Drew Burk - Notes on Construction

ere’s the truth: XXXX X XXX XXXXXX XX XXXX XXXXX, X XXXX XXXX XXXXXXXX XXXXXX XXXX XX XXX XXXXX XXXXXXXXX XX XXXX. XXXXXXX XXXX XXXXX, XXX XX XXXX XXXX XXX XXXXX XXXX.XXXXX XXXX XXXXXXX XXXX XX XX XXXX XXXXXX XX XXX XX XX XX XXXX, XXX XXXXXX XXX XXXX XXXX XX XXX. I’m almost 34, my birthday’s just a few days away—and that’s got nothing to do with why today’s not the day, it’s just a fact of the calendar, that’s all—and though I’m not old, and certainly not wise, XXX XXXXXXX X XXXXXX XXXXXXX XX XX XXXXXXXXX XXX XXXXXXXXXX, XX XXXX X XXX XXXXXXXXX XX XXXX XXXX XXXX XX XXX XXXXX XXXX XXX XXXXX XXXX XX. X XXXX XXXXX X XXXX XXXX XXXXXXX XX XXXX XX XX XXX.
      There’s a scene in Miller’s Crossing, where Tom Reagan’s standing in front of Johnny Caspar, and I think Mr. Reagan’s been beat up a little bit, or maybe this is before that… I’m not sure, and it doesn’t matter. Anyway, they’re talking, all civil and Coen, and Johnny’s fat little kid runs in and says Papa! Papa! Papa! Papa! Papa! Papa! Papa! Papa! Papa! Papa! and Johnny smacks him hard. Kid wails, but he stops it with the Papa! Papa! Papa! Papa! and Johnny and Tom finish up their nice little conversation.
      X XXX XXX XXXXX XXXX XX XXX XXXXXXXX XXXXXXXX XX XX, XXX XXXXXXXX XXXX XX XXXXXX XX XXXXX XX XXXXXX XX XXXXXX, XXX XXXXXXX XXXX XX, XXXXXX XXXXX XXXXX XXXXXXXXX XXX XXXXXX XXX XXXXXXXX XXXXX XXXX XXXXX XXXX XX XX XXXXXXXXX XXX XXXX, XXX XXXXXX, XX. XX. XX. XX. X XXX XXXX XX XXXXXX XXXXX.[2] I get over it pretty quick. The trick to it is: don’t be me.
      And then when Johnny and Tom are done, Tom’s leaving, Johnny hugs his kid, coos to him, says, “Aw, did somebody hit you?”
      And what kind of spork would this be without discord?
      Lies. Lies. Lies. That’s what it’d be. I know what I want. Thing is, I don’t always want what I want, dig? Hence Kevin. Kudos Kevin. Everyone is kinder than me. Everyone. You show me your lopsided pot and I take a bat to it and then I come at you, break your fingers, smash your wheel. Maybe someday someone’s going to grab it, twist and break my wrist, but I don’t know who that’s going to be. Instead it’s “Yeah, well, you’re going bald!” and what the fuck does that have to do with it? We’re supposed to be talking about the fucking pot. I’m saying pottery and I mean words.
      I need to use the pot. There’s an explicit purpose to it. It’s no good to me if you made it wrong. I don’t care about the size, the shape or the finish. Color means fuck all. But it needs to be absolutely what it was intended to be. [3]

The binding on this issue: It occurred to me that I’ve been doing a modification of a 4-hole Japanese binding for single sheets, but I’ve been using it to bind folded signatures.
      Um, duh.
      This issue we’re doing the regular, traditional, 4-hole Japanese method, binding single sheets with soft covers. Doing it old-school. The outer cover’s just attached to the back, the cover asymmetrical, not so much covering it as it is holding it. The reason for the asymmetry comes from this understanding I have in the back of my brain somewhere, that balance comes through imbalance, that a perceptual apprehension of a symmetrical, balanced thing in four dimensional space won’t appear balanced at all, and that you must in fact tweak it to account for time to have it balance in four dimensional reality. See? So yeah, of course asymmetrical.
