I had movie popcorn with butter and now my hand smells like I finger-banged the Land O' Lakes squaw.


::GringO::

There is a name to my pain...and it is Bucky

Tell me if you heard this one: a student sits in class, and s/he is bored. The lesson is not challenging; it’s just more of the same rigmarole that s/he has heard time and again. So the student, bright, bored and frustrated, acts out: s/he makes rude comments; the student wanders from his/her seat; s/he challenges the teacher’s authority with verbal jabs and by ignoring the lesson.

Sound familiar? We’ve all seen these kids in our classrooms; hell, some of us were those kids. I know I was.

Now you know that kid? Well, I have that kid’s opposite.

There is a kid, whom I will call Bucky, who is just about as dumb a person as I have met. I pity the dumb as I also envy them; they may not know what’s going on around them, but they seem happy that way and that’s fine, at least for them. Bucky is so dumb that he fucks up spacing out. If they gave out grades for lunch, Bucky would have an incomplete. Bucky is one more piece of proof that intelligence and jaw muscularity are directly proportional. Bucky drives me insane with his inability to think beyond the seven seconds his brain is currently failing to cope with. Bucky is failing P. E. for the third straight year. Bucky is so frustratingly ignorant and rude that I feel that I deserve sainthood for not wearing his blood like sloppily fitted crimson gloves. I find myself hoping, daydreaming, that Bucky tries something violent after school, so I can throw him into a trashcan so that he can begin his work on the rest of his life.

But I can’t do that. I am Bucky’s teacher, and while everyone else has given up on him (I’m not saying they’re wrong for doing so, mind you), I cannot. So I told him to meet with me after school so that we can discuss this day’s outburst and try to find reason and peace in the class. He didn’t show, and that’s a good thing, because then I didn’t have to face a moral quandary.

Had Bucky shown up, I would have tried to tell him that he can still make something of himself, and that high school is the last chance he would have to do so. I would have said that college is still a possibility for him, that he could achieve what he wanted, but only if he put his nose to the grindstone and worked with me and his other teachers; he could graduate with a GPA worth remembering.

Since he didn’t show up, I didn’t have to worry about lying to the little moron. Except for the GPA bit. I doubt anyone would forget a student who could win the James Blutarsky Award for Academic Embarrassment.

I think that what bothers me so much about Bucky is that he is the contradiction to what I am taught about students. What I am taught as a teaching student is that, no matter what, you don’t give up. You keep trying, reaching, and someday you’ll get through once you apply the perfect pedagogy to the student that was nearly custom fit for her/him. What I am seeing is that, once the students give up, it is almost impossible to get them back. There is no real extrinsic motivation; it’s all internal, and it’s all self-generated. I didn’t put out that fire, so I have no idea how to rekindle it.

That, and I have little patience for undeserved arrogance.


-Zeepdoggie

A Grand Bon Mot or Deux

While hanging with The GringO, a little nugget fell out of my mouth that lends yet more support to why we should have a podcast:

Z: What's he singing?
G: "We're only a lifetime away" (in a very ugly falsetto)
Z: Wow. Deep. but not as deep as the asshole those lyrics were farted out of.

"I tell ya, I can't think of a more humiliating and disgusting way to die than to be pierced by an interplanetary shit-sickle."

From whence that issued, many more as witty were spoken and forgotten. Admit it, you want to hear more.

-Zeepdoggie

Closing the Door on '07

Things I saw randomly walking around Chicago last year:

• A raptor of some kind taking a pigeon in mid-flight;
• A businessman shitting himself on the corner of Madison and Wacker;
• A bunch of guys pretending to be Elvis to raise money for cystic fibrosis;
• One human finger;
• More than twenty used condoms in the street;
• A young lady getting finger-banged on a tour boat;
• The largest pile of dog shit I had ever seen (you could’ve lost a toddler in it);
• More human excrement than I would ever care to see;
• Two people trying to push open a pull door immediately after watching someone fail in the attempt;
• A street performer falling in the middle of his dance routine;
• A huge stack of AOL Installer disks (I had forgotten those even existed!);
• A Hipster boy, while trying to rearrange his package in those insanely skinny jeans, tearing a huge hole in the crotch of said ridiculous fashion trend, spilling his fake junk onto the sidewalk (I think it was a pair of socks);
• A kid suffering splash damage from a horse taking a crap (he cried and cried and I laughed and laughed; seriously, Mom, what are you doing letting your kid get that close to a horse’s browneye?);
• A woman in a fur coat shouting “I HAVE MACE!” to no one in particular;
• Three rich white girls arguing about who was more “street;”
• Burned clothes surrounding the eternal flame in Daley Plaza.

