I Can't Believe it's 2007. I Wanna Throw Up

I can't believe it's 2007. How fucking depressing. I mean, it's not like I can barely remember 20 years ago; 20 years ago I was in NINTH GRADE!!! Totally conscious, the devil of puberty stabbing me with his evil pitchfork. Whatever that means. I mean, I remember 9th grade for chrissakes. This time in 1987, we were in the middle of the jv basketball season. I guess the main highlight being the last game of the season when Dennis Blagmon threw ice that hit Coach Futchko in the eye. Or, as he was affectionately known, Coach Futchko. Hmm. Well, and there was Kevin Brown quitting the team the day we got issued uniforms cause he didn't want to wear, and I quote, "the fag shorts." Actually, now that I think of it, our coach that year wasn't Futchko, it was Coach Barley. He was a 6'6" black man, so when you'd meet him on the court you'd think wow, this guy must be incredible. Then you'd see him play. The only way to describe his amazing non-coordination is the way his body flailed around, it looked like he was fighting off a swarm of bees. Unreal. When he wasn't accidentally elbowing your head into submission with one of his 14-inch elbows he was inexplicably falling to the ground. You'd toss him the ball, next thing you know bam! He's down. Luckily for us, he was even worse as a coach, his two big pieces of advice being "don't forget to breathe" and, when the ball was loose, "fightfightfightfightfight!" Brilliant. My big dream was to arrange it so a teammate collapsed on the floor, and when Barley went running to his unconscious body and asked what happened I'd slowly shake my head and say "Forgot to breathe. Poor bastard." Well, I also dreamed of gettin my mitts on some female chest fat, but at least the basketball dream seemed plausible. Fall of my ninth grade year was football. I can't recall too much except that I was a 6'1" 170-pound mix of rope steel and sinew who could run like a deer and hit like a runaway fright train. Well, that's how I remember it anyways. Don't remember too much of the actual games, other than we went 3-5. God rewarded my cockiness after such a "successful" season with 4 wins the rest of my high school career. Great. Also, this was my first year of jv football, as my parents hadn't allowed me to play the year before as an 8th-grader. The reason? The year before THAT, when my older brother was in the 8th grade my mother was 8 months pregnant when the season was to start and was like there's no way in hell I'm sitting out in the baking heat for this. So since he didn't play, it made perfect sense to my parents that the next year, when I was in 8th grade, I wasn't to play. Strange parenting, you say? Maybe. But my brother and I turned out just fine - him with his huge house, successful career, wife and kid and me with my amazing memory of everyone's birthday and a cyst on my back I call "Franklyn." So we're fine. I think the only thing I remember from baseball season that spring was one day at practice I showed up in white sweatpants and a white t-shirt and, in a nod to my Irish pastiness, my buddy Mike said "Xmas, put on some clothes." Reckon that's all I remember. Chicks, I dunno...I remember having a crush on TC, who 2 years later would become my first girlfriend and first love. Also LS, who for about 10 years had a weird thing with me, one year she'd be into me and I wouldn't be into her, then the next year the roles would be reversed. Could never get on the same page. Which sucks looking back cause she was crazy hot. And for those reading this that I went to high school with I mean Lee Sebren, not Libby Sill. I shoulda gotten together with her, not TC; always had a connection with her. Of course I haven't seen her in 17 years, so don't look for me to show up on the next Rachel Ray show about high school sweethearts who found love after 20 years. I remember my classes too. Geometry with Mr. Edwards,who drove a puke green van and had a wife who sometimes subbed and was so frightening looking we called her King Kong. And as I'm typing this I'm hoping the real King Kong doesn't read this, as he'd be insulted. Apprarently, this was also in the days when a teacher could keep a bottle of vodka in her desk too. I guess if you're that ugly, you need something to poke other people's eyes out. I did get sent to the office for fooling around in class with the "secret devil sign", that was exciting. Latin II I ruled; for some reason I could read Latin like a mf. Which luckily, as it turns out, means as much to the ladies as great looks or money. Hmm. Plus our teacher was so old I'm not saying she invented the language, but her social security number was XXIV. I mean her first name was "SVSAN", for chrissakes. And she was addicted to "Jeopardy!", so if in the first 5 minutes of class we could get her distracted by bringing last night?s