      Thank you for your time.

[1] Truncated, due to space limitations. Normally, I’d just cut somebody’s piece if I wanted a few more pages, or a few pieces if I wanted 20… but this time it’s someone else’s issue, and there’s nobody for me to cut. But the truncation’s probably not due only to that. Yeah, there’s a whole lot more pages in this issue than normal, so that’s gonna cost me extra, money we at spork don’t have, but that’s none of your concern, honeylove.
        Sweetiekins, I’ve been running out of bookstores lately, nauseated, broken, horrified, like if I went to the leper colony and discovered a herd of fetishists masturbating onto the walls of every hut.
        Wait… WHAT?!!?
        See, love, what are books? These days, I mean? And what are bookstores? You see where I’m going with this? Honeybun, we suck, you and me and all the rest, and we’ve gotten what we asked for, and we’re gonna get what we deserve.
        We’ve lost two independent bookstores in Tucson in the past few months, and they were the kind of store that yesterday I really really needed. A small, comprehensible, comfortable place with a limited range a guy can easily wrap his head around, a staff I trusted, a staff who knew my predilections and habits—and who love and push my publications, oh yeah, oh yeah—and to whom I could say “I want to read Céline, but like if he was a fry cook instead of a doctor and soldier…” and they’d know instantly where to send me. Bookstore people I wanted to just drop in and say hello to. And then ask them for some Bukowski but without all the puking… or something Palahniuk but less repetitive, less contrived (since sometimes you want it easy, you know, but you don’t want to have to bend that low—and Chuckie, it hurts me to say it, it really does, I loved you so… and here’s what I think you’re doing wrong. You’re interacting too much with them, your people. They’re dragging you down and making you stupid and chaining you up with their expectations—but what are you doing, Charlie P? You’re teaching them! You really gotta stop that. Oh my god do you ever have to stop that. If you could just sit here where I sit, reading the submissions some of your people have sent… and then see how angry they get when their resemblance to you, their pale, drooling sycophantic resemblance, is mentioned… I don’t know that it’d make you see, necessarily, but maybe you would… maybe you’d see that it’s not really helping, that it is in fact hurting. Let’s all be writers! How hard can it be, really? How hard can it be? Honestly, people. There are objective realities at work, it’s not all just what we like, or what we can relate to, some things are good whether we like them or not, some things bad. Tom Waits = Good; Justin Timberlake = Bad. No one can argue that, no matter what a person may feel on the subject. And with you, it’s like someone kicked you, put their finger in your face, their eyes not even seeing you, their eyes making your face a mirror to them and all they can see is their own wants; and they hold up Lullaby in one hand—you made me so happy with that one, Chas, it was you, but a you looking up, looking out, a growing, branching you, and I could forgive the tricks and the cheap little hooks—and the other hand fisted but the index finger stuck out so stiff it’s crooked and snapping from the tension in the tendons, and they’re spitting at you with every word, “Bad author! Bad, bad author!” Then they rub your nose in your book, and even though you know it’s good, really really good, this whole scene screws with your perception…), well, hopefully you’ve been places other than B&N or Borders, and you know what I’m talking about.
        But I walk into bookstores now and I come out never wanting to see another book again. I can’t buy books. I can’t read book reviews, I can’t… I can’t.
        That whole section at Borders or B&N, all the overstock. That’s the problem. Bulk. Scattershot overwhelming process, this small words and large-type, no ideas, buy all you want, we’ll make more, disposable entertainments, little more than magazines in book shapes but without the pictures of hot women in pretty underthings, and leaving me dirtier and worse for wear than had I spent an equivalent amount of time and attention on some good old fashioned honest porn. I leave a bookstore and I don’t ever want to write again. Don’t want to read anymore, don’t want to publish, don’t want to make the books…
        If I were prone to seeing conspiracies, I’d say that Oprah and the NYT Book Review were actually agents of the government, slow brainwashing and intellectual eradication their purpose, working toward a manageable groupthink ideal, taking the long view, figuring in just a couple more generations we’ll have it all sorted…

[2] This redaction is necessary. It’s not secrets or anything. “It's not enough to just say this is all about freedom of expression. We respect freedom of expression but we know there are certain boundaries and limits.”

