In the suburbs, where all the nice families live,
when the sun is resting in the saddle
just before the sky’s summit,
that’s where I am, in the suburbs,
and I’m riding a bicycle very slowly.
A garage sale. The nice family has furniture
in their arms.
The Dad wants to talk,
to tell me about his merchandise,
to talk of obviousness, and niceties.
The daughter wants to talk too.
She has toys that have lately grown lonely.
Her toys are in her hands, and she's
ready to let all that plastic go.
But I don’t get off my bike,
and I never hear their voices,
and I ride around the suburbs,
and I ride around the desert,
very slowly,
and I ride around the plains,
and I ride around the ocean.
I'm pedaling in all these crashing waves,
and I’m listening to music that’s
being put directly and instantly into my head by
a tiny magic machine that’s clipped
onto my cargo shorts. A metal wire
wrapped in smooth white plastic connects
the machine to my ears. It’s the Grateful Dead.
Brokedown Palace. I don't really know what
it's about- something about leaving one place
and going to another place, and hands and knees,
and rolling and rolling and rolling, and doo doo doo
doo doo doo, but the song
makes me feel like I need to keep on moseying
until I get more and more intimate
with the ocean, until all her fish know who I am,
and I know all her fish.
I'm somewhere else now,
in another part of the forest.
Was that an innocent garage sale?
Was he de-cluttering?
Was Dad doing it all to teach Sally
(We’ll call her Sally) a lesson on business transactions?
How nice Dad is.
Because that’s where she’s headed.
Girls named Sally always go straight to the marketplace.
Housethings in her hands, she’s putting them
on the driveway. She’s helping everyone.
Good Sally.
And how are you doing, Mr. Sun?
Keep climbing, and
Shine on me some more.
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5 comments:
The computer at my high school is acting funny. It will let me leave comments on my blog, but it won't let me make a new post on my blog. So, consider this comment today's post.
School has been rough in a lot of ways, but it's been cool in a lot of ways too. It would be easier if I lived in a house and had a lot more money and stuff like that. Right now my wife and I are still in a transitional phase.
Wanna hear the long story about us trying to buy a house? Well, the original close of escrow (COE) date was July 29th. (COE is when you buy the house for real and you sign all the papers and it's a done deal. You can move in right after the COE.) But the seller of the foreclosed home that we're trying to buy took forever getting back to us to tell us whether or not they would accept our offer, so we had to request an extension on the COE. The seller accepted our extension, and the new COE date was to be August 17th.
Well, when August 17th was coming up, the bank we're getting our loan from (I won't name the bank- that would be libel or something- so I'll just call them WF) so WF says, "Your real estate agent never gave us some form we needed, and we can't make the August 17th deadline." and our real estate agent said, "Yeah I did, WF, like 2weeks ago." and WF was like, well, I don't know whose fault it was, our real estate agent says it's the bank's fault and our bank says it's the real estate agent's fault. The fairest thing to say would be: there was a miscommunication. (A very expensive miscommunication, I might add.)
I should also add that generally speaking everything about buying a house is a blur of emails and faxes and phone calls and applications and credit checks and zip code changes and blah blah blah, and I don't get it all, and I don't want to get it, I just wanna have a place to live and I want to own a home someday... but uh... so we had to request a second extension on our COE, which sellers usually do not grant, but thankfully they accepted another extension, but it was only for a week long, and we had to pay 50 bucks a day for everyday we didn't "close." ("closing" means giving the seller all the money, through a down payment and then the bank you're borrowing money from gives the seller the rest of the money.)If we (a.k.a. WF) don't come up with the money by the new COE, Monday, August 24th, then GAME OVER, you know what I'm saying?
I don't know for sure, but now it's looking like we might lose 3,400 dollars. See, we put 3,000 dollars into the escrow account- that was our earnest money, to show the seller that we're really serious about buying the house, and the 3,000 was supposed to go toward our down payment. And 50 bucks a day for about 8 days for the second extension = 400 bucks, so that makes 3,400.
It's a very real possiblity that we don't get a house, and we are 3,400 dollars poorer.
But we have to move out of the place we're staying now, because my wife will give birth around September 10th, so if we don't get the house, we'll need to find a place to rent pronto.
And, I'm not even sure I want to try to buy another house. I mean, this process has been annoying, and what did we get out of it? Maybe we got a little wiser, but we lost thousands of dollars and didn't get a house. This process sort of makes me want to rent 4-ever. I don't know.
Now, there still is a glimmer of hope. If WF and everybody else can get a bunch of papers together in a hurry, then, we still might get the house. But if all the paperwork isn't done by Monday, then GAME OVER.
Oh, and we counted our chickens before they hatched; we spent 3,500 dollars on appliances, but they have not been delivered yet, and we can cancel those and get our money back, but I think there's a fee for cancelling.
Oh, and sometimes our car doesn't start. We took it to a place and they couldn't figure out what was wrong with it. It could be the starter or the spark plugs or the battery. I've had trouble with the battery before, so I think it might be the battery again. But my wife made the connection that the car is quiff when we use the air conditioner, but it's fine when we don't. So we haven't used the air conditioner lately and now the car is starting better.
And on my bike ride from the middle school to the high school, I got a flat tire. (I ride my bike 13 miles a day. From my house to the middle school, where I teach 2 periods of drama, and then from the middle school to the high school, where I teach 2 periods of English. It's tiring, but I like it sort of. It makes me feel like a pioneer. And it makes me feel more in touch with nature, and more in touch with my body.)
But I didn't have a spare tube or a bike pump with me, so I walked probably about a mile and a half in the hot hot sun to the high school, and I didn't have as much time as I would have liked to prepare for my class. But it all turned out mediocre. All's mediocre that ends mediocre.
