To the reader: I know that this rambles. Forgive me. However, it is, more or less, deliberate. 100 years after Joyce I am single handedly trying to take stream of consciousness to the next level. I call it “stream of randomness…”
I wrote an article for an underground paper. That was in grade 10, or maybe grade 11. The guys were going to do an underground paper. So I wrote about the last school dance. It wasn’t straight, you know, what I wrote. Even then. I can’t remember what I wrote, well it was a long time ago. But I remember that it was clever. I gave it to Joel Beard. He gave it back. He wasn’t mean about it or anything, but it didn’t meet the standards of “seriousness” that they were trying to meet. School dance? I think they wanted to write about student revolution. Anyway the paper never saw the light of day. Too bad.
Not.
They should have accepted my article. The paper would have been a runaway best-seller.
I have been living my entire adult denying the reality of my adolescence. The main way I do that is by watching TV shows about adolescence. I don’t know how that works exactly. Perhaps I live the TV characters’ life vicariously. I started this process when I was actually in high school; I watched Room 222 every week.
As an adult I’ve watched Degrassi Junior High, Degrassi High, and Degrassi The Next Generation. I’ve watched Heartbreak High (an Australian show), and Life As We Know It, a short lived hour long weekly that featured a young, rather chubby, and artlessly charming Kelly Osborne as Deb. That was the best teen angst show ever.
And movies: American Graffiti, The Breakfast Club, Fast Times At Ridgemont High, Dazed And Confused, anything with Molly Ringwald.
In real life, though, the dances were not so much fun. I liked the music. We used to have live bands, and they were very loud. Some were cool, some weren’t. We actually had Mood Jga Jga play at our school once. They were a great band, but we didn’t know their music, and it wasn’t dance stuff. Mostly from grade 10 or so on we had music men. Some were cool. Some weren’t. They were very loud. It was ok then to smoke. It was walking into a dance, maybe I was in grade 8, that I found out who smoked. I remember seeing Paula Hair-Affair sitting against the wall, smoking. She was a brain, at school. It wasn’t the brains you expected to see smoking.
I danced sometimes. With girls. I don’t know how well I danced, but it doesn’t matter now, and it didn’t matter then. The first dance I ever danced was with a girl named Elsie. There was a rumour going around that I fancied her. We were both of us quite small. Maybe that’s why people hooked us up. But I had nothing to do with her.
That was in grade 7. I had nothing to do with the girls generally, because they were in a separate class. And I hadn’t been in any kind of social group that would have given me access to girls. The girls I’d known in grade 6 were outcasts like me mostly. But that didn’t help. It wasn’t like the outcasts wanted to hang out with other outcasts – not then anyway. Later, ok. But Elsie. It wasn’t at a dance per se. It was at a lunch hour sock hop, the first I was ever at, and probably the last they ever had. Maybe they saw me dancing with Elsie and vowed never to let it happen again. The song was Light My Fire, the José Feliciano version. Figures – it was too fast for a slow dance and too slow for a fast dance. Who picked the music, anyway.
The whole thing got away from me. I was missing stuff. I knew exactly more or less approximately what it was. I’m living with the fallout.
But I quit watching Degrassi. I got tired of it, I admit it. It got too heavy, like Ayn Rand for teenagers; the message finally overwhelmed the story. So I have to find some other way to deal.
My teachers, though, it was all their fault. I will save that, though, for another post…
Ray Stevens
9 years ago