[3] Trillian, my daughter, she starts 1st grade in the fall. The school she’s at goes only through kindergarten, so we’re looking all over at what’s available, where she should go next year. There’s two schools we really really like, but they’re both way out of our price range. The one she’s at now is out of our price range too, but not so much as these others. One of them costs more than the state university out here. We can probably get a whole lot of financial aid but even with the maximum we could get, plus secret magic from no fewer than three fairy princesses kindly disposed to us and sympathetic to our cause, it would still be about twice what we can, at the extremes of most dire privations, realistically afford. We’re told to go for it anyway, told that there might be a couple bonus fairy princesses with magic to spare, but as I haven’t actually talked to any of these magical creatures, I don’t know how much faith to put in the possibility. The other school is about equal what it costs to go to the university, and with the maximum of financial aid, and the institution of the mentioned privations, we could probably just about make it. Maybe, if I sell my ass and mouth, and if my customers pay my asking price, and competition doesn’t force me to do the work for a nickel a shot (likely in today’s economic climate)…
        So, with that in mind, we signed her up for GATE testing, thinking maybe it wouldn’t be all that bad at a public school if she was in the full time GATE program. The test was this morning, so we took her down to the local high school where they were doing the testing… showed up at 8, packed into the cafeteria with a bunch of parents and kids, big sea of chaos, her name spelled Gillian Burke on the list, the address wrong, and some district yahoo telling us we’re pronouncing our own daughter’s name wrong, that my own daughter is pronouncing her own name wrong… Probably like 20 or more teachers and administrators in the cafeteria, all of them annoyed to be there on a Saturday, all of them concerned only with themselves, none of them seeming to be aware that there’s a bunch of children there. The kindergarteners are finally corralled, then shoved out the door, and one child is immediately lost. Taken into some other building. A couple teachers run off to retrieve her, not terribly concerned, like it happens all the time, like it’s no big deal to lose track of a five-year-old girl.
        They take Trillian off to go fill out a bunch of bubbles on a bunch of optical-scan forms—we’re told it’s to gauge her creativity, somehow, measuring how well she conforms to measure her creativity or something. I didn’t quite follow. They take her and herd us back through the cafeteria, outside to wait the two to three hours it’s going to take to do the test. Outside, there’s a bunch of high school kids sitting around at tables, waiting to do their Saturday school thing, because it’s good to punish kids who’re already being failed by their school and parents. About 8:20 some angry man opens a door, tells them it’ll be a couple minutes, then disappears. Comes back at 8:25, waves the kids in then closes the door—the door with no external latch—behind them. A few seconds later a kid comes up, another one of the Saturday school kids, asking where they went. I point to the door, the kid tries it, but it’s locked. I ask him if there’s some other way in there, he says there isn’t. I look at his paper, the paper tells him that he’s supposed to report to the cafeteria at 8:30. The cafeteria where they’re doing the testing for the 1st and 2nd grade kids, and they’ve put signs on the door that say: Testing In Progress. Do Not Enter. I go in anyway, ask one of the functionaries if there’s some other way to get through to the back of the building. She asks me why and I tell her the kid needs to get to his punishment. She says that’s none of her concern.
        I’ve been that kid. Thing about it today was he wasn’t late and he showed up like he was supposed to but he can’t get where he’s supposed to go, where they told him to go, and it doesn’t matter if he goes where he’s supposed to go because that’s not where he’s really supposed to be anyway, though there was no way he could have known that.
        Oh, and when we parked the car, following the signs… we parked and went to the sign that said GATE TESTING, taped to the fence, in the corner, the fence to the left, a wall to the right, no GATE at all. I believe either I or they failed the whole gate test before it even started. Also, at the entrance to the lot, the lot with maybe 8 cars in it, was a big sign that said: LOT FULL.
        My tax dollars at work. Yours too, they get Federal funds.