show up, she'd start blathering away about it till the bell rang. If bringing up"Jeopardy!" didn't work, I'd hang brain in front of her desk so she could lecture me for 45 minutes that "a young mans testes, no matter how large, pulsing and beautiful are NOT to be displayed in a classroom" blahblah blah, bell! English 9 was with Mrs. Moore, who was a great teacher but was unfortunate enough to not only weigh 300 pounds, but had a face that LITERALLY looked like a pig, so...Earth Science was Mr. Hewitt, who gave so many bonus points on quizzes and tests that if you didn't get a score of at least 136 you'd feel like a fucking retard. And he'd pass out candy. Candy?!?!!?! Christ. Though looking back, I wonder if any of it was date-rape candy. That'd be kinda cool. Gym class was great. The class would be 55 minutes long, if I recall. Well, the first five minutes we'd be in the locker room changing etc. And by "etc" I mean "pretending to not look at each other's dicks." The next 40 minutes would consist of us sitting in the bleachers while Mr. Mitchell, he of 400 pounds and a wandering glass eye, would take roll and yell for us to calm down. That would leave exactly 5 minutes of physical fitness, then five more minutes of changing/checking out dicks. Fun. The next year Mr. Mitchell was our Driver's ed teacher; class each day consisted of him being 10 minutes late, and you know how rowdy a class will get unsupervised for that long. Every day like clockwork, he'd come storming in, man-titties flappin and glass eyeball about to shatter, slam the door and start screaming at us that because we were goofing off instead of quietly studying how to drive, we were gonna get in a car and immediately kill everyone else on the open road. Of course he would fill up all 45 minutes of class screaming at us that we were gonna kill everyone instead of teaching us how to, you know, drive safely. Oh, and I had computer class, that was a waste. We had 2 computers I think they got from Food Lion or something. This was 1987, and the class was "Basic." We learned how to turn the units on and off, how to insert a floppy disk, and the ol? 10 PRINT "XMASTIME" 20 GOTO 10 30 RUN and then we'd squeal with glee as our name would be printed over and over. Wow. These lessons took up the first 2 days of class; what the hell we did the other 178 days of class I have no fucking idea. What was great was the teacher was Mr. Whitaker, who was the varsity basketball coach. This would seem natural, right? Computers hit the school for the first time ever - the future of mankind, the greatest technological achievement of our lifetimes, and who do they get to "teach" it? The basketball coach. Basketball, computer science, what's the difference. One time in class Tommy Waters, who was, to say it nicely, never under suspicion of being the manliest dude in the room, pitched a fit. "We never learn anything! You haven't taught us a thing, we never do anything in here! I'm going to report you to the school board!!" to which Coach replies "go ahead, I need the publicity." This man was also our trigonometry teacher, another baffling choice. We had a guy in our trig class Brian, who was a math whiz. Every time there was a test or a quiz Brian would be the first to turn his in, and we?d all take a break and watch Coach grading Brian's paper at his desk. He'd get out his answer key and start checking Brian's answers. You could see him going down the page with each problem: number one, check, number two, check, number three...now his head would go from Brian's paper to his answer key, then back to Brian's paper, then he'd take his eraser out, change the answer he had in his answer key to whatever answer Brian had, and move on. Unreal. Oh, and I had Biology too. This was Mr. Robertson, who was 100 years old, had taught everybody's grandfather. What the fuck - apparently at my school to be a teacher you had to either be old enough to have invented your field of study, or big enough to eat it. Christ. You could tell he hadn't changed a thing in his classroom since 1959 either; the weird stuff in formaldehyde you always have in thes back rooms. 2-headed cat, the dog with 6 legs, Jayne Mansfield's head. He also was hysterical when he'd rattle off, what were they, genome codes or whatever, he'd be like "...alright...copy this down...the genome makeup for...the...frog is.....bigTlittleTlittleTlittleTbigTbigTlittleTbigTbigTbigTbigTlittleTbigTbigTlittleTbigTlittleTlittleTlittleT and..,,,,,.bigT." Meanwhile you're still writing "The Cars suck" on your paper. 20 years. Christ. And if I took 10 minutes, I'm sure I could remember a bunch more. I don't care about getting old, but getting old having accomplished NOTHING is starting to creep up on me. Ah well. At least I don't wear my skin-tight, comes up just below the nutsack Ocean Pacific gym shorts anymore.