Monday, August 20, 2007

* SKOOL DAZE BLUZ

(The following effusion was inspired in part by my awareness that I seemed to be "rushing" out blog posts now, knowing that I wouldn't be able to expend nearly as much effort when school started.)

I imagine that damned near EVERYONE who has grown up in a Western nine-month school system has internalized the same seasonal-emotional clock: the clock that says, with the end of summer, something painful comes. Whether your particular school starts in mid/late August or after Labor Day, it's that same archetypal turn towards the "Fall of Man," both a darkening of the seasons and an imprisonment of the soul: i.e., SCHOOL.

And it also really doesn't matter that much if you're a student or teacher, young or old. ALL know that two-weeks-to-go shudder, that beginning-of-the-end-of-pleasure "I-have-to-do-something-now-before-it's-over!" As a child, I knew it, even though I also knew that, as a poor kid whose only love was books, it wasn't that great a loss. As a young man without a job, though, I especially felt it, perhaps, since watching Jerry Lewis & his marathon without having found a real job YET meant true failure, according to the natural order/timeframe of things. (That is, without a job, I should by all rights be in school now, in some fashion or another, doing something!) As a middle-aged curmudgeon with a teaching job, yes, there's the pressure of syllabi and handouts and trying to concentrate the mind beyond the ephemeralia of blogs & "radio rants"—and yet my classes actually do deal with many of the issues that I'm so po'd about in these blog entries.

But still—yes: the body's, and society's, clock says it's the end of summer, a death, a finale, a funeral for the soul. But like that toothache I blogged about before—it's rather a delicious pain at this point in my life, an acknowledged product of the heavy fruits of consciousness. [Geez, I came off sounding older than I am. I hope.]

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