        Like I said, I’ve been that kid. I tell the kid I’ll give him my phone number at work and he can have some shithead administrator give me a call on Monday and I’ll corroborate for him that he was there, that he was there on time, and that they should consider his Saturday obligation to them fulfilled. I pound on the door the big angry guy took the rest of the kids through, I pound on the windows. I get nothing. The kid says, Thanks anyway, and wanders off, probably figuring he’s gonna get what he’s gonna get no matter what he does, so maybe he may as well just enjoy his weekend. Whole day ahead of him, all that.
        At 8:34 another kid comes up, tries to go to the cafeteria, but can’t. I ask if she’s there for Saturday school and she is. Her paper tells her to go to the cafeteria too. She calls her mom, explains the situation and waits. Her mom arrives around 9, and right at the same time the door opens and the big angry guy sticks his head out. I call to him, tell him that he’s missing a couple kids.
        “They’re late. They’re supposed to be here at 8:30.”
        “No, she wasn’t late, and she’s supposed to be there,” I point to the cafeteria, “at 8:30. This is not her fault.” Okay, maybe she was a couple minutes late, but how is it gonna help her to get further penalties piled on for 4 minutes?
        “She’s here as a punishment, if she can’t be here on time…”
        I say she was on time, and the problem was he wasn’t where he was supposed to be. He says that’s not his fault, and I say that it’s not hers either.
        And then he says, “It’s not my responsibility.”
        And that’s pretty much when I lost it.
        “IT IS SO YOUR RESPONSIBILITY. YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR EVERY SINGLE FUCKING ONE OF THESE KIDS HERE!”
        He stammers something. And I’m told later that I was being kicked at this point, but I don’t remember that at all.
        “Has it occurred to you, to any of you,” I say, “that if you shitheads were maybe doing your jobs all along then you wouldn’t be here today, that if your systems weren’t so fucked up that this problem here might not exist at all?”
        The height of civil discourse.
        “You obviously don’t work in a school.”
        But the thing there is I kinda do. And my wife does in reality. A functioning school where the parents and the teachers and the administrators are constantly aware of all the students, wholly focused on them, to the exclusion of all else—because, strange as it may seem to some, it’s a school, and we kinda figure that’s what schools are about.
        The big angry guy, probably just to get this over with and get away from the ranting yahoo out there on the patio outside the cafeteria, tells the girl to get on inside, then shuts the door. Me, I’m still yelling at him, that he and all his compadres are the reason these kids are failing, that it’s precisely because they can say the words, “It’s not my responsibility,” and believe them when they say them; the kids hear: You are not my responsibility, which also pretty much means, I don’t care about you. The kids, too young, even at 15 or 16 or whatever, and the recipients of the shitty educations at the hands of this shitty system, are in no way prepared to be responsible for themselves when nobody else is. They need the teachers and administrators and their parents (they’re included here, too, I just didn’t have any handy to rant at), they all need to make these kids understand, they need to say to them, You are my responsibility, I am responsible for you.
        And what I realized just a second after the door closed, was big angry man, he probably got the same when he was young. That last generation’s recipients of shitty public educations are now in charge of doling out this generation’s shittier education.
        And then I’m told that I can’t do that. I can’t just say those kind of things to people, that I have to pick my battles. And to that, well, I picked it. And I have to do that. We all have to do that. We’re screwing the kids over just as much through staying out of it as those people inside are by doing or not doing whatever it is.
        Yeah, the system’s got problems. Scrap it. Wholesale. Get rid of it. Ask me what to do, ask us all. The money’s there, the infrastructure’s there. There are systems that do work. Do that. Don’t phase them in, just start over, from the beginning, and do it right.
        And yeah, some of the kids are so far gone already that there’s no helping them. That’s sad, sure, but if you can’t help them you can’t help them. Let’s find out who’s responsible for them, put them in prison or execute them, or make them adopt all the kids they’ve failed over the years—but let’s not wreck even more kids through some impossible guilt-produced backward obligation to the things that are already irreparably broken.
