Just Say No to Rabid Dogs
the commune's Omar Bricks speaks out on educational reform 

Monday, Mar 4, 2002
Seems like we spent our entire childhoods preparing for things that never happened. How many hours did we waste watching filmstrips on not accepting rides from strangers, or classics like “Don’t Play with Rover Foamymouth” that taught us the virtues of staying the hell away from dogs with rabies? How many sleepless nights spent worrying about total global annihilation from a nuclear war with the Russians? By that I mean other kids staying up all night worrying about nuclear death, God knows Omar Bricks didn’t lose any shuteye over foreign policy issues. I was way too wrapped up in my plans to order a money printing press from an ad I saw in the back of a Casper comic book. I schemed for a year to get that damn money-mill, and then it finally came in the mail and it turns out the friggin’ thing prints toy money! I shit you not, ten-dollar bills with a picture of a walrus on them. I could have shit, I was so mad. I might have. Gone were my dreams of printing up enough currency to buy every toy in the store and to build a functioning car out of Legos, with which to drive to Sea World. I’d have to wait until Christmas (and 1995, alternately) like all of the other kids, like a shmoe.

I guess every little kid had to have some major disillusionment when they were young, like having their parents die or ordering Sea Monkeys. I’m sure you know the drill: ad in the back of your comic book looks awesome and makes you think you’re getting a clan of human-sized merpeople in the mail, and that in no time you’ll be frolicking in their underwater kingdom and cutting deals to have the Sea Monkeys blow up your school and stuff your Social Studies teacher into a steamer trunk headed for the Dutch East Indies. Then of course the package comes in the mail and it’s an ant farm and a packet of dust. Since you’re a kid and therefore gullible as a mail-order bride, you follow the instructions, add water, and hold your breath to see if this chintzy crap will somehow transform into the awesome experience you’ve been envisioning. Instead, it ends up looking like that Watersquirtz ring-toss game you’ve had since you were five, the one that got all leaky and mildewy after it spent a few years at the bottom of your toybox. It dawns on you then that the only way you could use these “Sea Monkeys” to get back at your Social Studies teacher would be if you put them in her coffee. So you get mad, and stay that way for the better part of seven minutes until you realize that you’re missing the beginning of Diff’rent Strokes, and it’s the one where Willis tries to grow a goatee.

That’s what I hear anyway, I never ordered the Sea Monkeys myself. My dad had ordered them when he was a kid and his bitter diatribes convinced me that they probably weren’t worth the eight bucks. For that same reason we never got to go to Sea World, since there was no way dad was going to shell out his hard-earned money to see a bunch of water fleas swim around in a tank.

Thank Moses I had my dad to impart these pearls of wisdom on my young mind, since school definitely wasn’t doing it. They were far too concerned that we were going to get kidnapped from the school parking lot or bitten by a stray dog if we somehow managed not to get nuked while doing drugs. Of course none of it ever happened, and we all survived (except for Tommy Frink, who peed in the sink and later ended up becoming a Scientologist). What the suits didn’t understand was that there were far too many Transformers to collect for any of us to blow our allowances on crack pipes. Of course I may be a bad one to ask since I flunked out of the DARE program at the tender age of eight. I passed out when the officers were showing us how to tie off and locate a vein, so during the graduation ceremony I had to sit off to the side with the kid who’d had Mono the whole time.

Seems like they could have been showing us filmstrips on something useful, like not answering cell phones in movie theaters or what to do if the guy next to you on the plane is wearing a diaper made of plastic explosives. I’m pretty sure I know the proper position to be in when you’re obliterated by a mushroom cloud, but search me for how you’re supposed to disarm a pimply reject in a Korn shirt with an Uzi. Or even etiquette things like the polite ways to turn down a request to join a cult. That would come in handy. And karate. They definitely should have taught us karate.

But, you know, life goes on and some things you just have to learn for yourself. For everything else, I’ve been thinking about correspondence colleges.

Yeah. I should definitely open one!

Bricks out.