8am to 3pm, part 1

Do you ever wake up from a dream that feels so real its almost as if you're not waking up at all? That the time spent in that REM reality was as strong as a reality as turning off your alarm? Nothing fantastical or fulfilling, not even profoundly depressing; just as mundane as when you make coffee and check your e-mail while it brews, just as empty as when you check your hair in the mirror and wondering if your hair is thinning. The zombie life is no life to live and there are spurts of excitement as you meander in that time that the world allows you to meander. Sometimes something unexpected happens and it reminds you of how exciting it can be, how wonderful making coffee is, how proper grooming is essential. And then you go back to sleep and they become a calculated sequence of events once again and it is tough. "This is water," I keep reminding myself as if I've replaced the Lord's Prayer with the mantra of a man who committed suicide with 10x the level of my awareness and excitement of unraveling the world (surely if he tapped out, how can I cope -- by telling myself this is water). Oh well, got to drink this coffee and fall in love all over again as if every hour is a relationship that ends, a continuous string of one night stands that float by the wayside until you fall in love all one more tme, finding things from the past relationships that allow you to hold on hope for a bliss that one can frame in your dusty heart.




Once upon a time, when classrooms used chalkboards and school computers were limited to how many bullets you should buy before hitting the Oregon Trail, there was a group of children in uniforms. The boys would wear baby blue collared shirts with navy blue slacks. The girls would wear plaid-red jumpers with white button-up collared shirts. It was a class of roughly 30 that, aside from the occasional transfers or new kid(s), pretty much saw each other 9 months out of the year. Girls would get periods and develop breasts. The boys would fake wars and eventually learn what the term blow job was, which would usually be followed by laughter and comedic fascination.

Friendships would form, alliances would gather, reputations acquired, preferences were developed, love would blossom, hatred festered, jokes played out, teachers despised, authority would be tested. Approval was determined by your sociable skills, your level of power over the rest of this class and thus determining the weak links or scapegoats of this group -- by characteristics or features such as a well-documented broken home or the fact that your 12-year hair was stringy and your forehead was big. If the rest of this group found out you liked a certain person of the opposite sex, it would suddenly reach around the rest of the class. If your social standing was strong, then it would be of even greater importance to this group, sometimes reaching the ears of separate younger groups that had similar social protocol.



This controlled social dynamic was to prepare these limitlessly-potentialled mounds of clay for even larger packs, ones which were romanticized as being more mature and adult. This organized, accepted method would lead you to greater heights and understandings as human beings and whatever happened afterwards would just be a means to separate the wheat from the chaff, social Darwinism. But the idea was if you were to give these 30 children the same weaponry and arm them with uniformed knowledge then the potential can be further suited and although there were flaws, which there were, it was better than an alternative isolation of home schooling that limited your knowledge of social awareness, or so it looks. I am not one to argue for or against such debates. I am only here to document an "innocence" that I treat with reverence and love.

I am a grade school historian.

(****disclaimer: i think you guys all know who i am, it's gonna be first-person, but knowing that the internet makes things smaller and because my memory isn't 100% no real names will be used and shit might be flourished with inaccuracies so just treat this as creative non-fiction or straight up fiction, really, in the same way bukowski really was chinaski.)