My daughter’s got 12 years of school before college, and it takes only a few minutes to fuck a kid up forever. So as of this writing, my ass is officially on the block. Up for sale. I’ve got tuition to pay.

^[1]
	ere’s the truth: XXXX X XXX XXXXXX XX XXXX XXXXX, X XXXX XXXX XXXXXXXX XXXXXX XXXX XX XXX XXXXX XXXXXXXXX XX XXXX. XXXXXXX XXXX XXXXX, XXX XX XXXX XXXX XXX XXXXX XXXX.XXXXX XXXX XXXXXXX XXXX XX XX XXXX XXXXXX XX XXX XX XX XX XXXX, XXX XXXXXX XXX XXXX XXXX XX XXX. I’m almost 34, my birthday’s just a few days away—and that’s got nothing to do with why today’s not the day, it’s just a fact of the calendar, that’s all—and though I’m not old, and certainly not wise, XXX XXXXXXX X XXXXXX XXXXXXX XX XX XXXXXXXXX XXX XXXXXXXXXX, XX XXXX X XXX XXXXXXXXX XX XXXX XXXX XXXX XX XXX XXXXX XXXX XXX XXXXX XXXX XX. X XXXX XXXXX X XXXX XXXX XXXXXXX XX XXXX XX XX XXX. There’s a scene in Miller’s Crossing, where Tom Reagan’s standing in front of Johnny Caspar, and I think Mr. Reagan’s been beat up a little bit, or maybe this is before that… I’m not sure, and it doesn’t matter. Anyway, they’re talking, all civil and Coen, and Johnny’s fat little kid runs in and says Papa! Papa! Papa! Papa! Papa! Papa! Papa! Papa! Papa! Papa! and Johnny smacks him hard. Kid wails, but he stops it with the Papa! Papa! Papa! Papa! and Johnny and Tom finish up their nice little conversation. X XXX XXX XXXXX XXXX XX XXX XXXXXXXX XXXXXXXX XX XX, XXX XXXXXXXX XXXX XX XXXXXX XX XXXXX XX XXXXXX XX XXXXXX, XXX XXXXXXX XXXX XX, XXXXXX XXXXX XXXXX XXXXXXXXX XXX XXXXXX XXX XXXXXXXX XXXXX XXXX XXXXX XXXX XX XX XXXXXXXXX XXX XXXX, XXX XXXXXX, XX. XX. XX. XX. X XXX XXXX XX XXXXXX XXXXX.[2] I get over it pretty quick. The trick to it is: don’t be me. And then when Johnny and Tom are done, Tom’s leaving, Johnny hugs his kid, coos to him, says, “Aw, did somebody hit you?” And what kind of spork would this be without discord? Lies. Lies. Lies. That’s what it’d be. I know what I want. Thing is, I don’t always want what I want, dig? Hence Kevin. Kudos Kevin. Everyone is kinder than me. Everyone. You show me your lopsided pot and I take a bat to it and then I come at you, break your fingers, smash your wheel. Maybe someday someone’s going to grab it, twist and break my wrist, but I don’t know who that’s going to be. Instead it’s “Yeah, well, you’re going bald!” and what the fuck does that have to do with it? We’re supposed to be talking about the fucking pot. I’m saying pottery and I mean words. I need to use the pot. There’s an explicit purpose to it. It’s no good to me if you made it wrong. I don’t care about the size, the shape or the finish. Color means fuck all. But it needs to be absolutely what it was intended to be. [3] The binding on this issue: It occurred to me that I’ve been doing a modification of a 4-hole Japanese binding for single sheets, but I’ve been using it to bind folded signatures. Um, duh. This issue we’re doing the regular, traditional, 4-hole Japanese method, binding single sheets with soft covers. Doing it old-school. The outer cover’s just attached to the back, the cover asymmetrical, not so much covering it as it is holding it. The reason for the asymmetry comes from this understanding I have in the back of my brain somewhere, that balance comes through imbalance, that a perceptual apprehension of a symmetrical, balanced thing in four dimensional space won’t appear balanced at all, and that you must in fact tweak it to account for time to have it balance in four dimensional reality. See? So yeah, of course asymmetrical. Thank you for your time. [1] Truncated, due to space limitations. Normally, I’d just cut somebody’s piece if I wanted a few more pages, or a few pieces if I wanted 20… but this time it’s someone else’s issue, and there’s nobody for me to cut. But the truncation’s probably not due only to that. Yeah, there’s a whole lot more pages in this issue than normal, so that’s gonna cost me extra, money we at spork don’t have, but that’s none of your concern, honeylove. Sweetiekins, I’ve been running out of bookstores lately, nauseated, broken, horrified, like if I went to the leper colony and discovered a herd of fetishists masturbating onto the walls of every hut. Wait… WHAT?!!? See, love, what are books? These days, I mean? And what are bookstores? You see where I’m going with this? Honeybun, we suck, you and me and all the rest, and we’ve gotten what we asked for, and we’re gonna get what we deserve. We’ve lost two independent bookstores in Tucson in the past few