This author first wishes to acknowledge the stupendous, albeit coerced, efforts of his students.

.: Today, as each young podling handed me their Midterm, I jokingly shook their hand (sometimes, hands) and said, “I want to thank you for being here. Your presence means a lot. Thank you”. I will admit, without being pressured, that of course at first I meant none of it, it was a joke, a big hilarity, everyone smiling and thinking “Yeah right”, the other TAs smiling and laughing with looks like “Good one” on their faces but maybe hiding jealousy inside for the closeness and comraderie I evidence with my students, and me acting all clever for having made a pretty funny conceptual inversion on the spot and– even more notable– pushing it past any calm or logical conclusion to a new level of funniness.

But as time went on (I have 90 or so students whom I call “mine”, it can take a while to shake all those hands) I began to think more on it, and think how– honestly– there’s something strangely miraculous about this situation, about us being brought to this moment, intersecting for a few weeks or months, me shouting and jumping in a psuedo-erudite St. Vitus’ Dance, them scrawling in notebooks trying to seperate my little insanities from what they will really need to know, you know, for the test; for the whole damn enterprise of University education…

I won’t go into the legacy of the “University” now, it isn’t that relevant (well, ok, it is, it’s just time-consuming), but still: i started to really believe what I was saying. Oh of course I continued to laugh and play the eccentric teacher-Fool (that is my pedagogy, you see: decentralizing the classroom while making a Holy Spectacle of myself… get ‘em laughing (read: VULNERABLE) and nail ‘em with the ideas, the critical thoughts, the We-Don’t-Have-To-Believe-This-Crap philosophy of DECONSTRUCTION) but inside I was becoming more and more convinced of its truth. Now, I am not that much of a Fool– I know they aren’t there by choice, or not by the honorable, noble, “Here I stand…” CHOICE, out in the open, everything; but they are choosing to be there, really, allowing it to happen to them, even if it is a muted and mitigated circumstantial decision. And we stage these amazing get-togethers for their benefit, constructing tests, whittling down questions, like a beautiful Jacobean Drama, or maybe more like a never-ending Kaprowian Happening, yeah that’s more it– an Elongated Happening in 49 Parts (Days of Instruction), strange rules and protocols, everyone has a cue card but no one knows just what’s going to happen next– and then it’s me, up on a desk, throwing a chair, and trying to get them to reverse-engineer Hernan Cortes’ smile after his converstation with Montezuma in the altar room atop the temple in Tenochtitlan. It’s an amazing stew, we navigate half-blind, and I really have to admit– yes, it it important to write this and have it sit in virtual space so that any of the world might see– I have to admit that they make it fun. They give it purpose. They make it happen.

I think about my old J.D. Salinger days, and particularly about Franny and Zooey; I think about the Fat Lady, how Seymour would always tell Zooey to polish his shoes for the Fat Lady (even though they were on a radio show). I could talk about this idea– the shoes, the Lady, all of it– for hours, assuredly; but for this present moment, I tell you only this: there is something out there, enmeshed in the web of us, that makes it all necessary, all worth it. It is why I cannot ever speed through this grading, I can’t let their words fall on me while I make myself, through boredom or insensitivity, deaf or blind. Because, despite my complaints and jokes and irritations, deep down I am convinced, I am a believer, I know just how much I owe them for being there and I feel how much they really want this, be it MMW, UCSD, or– I mean especially– LIFE.

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Well, then– I really should read through that bombastic expurgation above, maybe try and decipher its denser moments before pressing the “Publish” button down at my screen’s bottom. But I won’t. I’ve had some scary moments this evening, quite scary– and I believe I am finally learning when to leave well enough alone, as they say (still they, not yet we). So I am trying to get through this, my first real post in a long long while (though not for lack of trying, dear readers– do you really think I would through intention or mere negligence leave you all in such a lurch?) and I got a few miles to go before sleep, as Robert says. Albeit sans snow.

Getting the Econobox rolling this afternoon, I– as usual– brewed a nice pot of coffee, a dark wytch’s brew, malificium, malleus maleficarum. The curse, though, was on me: as I graded several papers, I drank my cup o’ myths, complete with (what I can only now surmise) half-and-half that had somehow gone very very wrong in the day or two since I actually, fully and completely, shut the fridge door. Yes, it’s true… I must have left the damn door incompletely shut, for though the ice hadn’t quite melted in the freezer portion, things looked.… odd in there. The mayo was all streaky and seperated. The rhubarb jam– heretofore unopened– was a little leaky on its own pebbled canning jar sides. The eggs were inexplicably wet on top.

It is a creepy thing– the rot that lurks beneath the surface. Just how quickly things devolve to a bacterial form of life. How much our complex, multi-tissued, lumbering selves (supposedly some sort of peak acheivement for the evolutionary process) suffer at the hands of out prehistoric, yet engagingly persistent, single-celled ancestors…

See– I often posture myself as a with-it sort of fellow; educated, intuitive, critical and insightful. But alas, my dear readers, the veil was lifted and the truth revealed, like Borges’ Muslim leper: I am a dolt. Never occurred to me things were… off. I put that besotten cream in my coffee. Things went downhill. Not immediately, but… later:

in the grocery store, purchasing a few necessities, crouched down to look at the vegetable bullion cubes, a certain tingling in the stomache. I stood up, not quite concerned, into… a nauseating, spinning cloud, hot flashes, a cold sweat or two, and a persistent desire to sleep in my bathtub. I paid for my goods, stumbled home, my limbs feeling drunk, uncoordinated. All I could think was, “I need to get home and eat my pretzels”. I hadn’t figured it out yet, hadn’t put the clues together…

When I arrived in my home, I was deleriously thirsty, so I jumped to the fridge (remember– I hadn’t pieced it together yet), poured the rest of my “Orange Juice” (quotes are to indicate that it existed as a name only at this point) in to a cup and drank quickly… And, well, the OJ was “off” too, tasted like chalk. I was so confused, it was like I’d been abducted by aliens and they had returned me to my world but the drugs and mind-control hadn’t worn off yet. It took me 20 minutes of investigation to figure out the story, and I discovered that my door doesn’t really shut unless you pay close attention and watch it for tracking lapses. So– my food has been rotting– slowly– for days and days, without my knowledge, because (oh it all comes out now) I can’t recall if I have ever, before tonight, closed that damn door successfully. And all this time I have been a believer in our miracles of refrigeration technology. Fool me.

Anyway– all’s well now. I feel better, I ate my pretzels (and some cous-cous with diced pickles and tomatoes). And– this you probably guessed– it made grading impossible. There you have it.

Well then, time to see how all this turned out. Hope you’re well out there in the real world, living the lives I only dream about. In the magic world with papers that grade themselves, and half-and-half that never goes bad.