I have nothing bad to say about my grade school. It was a fine institution, a fine faculty, a fine experience which probably shaped my life in some way. I feel less obligated to heap praise upon such an expensive school which my parents had a hard time paying for. I mean, we paid our money, the product has been delivered, I am free to do with it as I will.
Whatever the case about nostalgic heuristics I spotted something in the grade school newsletter today that made me laugh, and if my chuckles were disdainful then I apologize to all involved but the matter was just too vapidly pitiful for me to let pass.
It seems my grade school has established an Athletic Hall Of Fame for its storied 8th Grade sports heroes. An acquaintance from my graduating class was recently inducted into this storied pantheon of outstanding grade school athletes from that school. Induction is followed by ceremonied (apparently attended by nothing but family members of the inductee) and speeches by the grade school ahtlete thus ordained.
This sort of thing makes mes want ot be a serial murderer. I have no thrist for bloodshed or homicide but I wish sometimes that these pithy accolades heaped by grade schools onto their eternally grade schooled alumni were tempered by a sourness, by a darkness, by comments that inevitably reveal a pathos behind the facade of self-congratulatory sycophantry the infects nostalgia which intrudes upon the sincerity of memory.
I read about the comments offered by this Hall Of Fame Athlete. He claimed that the hours and weeks and months and years spent on the basketball court and in the football fields made him a better man in the years to come. He made salutatory comments regarding other classmates of the time, and that is where my sudden desire to be a serial murderer arose. I wanted those comments of his to be tempered by the reality that all was not golden in those days, all was not as the happy faces of fabricated serenity would have us think both then and now. No, there was a darkness among us. As we cleansed our unfilthy souls with humanistic athletic endeavor the clouds of no mercy gathered over others among us, knowing then as ever that he would one day fall to infamy at the hands of his unquenchable anger, his sociopathic monstrosities. While we hit softballs and congratulated ourselves for breaking records of the day another among us was planning to take us all down, to demeen our reputations and our resolve with cherry-topped filth.