months, and they were the kind of store that yesterday I really really needed. A small, comprehensible, comfortable place with a limited range a guy can easily wrap his head around, a staff I trusted, a staff who knew my predilections and habits—and who love and push my publications, oh yeah, oh yeah—and to whom I could say “I want to read Céline, but like if he was a fry cook instead of a doctor and soldier…” and they’d know instantly where to send me. Bookstore people I wanted to just drop in and say hello to. And then ask them for some Bukowski but without all the puking… or something Palahniuk but less repetitive, less contrived (since sometimes you want it easy, you know, but you don’t want to have to bend that low—and Chuckie, it hurts me to say it, it really does, I loved you so… and here’s what I think you’re doing wrong. You’re interacting too much with them, your people. They’re dragging you down and making you stupid and chaining you up with their expectations—but what are you doing, Charlie P? You’re teaching them! You really gotta stop that. Oh my god do you ever have to stop that. If you could just sit here where I sit, reading the submissions some of your people have sent… and then see how angry they get when their resemblance to you, their pale, drooling sycophantic resemblance, is mentioned… I don’t know that it’d make you see, necessarily, but maybe you would… maybe you’d see that it’s not really helping, that it is in fact hurting. Let’s all be writers! How hard can it be, really? How hard can it be? Honestly, people. There are objective realities at work, it’s not all just what we like, or what we can relate to, some things are good whether we like them or not, some things bad. Tom Waits = Good; Justin Timberlake = Bad. No one can argue that, no matter what a person may feel on the subject. And with you, it’s like someone kicked you, put their finger in your face, their eyes not even seeing you, their eyes making your face a mirror to them and all they can see is their own wants; and they hold up Lullaby in one hand—you made me so happy with that one, Chas, it was you, but a you looking up, looking out, a growing, branching you, and I could forgive the tricks and the cheap little hooks—and the other hand fisted but the index finger stuck out so stiff it’s crooked and snapping from the tension in the tendons, and they’re spitting at you with every word, “Bad author! Bad, bad author!” Then they rub your nose in your book, and even though you know it’s good, really really good, this whole scene screws with your perception…), well, hopefully you’ve been places other than B&N or Borders, and you know what I’m talking about. But I walk into bookstores now and I come out never wanting to see another book again. I can’t buy books. I can’t read book reviews, I can’t… I can’t. That whole section at Borders or B&N, all the overstock. That’s the problem. Bulk. Scattershot overwhelming process, this small words and large-type, no ideas, buy all you want, we’ll make more, disposable entertainments, little more than magazines in book shapes but without the pictures of hot women in pretty underthings, and leaving me dirtier and worse for wear than had I spent an equivalent amount of time and attention on some good old fashioned honest porn. I leave a bookstore and I don’t ever want to write again. Don’t want to read anymore, don’t want to publish, don’t want to make the books… If I were prone to seeing conspiracies, I’d say that Oprah and the NYT Book Review were actually agents of the government, slow brainwashing and intellectual eradication their purpose, working toward a manageable groupthink ideal, taking the long view, figuring in just a couple more generations we’ll have it all sorted… [2] This redaction is necessary. It’s not secrets or anything. “It's not enough to just say this is all about freedom of expression. We respect freedom of expression but we know there are certain boundaries and limits.” [3] Trillian, my daughter, she starts 1st grade in the fall. The school she’s at goes only through kindergarten, so we’re looking all over at what’s available, where she should go next year. There’s two schools we really really like, but they’re both way out of our price range. The one she’s at now is out of our price range too, but not so much as these others. One of them costs more than the state university out here. We can probably get a whole lot of financial aid but even with the maximum we could get, plus secret magic from no fewer than three fairy