101718 0 Words. That’s what it always says right before you start. You never have anything to say. Just like Fred Red said he would never get used to that lurching exciting feeling of lift-off, no matter how many times he experienced it, so you never get used to that sinking feeling of nothingness, no matter how many times you sit down to type. Why? Probably because there’s absolutely no reason in the world to do this. It’s utterly meaningless. It’s kicking up a cloud of fine dust, in the grassy patch above the beach. The sand barely comes up this far; it’s mostly dirt, and crabgrass, maybe a used condom, a pepsi can, the tattered remains of someone’s faded red shirt. Walk along here, one particular day, and feel the breeze off the lake—how it buffets you! From the side! Such a relentless invisible force is that lake wind. Where does it all come from? Gallon after gallon of big dumb ripped muscular wind, just booming across all that open water, punching you repeatedly with the open-mouthed grin of a simple-minded rambunctious giant invisible friend. Wide boy. A friend like that is good to have around. Gotta do grading. Some senior’s parent wanted to know where all the college prep stuff was in AVID. Any time I get a message like that from Rick I go into overdrive, panic mode for a day or so. Shit, I’m gonna lose my job. I really kind of hate AVID, to tell you the truth. There’s some fun stuff there and some freedom and some opportunities, but in a way it’s the most constricted, restricted, prescripted class I have. Because in the recruitment process we fucking play it up so much; there’s all this hype I’ve gotta live up to. And I mean I could just teach exactly according to the official curriculum, but a) so much of it is fucking gay, and b) that would be four different classes. Maybe it was a mistake to combine them all and try to have an AVID clubhouse. Or maybe I just haven’t made the clubhouse vibe happen yet. HOW DO I DO THAT? Well, that’s something to talk about at the site team meeting tomorrow. I feel like the only people on the site team who really give a shit are Jason and Jodi. And Amanda of course; she’s awesome. Everyone else is basically just barely more useful than dead weight. They’re doing their own thing, and making their students do Cornell Notes and shit, but beyond that, it’s just another fucking committee they can say they’re on so they look like a team player. That’s not quite true. But I don’t see them helping me run the elective at all. Just the schoolwide stuff. Maybe that’s all they’re supposed to do. Whatever. Whine whine whine, bitch bitch bitch. We’ll make it work. Some cool stuff will happen. Some dumb stuff will happen. Some will be fake bullshit. Some will be truly pedagogical moments. the conference in San Diego will be stressful but fun. I get to travel. I gotta get a ticket. Shit, I don’t want to pay up front for that. Shit, it’s embarassing to contemplate requesting not to have to pay up front for that. Nothing like a nice little reminder that I don’t really fit in here. Here among all these polite professionals and their modest houses and respectable hobbies and kids on sports teams and in the military and stuff. Whatever. If I were looking the other way, things would look a lot different. Someone else would be looking at me and going, oh, yeah, with your sushi from the grocery store and your garage door and your washing machine and your Toyota Camry. You actually have a three bedroom apartment, while I’m sitting over here with a pathetic string of lights hanging off a two foot tall plastic tree trying to look cheerful all alone in the dingy light with my kid, after his dad took off with some bitch and went to arizona, and after i take this picture and we open up our one present i’m going to go outside and have a smoke. While the asphalt of the driveway crumbles to bits. And then someone else would be like, oh wow, you have a *driveway!* And so it goes, on and on. Whatever. Did you see how that conversation went, how that little ongoing moment went, when we were at the middle school? So dig this, it was like a little tarot card. It was like a little animatronic exhibit. It was like a little corner of an exotic expensive zoo. There’s moments like that all around! Did you ever notice that? There’s little one-act plays going on all the time, everywhere! The whole conglomerate, the whole web, the whole cloud, the whole totality of them is like one giant infinite-act play. You can travel. If you can learn to traverse every dimension of it, you can be in any time or place of it that you want to be in. Vibrate, rotate, translate, fibrillate, and you go to a different part of it. Which part do you live in right now? Who are you this time? But anyway, the little locus, the little node of it that I was watching at the middle school was this: Slightly fat comfortable (smug, even?) middle class man with at least one kid in middle school sits at a round-top table in the yellow and white and chrome “study area” with reasonably comfortable chairs and hard surfaces. Next to him at the table sits his wife. She has that wifey witch skin. That craggy, wrinkly evidence of succumbing to gravity and boredom. Her hair’s pulled back. (It always is, you know the way I mean.) Her smile frowns slightly at the corners. The man, he’s got a gray fuzzy helmet of hair and his face is round and his grin is permanent, but not particularly mirthful. His small eyes are constantly ready for any red flags, any early warnings of something that’s not normal. This couple is like a pair of mismatched baked goods. There is absolutely nothing sexual about the wan, washed-out plaid aura that hovers over this table. Standing facing them, almost imperceptibly rocking back and forth in his semi-relaxed horse stance, is a slightly fat young cop. He’s got that vest of metallic looking polyester that they wear. He’s got hardware of all descriptions hanging off him all over the fucking place like an exaggeratedly neat high tech version of a pots-and-pans man’s truck. He’s got a gun of course; he could whip that fucker out at any moment and kill us all, but we’re all almost just fucking al*most* a hundred percent sure he won’t—as close to a hundred percent as the fastest spaceship ever can get close to a hundred percent of the speed of light. He’s young. His cheeks have the blotchy rose of youth on them. Baby face. They’re talking about something. The middle aged couple are telling the young cop stuff and he’s respectfully listening, but only *mostly* respectfully, because he knows, even though he’s young and still saving money, that he’s basically one of them. The audience of this play is not one of them and never will be. That was decided a long time ago. That decision was the price of admission to this play. Do you live in Muskego? they ask him. No, he says. I live in Waukesha. I want to live in Muskego, but I need to— the middle aged man nods sagaciously, already knowing the end of the sentence; he holds up one mitt and flakes his fingers together in the weird common sign language for *money.* —save up some more money first. Drink. Drink deeply. Inhale great draughts. Carry a gun. Wear a uniform. Have a gut. Be a cop in a middle school. Outside, a great sea of brown crispy leaves of corn frondles in the freshening autumn breeze. The sun is low in the sky. Things are getting hazy. And... scene.