think that it’s so good that we have a society who knows things about themselves and their history and the world they inhabit. I know it’s a meme to say “The mitochondria is the power house of the cell!” but man, I am pro that. I think it’s a good thing that a lot of people know stuff about science and math.

Ugh, just gonna say, I hate a “Another day without using the Pythagorean theorem,” person. “We’re never gonna need this!”. Yeah, sure, you maybe don’t need to know about how to do algebra, or how mass and velocity work, but someone does! They’re not going to start teaching the Pythagorean Theorem in college are you nuts? Yes, you specifically are not gonna use it. But the world needs people who make their profession in knowing that, engineers and architects and physicists et al. (There’s a M*A*S*H* joke that I can’t find that this reminds me of, tell me to tell you it because I can’t find the clip) and they’ve gotta cast a wide net! You’ve gotta start with the basics! I dunno, I’m sorry you had to spend forty-two minutes learning about what a metaphor is (Oh I want to un-alive[HATE un-alive. HATE how the algorithm determines the language we use because you can’t say kill or die or something. I’m not smart enough to know the nuances and intricacies of it. Maybe this is Old Man Yelling At Cloud.] the person who made the stupid “The Curtains are F***ing BLUE!” post. I want to beat you up. Man, the works we are taught are not like, random things people just vomited out without care or thought. Everything everything is there for the reader to uncover. Even if it’s unintentional. [I adore that clip. I love that so much. I miss being an artist!] I don’t think your teacher was just “making up” metaphors and stuff. Buddy it came free with your fucking pattern recognition.) but I think it’s good that we have artists capable of making things because of that education. It’s good to not use everything you learn. That’s fine. I took Italian, and I don’t speak it anymore, but that’s fine because I literally fulfilled a childhood dream!

Assassin’s Creed II was a game that I played a lot of. The whole Ezio trilogy. I loved them. I’ve never beaten III. They remapped the controls and I could never get around that. Anywho, I was a kid and took Italian class because I liked Ancient Rome and I’ve got Italian in my family (Che Zuppa! DM me and say you remember Che Zuppa!) and then in middle school I started playing the Assassin’s Creed games, and they made me want to go to Italy. And specifically, Florence, the place where the second game starts! And then I got to do that! I got to achieve a lifelong dream*.

Anyways I got rambling about education and stuff and I wish I were smarter but if you tried to send me back to an academic environment I would gnaw off my leg like a coyote. My leg doesn’t even need to be trapped. I don’t even need to be imperiled. I could be sitting perfectly still, on my couch, and if you told me I had to do classwork I would bite through tendon and sinew with rabid fervor. Tell me I have a syllabus to read and I’ll chew through the other one.

I wrote this in twenty four minutes.

*

Yay!