princesses kindly disposed to us and sympathetic to our cause, it would still be about twice what we can, at the extremes of most dire privations, realistically afford. We’re told to go for it anyway, told that there might be a couple bonus fairy princesses with magic to spare, but as I haven’t actually talked to any of these magical creatures, I don’t know how much faith to put in the possibility. The other school is about equal what it costs to go to the university, and with the maximum of financial aid, and the institution of the mentioned privations, we could probably just about make it. Maybe, if I sell my ass and mouth, and if my customers pay my asking price, and competition doesn’t force me to do the work for a nickel a shot (likely in today’s economic climate)… So, with that in mind, we signed her up for GATE testing, thinking maybe it wouldn’t be all that bad at a public school if she was in the full time GATE program. The test was this morning, so we took her down to the local high school where they were doing the testing… showed up at 8, packed into the cafeteria with a bunch of parents and kids, big sea of chaos, her name spelled Gillian Burke on the list, the address wrong, and some district yahoo telling us we’re pronouncing our own daughter’s name wrong, that my own daughter is pronouncing her own name wrong… Probably like 20 or more teachers and administrators in the cafeteria, all of them annoyed to be there on a Saturday, all of them concerned only with themselves, none of them seeming to be aware that there’s a bunch of children there. The kindergarteners are finally corralled, then shoved out the door, and one child is immediately lost. Taken into some other building. A couple teachers run off to retrieve her, not terribly concerned, like it happens all the time, like it’s no big deal to lose track of a five-year-old girl. They take Trillian off to go fill out a bunch of bubbles on a bunch of optical-scan forms—we’re told it’s to gauge her creativity, somehow, measuring how well she conforms to measure her creativity or something. I didn’t quite follow. They take her and herd us back through the cafeteria, outside to wait the two to three hours it’s going to take to do the test. Outside, there’s a bunch of high school kids sitting around at tables, waiting to do their Saturday school thing, because it’s good to punish kids who’re already being failed by their school and parents. About 8:20 some angry man opens a door, tells them it’ll be a couple minutes, then disappears. Comes back at 8:25, waves the kids in then closes the door—the door with no external latch—behind them. A few seconds later a kid comes up, another one of the Saturday school kids, asking where they went. I point to the door, the kid tries it, but it’s locked. I ask him if there’s some other way in there, he says there isn’t. I look at his paper, the paper tells him that he’s supposed to report to the cafeteria at 8:30. The cafeteria where they’re doing the testing for the 1st and 2nd grade kids, and they’ve put signs on the door that say: Testing In Progress. Do Not Enter. I go in anyway, ask one of the functionaries if there’s some other way to get through to the back of the building. She asks me why and I tell her the kid needs to get to his punishment. She says that’s none of her concern. I’ve been that kid. Thing about it today was he wasn’t late and he showed up like he was supposed to but he can’t get where he’s supposed to go, where they told him to go, and it doesn’t matter if he goes where he’s supposed to go because that’s not where he’s really supposed to be anyway, though there was no way he could have known that. Oh, and when we parked the car, following the signs… we parked and went to the sign that said GATE TESTING, taped to the fence, in the corner, the fence to the left, a wall to the right, no GATE at all. I believe either I or they failed the whole gate test before it even started. Also, at the entrance to the lot, the lot with maybe 8 cars in it, was a big sign that said: LOT FULL. My tax dollars at work. Yours too, they get Federal funds. Like I said, I’ve been that kid. I tell the kid I’ll give him my phone number at work and he can have some shithead administrator give me a call on Monday and I’ll corroborate for him that he was there, that he was there on time, and that they should consider his Saturday obligation to them fulfilled. I pound on the door the big angry guy took the rest of the kids through, I pound on the windows. I get