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07/7/25   
Frankly my dear, we don't fucking care

O Captain!

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December 6, 2004
Before my days as a newspaperman, and slightly after my days as the Spoonman, I served my time in the American school system as a teacher. Or a learning person, as we used to say before they invented proper grammar.

My earliest teaching experiences were at a prep school, the kind where it's all boys (or girls, but I couldn't land a gig for that one) and they have to wear uniforms and conduct themselves like rich and snobby gentlemen. At first, the fellows were all leery of me, because I was so close to them in age. After a while, they came to think of me as their favorite teacher. Some of that was because I was so close in age, they thought they could trust me, but it was more than that as well. I actually enjoyed teaching, and tried to make all the subjects we studied connect to their own lives.

This is not always an easy task. We were going through a rough period where ventilation and air conditioning was being forced into the classroom, and while I think I did a good job, I couldn't always make the kids see the value in knowing how the thermostat works. I did better in other subjects, like teaching poetry.

All of my students came to love Walt Whitman quite a lot. Before my class, they thought of him as some stuffy, recently-dead hooligan who wrote homo garbage. But then I actually read a few of the poems for them, some of them in an amusing Italian dialect, and they were thrilled. One student told me "I Sing the Body Electric" was the best verse he had ever heard, and I don't think he was trying to get extra-credit by saying it. I gave it to him all the same, though.

Then, they fired me from the job. My students took it hard. They threatened to protest when I told them I had been fired for reading all the poems in an Italian accent. They said they would storm the school, bust out all the windows, and rape the faculty, but not because they wanted to do it. They wanted to show support for me. I told them if they wanted to show support for me, really wanted to prove their loyalty, they would continue their educations and forget about my troubles.

They did that. But on the last day, as I was escorted off the campus, they all leaned out the windows and recited my favorite Walt Whitman poem, chanting "O Captain! My Captain!" just like Grand Funk Railroad later would. They turned all this into a movie, but since they threw out my original draft screenplay, I want no part of that Hollywood garbage.

I eventually wound up in public schools, where my under-informed and incompetent teaching made me fit in quite well. It had been the real reason I was fired, of course. No one's ever been fired for reading poetry in a bad accent.


Quote of the Day
“What joyous spring, what sylvan glade, alive with growth and life anew, springing forth in buds of nature's splendor, what miracle of- what, it's snowing? Again? FUUUUUCK. I'll be at the pub.”

-Roderick Youngfellow
Fortune 500 Cookie
You are so ugly, the mere sight of you makes small children give up on life. No twist to that, it just needed to be said. Instead of Band-Aids this week, use bacon. Everybody loves bacon. The only cure for breath like yours is the Hemmingway solution. This week's lucky haiku: Luke Luck licks dykes, Luke's dick sticks Mikes, Mike's wife knifes like OJ.


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Least Requested Christmas Gifts
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5.Hot Toddy, the hottest doll of 1922
6.New Matrix sequels
7.Saddam Hussein action figure with Hideaway Hovel playset
8.Online Predator Chat for X-Box Live
9.Four More Years
10.No Hope for the Holidays, an all-star Christmas Depression
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