I mentioned that teaching is tough. Well, if the kids would be quiet and stay in their seats and have more respect for me and more respect for school, things would be fine. But some of these kids, you know, they just want to talk and throw things and get up out of their seats for no reason and yell and make farting noises and who knows what else, but I'm trying to enforce rules, but I've never really been great as an authority figure, you know? I sort of wish I taught at a Catholic school, or a military school- somewhere where the kids were better behaved. I'm trying to change their behavior, but boy is it tough.
Teaching is a hard profession, but I don't like teachers who whine abut being unappreciated and underpaid and such. Teaching is hard, but it's not nearly as hard as being in the military, I would imagine. It's not as hard as drilling for oil. It's not as hard as being a coal miner. And really, the hours aren't as bad as a lot of other professions, so... uh... I've had some discouraging moments, and I still have discouraging moments now and then when I want to give up and apply somewhere else, probably in the manufacturing or warehouse or delivery industries. I think I could be a pretty good mail carrier, or assembly line worker, or a warehouse guy... I could be a cashier, too, but they don't get paid that much... so I've heard that the first year of teaching is really rough, but once you have a year beneath your belt, it gets easier. And I'm working with some really supportive people, so that's good.
The plan is still for me to teach for the rest of my life, so I think that's what I'll do.
I'm not very good at it right now, but hopefully I'm not bad enough to get fired.
Sincerely,
Telemoonfa
P.S. The comments can't be too long, so I had to split it up into two comments.
Dear Readers,
Here’s a funny story:
On my second day of school, after I went into the faculty area where teachers eat lunch and make copies and stuff, I found a big box filled with bags of microwaveable popcorn. I didn’t know who they belonged to, but there were so many of them, and I was so hungry, and I thought that the owner wouldn’t miss one little bag of popcorn, so I took it and put it into the microwave. I set the microwave to 4 minutes. I went into my nearby classroom to get a piece of paper I needed to make copies of. Then my phone rang, and it was the lady from the front office who is in charge of attendance. She was asking me if so and so was in my class that day. At the end of the phone call, the fire alarm went off!
Yikes!
Oh no, it hurts my ears!
So I went into the hallway, and I smelt burnt popcorn. Oh No! I went outside, and a lot of administrators were running around looking for the source of the fire alarm, and I said to some administrator guy, ‘I did it! It was me! There’s not really a fire, I just accidently burned some popcorn!” I felt embarrassed, but I was a little relieved because at this point in the day all the students were gone… or were they? Turns out they were not all gone! Oh no! The ninth and tenth graders were gone, but all the eighth graders operate on a different schedule because even though they meet at the high school campus they’re technically part of the middle school so they follow the middle school’s schedule, blah blah blah… so anyway they had a full-fledged evacuation of all the eighth graders all because little telemoonfa wanted to eat some popcorn that wasn’t his.
And what kind of freak microwaves did they put in those faculty areas, anyway? What kind of nuclear-powered microwave electrifies popcorn for 4 minutes and then erupts out smoke like a volcano, enough smoke to set off a fire alarm?
And I only set it for 4 minutes! I can understand a few blackened pieces of popcorn, but enough smoke to evacuate the entire eighth grade class? Gee whiz.
But it is my fault, honestly. I got teased a little for it, but oh well.
But that little event let me think about a new segment for Telemoonfa Time. I call our new segment “Radical Educational Reformations.” In “Radical Educaitonal Reformations,” I’ll propose a few, well, radical changes to the American public school system. I only have three so far:
1] Cancel all fire drills.
Seriously, how often do real fires really happen at school? When’s the last time you heard of a school burning down? Uh… NEVER! Plus, practicing fire drills waste a lot of classtime, and uh… I think the protocol to follow if there ever is a real fire should be EVERYBODY RUN FOR YOUR LIFE!!!
That’s much simpler and memorable-er don’t you think?
While we’re at it, we might as well cancel all emergency drills. Duck and cover? Ha! Like ducking and covering would ever really stop a nuke from killing you.
2] Cancel the twelfth grade.
All the students have probably learned all they need to learn by their junior year of high school. Canceling the twelfth grade would solve a lot of budget issues, too. Think about it: students would be put to work sooner, or moving on to college or the military sooner, and then all the twelfth grade teachers could move to lower grades, and class sizes could be smaller. Fewer students means less money being poured down the educational sink. It’s just an idea I had. Or maybe Mark Steyn thought it up before me. I think Steyn said something about putting students through less school in one of his books, “America Alone,” or maybe he said it somewhere else, but I know Mark Steyn likes to make fun of people who hang out in college for years and years and years while slowly pursuing a liberal arts degree.
3] Require all teachers to obtain
and use concealed weapon permits.
Thus ends my first installment of “Radical Educational Reformations”
Sincerely,
Telemoonfa
kekekekekeke.
you got your house now right?!
I like your educational reforms.
fire drills are dumb, if there was a fire I'm sure all the kids are gonna walk calmly to the designated area, if there really was a fire... a dangerous one where'd you'd have to evacuate then the kids would run like mad.
I once wore my trenchcoat and walked onto the middleschool campus without checking into the office and the school went on lockdown cuz there was a shady tortured teenager with a trenchcoat unofficially on campus -BIG DEAL!!! its not like I had a bomb strapped to my chest.
but that's really funny about the popcorn, that must of been pretty embarassing though, let's hope the students don't find out about it. did you ever find out who the popcorn belonged to?
you're right about 12th grade. i didn't need it at all. i do think that kindergarten should start earlier though, age 4 at least cuz the younger a kid is the better his brain learns....maybe if kids started school at 3 or 4 there wouldn't be so many stupid teenagers and adults later. what do you think?
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