nothing. The kid says, Thanks anyway, and wanders off, probably figuring he’s gonna get what he’s gonna get no matter what he does, so maybe he may as well just enjoy his weekend. Whole day ahead of him, all that. At 8:34 another kid comes up, tries to go to the cafeteria, but can’t. I ask if she’s there for Saturday school and she is. Her paper tells her to go to the cafeteria too. She calls her mom, explains the situation and waits. Her mom arrives around 9, and right at the same time the door opens and the big angry guy sticks his head out. I call to him, tell him that he’s missing a couple kids. “They’re late. They’re supposed to be here at 8:30.” “No, she wasn’t late, and she’s supposed to be there,” I point to the cafeteria, “at 8:30. This is not her fault.” Okay, maybe she was a couple minutes late, but how is it gonna help her to get further penalties piled on for 4 minutes? “She’s here as a punishment, if she can’t be here on time…” I say she was on time, and the problem was he wasn’t where he was supposed to be. He says that’s not his fault, and I say that it’s not hers either. And then he says, “It’s not my responsibility.” And that’s pretty much when I lost it. “IT IS SO YOUR RESPONSIBILITY. YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR EVERY SINGLE FUCKING ONE OF THESE KIDS HERE!” He stammers something. And I’m told later that I was being kicked at this point, but I don’t remember that at all. “Has it occurred to you, to any of you,” I say, “that if you shitheads were maybe doing your jobs all along then you wouldn’t be here today, that if your systems weren’t so fucked up that this problem here might not exist at all?” The height of civil discourse. “You obviously don’t work in a school.” But the thing there is I kinda do. And my wife does in reality. A functioning school where the parents and the teachers and the administrators are constantly aware of all the students, wholly focused on them, to the exclusion of all else—because, strange as it may seem to some, it’s a school, and we kinda figure that’s what schools are about. The big angry guy, probably just to get this over with and get away from the ranting yahoo out there on the patio outside the cafeteria, tells the girl to get on inside, then shuts the door. Me, I’m still yelling at him, that he and all his compadres are the reason these kids are failing, that it’s precisely because they can say the words, “It’s not my responsibility,” and believe them when they say them; the kids hear: You are not my responsibility, which also pretty much means, I don’t care about you. The kids, too young, even at 15 or 16 or whatever, and the recipients of the shitty educations at the hands of this shitty system, are in no way prepared to be responsible for themselves when nobody else is. They need the teachers and administrators and their parents (they’re included here, too, I just didn’t have any handy to rant at), they all need to make these kids understand, they need to say to them, You are my responsibility, I am responsible for you. And what I realized just a second after the door closed, was big angry man, he probably got the same when he was young. That last generation’s recipients of shitty public educations are now in charge of doling out this generation’s shittier education. And then I’m told that I can’t do that. I can’t just say those kind of things to people, that I have to pick my battles. And to that, well, I picked it. And I have to do that. We all have to do that. We’re screwing the kids over just as much through staying out of it as those people inside are by doing or not doing whatever it is. Yeah, the system’s got problems. Scrap it. Wholesale. Get rid of it. Ask me what to do, ask us all. The money’s there, the infrastructure’s there. There are systems that do work. Do that. Don’t phase them in, just start over, from the beginning, and do it right. And yeah, some of the kids are so far gone already that there’s no helping them. That’s sad, sure, but if you can’t help them you can’t help them. Let’s find out who’s responsible for them, put them in prison or execute them, or make them adopt all the kids they’ve failed over the years—but let’s not wreck even more kids through some impossible guilt-produced backward obligation to the things that are already irreparably broken. My daughter’s got 12 years of school before college, and it takes only a few minutes to fuck a kid up forever. So as of this writing, my ass is officially on the block. Up for sale. I’ve got tuition to pay.