Wow, but I saw a lot of shit last year, often literally.

What did you spot?


-Zeepdoggie

Gayest Death Ever

A Brief (1) Explanation of This Drawing

Having exhausted my supply of DVD’s I was able to stand watching yet again I knew I needed to do something to occupy my mind. Crosswords or Sudoku would require thought and effort to draw upon certain resources of my brain that I just did not feel like tapping. What to do then? Why not a drawing? Well, OK, a drawing, but what kind? I have made portraits for a long while and though laying out the muscle and skin wrapped around a skull, then altering the arrangement of said elements, is a challenge, after a while it becomes tiresome (2).

Thus, with such thoughts and feelings I decided a figure drawing would be a nice challenge. I prefer to draw female (3) figures, but as I do not possess a readily available and willing body of the feminine persuasion (4), my own masculine build would have to serve my needs. What kind of pose? How about walking with two objects being carried, one in each hand? (5)

The lighting was easy to arrange, the topless pose easily captured with a digital camera, and viewable as a drawing resource. I laid out the drawing in an outline only form. I stepped away, blinked, made a snarl-like face by raising the left side of my upper lip, thus also altering the position of my left nostril as well, while simultaneously raising my right eyebrow. This is the thought that produced such a facial expression: “Man, that looks gay.”(6)

Though I wanted to create a figure piece I knew this was one I would not want for myself. Then who would want it? Eureka! The CSM (7)! Why, I still owed him a drawing for the T.V. he gave me and a warming gift for his new apartment! This decided I went to work altering the body, making it even more intimidatingly testosterone injected than my own (8). I added a portion of lower body, also nude, complete with tasteful and subtle, yet accurate, genitalia (9). The body shaded in, I needed some type of head. But why make it a normal head?

Then it occurred to me that the end of this month has a holiday commonly called Halloween, an English bastardization of the German Hallowe’en (10). Death! Blood! Pumpkins! Wait, no, just death! How about having a cowl emerge from the shoulder, a throwback to the image of the Grim Reaper who is bedecked in a black robe? “The Gayest Death Ever” (11) was thus completed. I hope you enjoy it.

Practical Information

Created using charcoal (12) pencil on acid free sketch paper. It is a standard size suitable for cheap framing.

End Notes

1. This is not very brief actually. Quite long really, quite.
2. Just as this writing style is tiresome.
3. A term used to describe the gender of the species that bears children (with the exception of the Sea Horse, in which species the father has the babies).
4. Keeping someone against their will is apparently a crime.
5. Allow yourself to contemplate and decide for yourself what the objects are (though given the sexual preference of the intended recipient, I would nudge you toward a type of novelty phallus).
6. “Gay" is the current slang vernacular used to describe homosexuality. It can be used in several ways in a sentence, be it noun, verb, or adjective. Other forms are possible though not as commonly used as these.
7. CSM refers to the pseudonym assigned to this friend by Zeepdoggie.
8. A great Challenge I assure you. I was once assigned “hottest bod” while standing in a group of third graders (13).
9. Notice some slight indication of a dorsal vein, and pubic hair, the only kind this Death has oddly enough.
10. Absolutely true.
11. In light of this title perhaps the method would involve a severe act of sodomy using the tools of his trade (see (5)).
12. This is a substance commonly found beneath the topsoil of Earth. It is formed by the decomposition and of carbon-based plant life which is then buried and through time becomes compressed and is, atomically speaking, altered. It is worth note that coal is still used as a power source due to its combustibility which produces the energy to move turbines which provide power for electronic devices. The longer it has taken coal to form the cleaner it burns. Thus we find anthracite coal which in appearance and texture is similar to that of volcanic glass, though created in an entirely different process. If coal has been compressed long enough, with enough heat produced as well by said process, diamonds will form. Diamonds are the hardest of all natural minerals, as well as the most valuable (14).
13. Don’t ask.
14. If you read all of that, I will laugh at you (15).
15. See (10)

::GringO::