P & T Conferences

Few parents are coming. I sit and type, occasionally glancing out the window to watch some dorm kids play a rough and ready version of 3 on 3. Today was trying. Time seemed to inch along its path, and everyone seemed to have a shitty attitude. I almost dropped an F-bomb for purposes of sheer provocation. So you won’t learn. Fine – I’ll say fuck. Then at least you won’t sleep. I am the equivalent of Skinemax late night previews, a small amount of substanceless titillation that ends up angering the audience with its small yield. There is considerable irony in uttering things that you used to derisively dismiss and hoping they might have some effect, not for you the speaker, but for your listeners who may – in fact – be tuning you out. Well, no shit. That’s how this goes, idiot.
The ones who fuck around tend to be my favorites. I’ve said this before. I am terminally afflicted with repetitive repetition disorder, in a non-Kierkegaardian sense.

*****
Short sentences are the new Onyx, and I’m not just talking Sticky Fingaz. Thomas Gunn wrote a poem called something Heart (Sacred Heart?) that made it difficult for me to sleep last night. This has been a strange year for poetry, vis-à-vis my life. I wonder if more scars equals more visceral memories – and say this because I encountered two young people whose hands and forearms were canvasses of scars: nicks, slits, and stabs that I am guessing were the result of work, not socio-psycho fallout – because the times I had stitches burn on indelibly in my memory.
3. What is one of your prejudices?Hippies and Yuppies, but I am turning into both.
So says Carrie Brownstein of Sleater-Kinney.

*****
There is a need to be serious. Students have problems – deaths in the families, medications, learning disabilities, foster situations, have been abandoned, forgotten – all fucked up shit, in other words – and you can’t be that brainless self you normally are that makes jokes and stares at the floor to avoid dealing with large gray incessantly bugling pachyderms. You are the other adult on the end of this connection, and this is scary. Sometimes you do the thing, truly do it, and as a result you come away with a plan that is not the pedagogical equivalent of a “go deep toward the oak tree and I’ll heave it.”

*****
The night is ending. The night ended.