Didn’t Graduate

Hadda a girl once, this was during college.

Darkest, longest hair, biggest brownest eyes …

Not that kind of story, whatever kind you thought.

Being stupid (I said this was during college, yes?) I’d no idea … none. Not what it was nor what it cd be and thus not that one though it set me off on the one I have which for better or worse is mine. So, mentioned here just for this: we used’ta have this exchange wherein my journeying to university had come lacking nearly withal the blessing of the state, by completing a sanctioned diploma program in high school. Took the equivalency exam, which a moderately accomplished monkey in the 8th grade could’ve passed — seemed like ‘you might need it’ applied here — but I didn’t, and don’t, have a high school diploma.

Whenever I said that to Rachelle she nearly always rightly mocked me in a gruff approximation of a voice we s’posed to might’ve belonged to an ignorant caveman:

‘heh, heh … snort … I dudn’t grade-jyoo-eight.’

The truth of it was that I didn’t graduate … but I did finish. Prolly coulda done so as an eighth grade simian save for the five-paragraph essay they required to get out of the ninth. I cd’ve written it, sure, but for the blinkered Philistines running the show who wouldn’a have administered it.

And of course the point of the truth is that it didn’t matter.

It didn’t matter I snort … dudn’t grade-jyoo-eight … because there I was at USC and, more broadly, no one would care.

One at about that time did — another girl sorta hadda, had in high school said she broke up with me because I hadn’t ‘had my senior year experience’ so she at the time cared, but that’s it.

No one since ever has.

This is a lawngish way of saying, but mayhap not an unenjoyable way of hearing, that sometimes I’ve been known to do a thing different. This is not me tryin’a sound so cool (a detestable thing; read late, semi-sainted journalist and Roman Catholic Michael Kelly’s essay, ‘King of Cool’ — you can find it by Googling his name with ‘Do not blame it on the bossa nova’ or just click here).

A place presently fitful for this anti-socialization behavior is graduate school — or as Rachelle might mock, grade-jyoo-eight skool.

My APA papers are APA papers but do not sound like APA papers.

This causes a response very exactly like, ‘This is not an APA paper.’

Imagine a shopping list that rhymes.

A room piled with papers, plied with books, not the 60-inch TV expected.

A black bear with a mountainous interstate highway-shaped streak of charcoal gray down his spine.

Are they still a list, a room, a bear?

Not what we thought such things hadda be.

If we care a’tall on’t we may end up caring more.

If we don’t, that’s not a person I’m writing to for with.

Not even with for to grade-jyoo-eight.

None too cool it ain’t.

Which is OK.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Recent

Coyotes and Christians

I am not saying Christians are like coyotes. [For that, some could cut caustically to coyotes are like Christians — tricksters, roaming in the dark, feeding on the dead … ] Simply noticed — somewhat in passing, as it’s said, having attained, apparently … achieved? … some kind of state where nearly anything I hear,

Read More »

And Did Dostoevsky Say ‘Beauty Will Save’

Short answer: he did not. Neither did Prince Myshkin, that we know of. Likely both believed it. Beauty — in the person of Christ — will do so. And clearly D wrote of M in The Idiot to explore art and beauty and ugliness and salvation. But did he say it, and did he believe that

Read More »

What I Recalled Watching Netflix

[Television is educational.]   One Saying the same stuff over and over looks like you have different things to say. Two If you’re ever in a below-average film or streaming series, and you beat the tar out of a guy, in a house, and you gaze down in both some shock as also a certain

Read More »

Seeking the King

A line everywhere misattributed to Chesterton reads thus: The young man who rings the bell at the brothel is unconsciously looking for God. This line is not from the great [several senses of the word] man who recently celebrated his 150th birthday, but the mid-century most unmodern novelist Bruce Marshall. The words — which do

Read More »

Random

Hey Babe, Wanna Increase My Downline?

This wouldn’t be the first time someone “posted” a “blog” on their “website” while having nothing to say. Well, not nothing exactly, but certainly not being sure exactly what he wants to say. But then that’s part of what a blog is, or was. Or maybe that’s just the bad kind; definitely it’s the old

Read More »

No It Won’t

I don’t think that quotation means what we think it means. Beauty will not save the world and anyway Dostoevsky didn’t say it and anyways he didn’t mean it neither. The line that’s led to our clichéd abuse of the idea’s akin to ‘Eskimos have 418 words for snow’ and ‘it takes 21 days to

Read More »

One Day One

The birds start by 0315 here, which is when I awoke this morning. They didn’t do it, make me wake-up, they’re not roosters after all, but it was odd, since in summer-coming season — the annual-but-always-unexpected late Spring overcast SoCal days with weather-people broadcasting [good weather word!] ‘plenty of heat on its way’, or the

Read More »

I Am The Fat Guy

One New Year’s Eve I was in Big Bear with friends. I was in college and we’d been coming up the mountain for a few years, first at Mike’s, then at Andy’s. It didn’t take much for us to decide to drink while we were up there, but we weren’t hardcore, as far as I

Read More »

Related

People do the Craziest Things

Adam — did he do what he did for love? Did he say, ‘I will join her; I can’t bear to be without her.’ — is that how it went down? He at after Eve; was it because he’d rather skulk around the earth a sojourner and pilgrim at the mercy of the people in that

Read More »

Kim Possible

All the while watching Mad Men seemed to me the question was ‘Would Don Draper be redeemed?’ Breaking Bad was running roughly concurrently and the same question with an otherly alliteration was being posed: ‘Would Walter White be damned?’ The answer to the first was quintessentially postmodern, exquisitely childish, and thereby perfect — neither. Or, as an actual

Read More »

Christ on a Postage Stamp

Got to thinking on postage stamps today bec hadda mail a book to a friend and when you go in you hafta say to the guy, no matter what your actual business is that day, and of course you’re already saying it if you went in for this purpose — ‘What first class stamps d’ya have?’ It’s

Read More »