No Recess

I’ve been saving sharing this with you for a long time. Partly because it’s embarrassing, mainly because it’s awful but also because it just never felt like the right time to show this to you.

You see, when I was in college, I wrote a novella for a course I took on writing novellas (shocking, I know). I entitled this novella: No Recess. I got an A-. I probably deserved a C. But apparently, just finishing a novella guaranteed you a B in this class.

It never felt like the right time to share this novella with you because the writing seems clumsy and dated. The truth is, I wrote this thing nine years ago, when I was no older than PIC's Paul Frank and Tyler Haggard. As you can see from reading this, Frank and Haggard are better at twenty than I was then. What can you do?

Anyway, two things motivated me to share this novella with you, chapter by chapter, over the next twenty days (at a chapter a day). First, my new book is on its way. (It is way better than this novella.) And I want you to get used to reading this kind of format from me with the hopes that it will pump you up to buy the finalized version of my book: The Snippets and the Impure Tour.

Second, PIC is in serious transition here and I don’t feel like writing anything new on it. I just don’t trust it. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with it but well, when you have a personalized blog for three years and that blog gets yanked away, you kind of, I don’t know, feel like you don’t want to write in it. It’s kind of like when my mom redesigned the kitchen in my parents’ old home. Sure, the new kitchen was better in almost every way. But I couldn’t find a flipping glass to save my ass. It took me a while to feel comfortable eating there. Just one of those things.

So anyway, here is the prologue to the novella, No Recess, which I wrote back before I could drink legally. I hope you enjoy.

No Recess
By Nathan DeGraaf

This book is dedicated to the memory of all those kids who went before their time.

PROLOGUE

A Letter to the Principal
Received: 2-19-97

Dear Principal Hartman,

Your recent school announcement overwhelmed me with accusation and disappointment. Your words began something like this: apparently, some overzealous students figured the vending machines in the school’s cafeteria were simply no good as functioning vending machines and could better serve the student body as broken hunks of vandalized glass. Your sarcasm surprised me, but truth shone from within your insolent statement, most likely without your knowledge.
Not one item in the school’s vending machines even bordered on healthy. As a matter of fact, the vending machines supply the student body with fats, sugars, tooth decay, acne, and other miscellaneous toxins like MSG or Yellow Dye #5. I am quite sure the vandalizing students (if they were students) simply hungered for junk food, the thrill of trespassing and vandalism, or a combination of all three. However unknowingly, these vandals spared the health of the student body—most likely for only a day or so.

After the sarcastic statement, you offered a reward for any students who knew the whereabouts of these vandals. I found it ironic that you are completely ignorant of the perpetrators’ identities, yet positive these perpetrators were indeed, students. Your assumptions undermine your very search for truth and as such, I cannot possibly consider your call for truth as anything more than a cheap ploy to look good for your supervisors. Academia at the high school level seems to be nothing more than looking good for one’s supervisors.

Your final statement infuriated me so much that I memorized it: “If any student out there can tell me why kids today are so insolent, uncaring, insensitive, unconcerned about the world in which they live and above all, ignorant of the importance of education, I wish to receive an explanation, because I am baffled by the horrendous behavior of certain students.”

Fair enough. You want to know so I will tell you. We’ll start with modern technology and its effect on mass society, move into an assessment of our Babylonian culture until we’re led right up to the glory-be-to-God education system, which flaunts discipline and neglects actual education.

I was born in 1981. By 1981, you were thirty-five years old. You understood that the world had changed—perhaps you even helped change it. I only knew that I was in the world. I played video games, watched Sesame Street, drank Kool-Aid, Coca-Cola and Mountain Dew. I ate prepackaged meals from McDonalds, Burger King, Wendy’s and Taco Bell. My dinners at home came from boxes, jars, cans and delivery boys. My mother taught me to do laundry when I was six. It involved throwing clothes into the machine, applying soap and pressing the ON button.

How did your mother do the laundry?

I microwave my bacon and eat eggs with the yolks already removed. I watch seventy channels of television. I own a computer with CD-ROM and Internet compatibility, as do you. As do we all. I played baseball, football, basketball and hockey through organizations and leagues that required compensation for services rendered. We didn’t have pick up games. We were part of a consumer society. If it could be bought, it would, and we’d much rather buy it than make it. Making something requires work and ingenuity.

The society we live in is pre-packaged, remote-controlled apathy at its finest. No one cares about actual people anymore. Food companies spend more money on advertising than actual food. Who cares how it tastes? What are they gonna’ do, make their own pasta sauce, their own peanut butter? Yeah, right. It’s this or nothing people. Eat up. Yum, yum. Television decides what clothes we wear and where these hip garments are purchased. The marketers don’t want us to think. Even you, a supposed educator, couldn’t care less if we learn the benefits of education. You want test scores, football victories, pep rally attendance and, above all, you want money. You want a spotless record. You want working vending machines. Well, too bad, because we want something which means a hell of a lot more to us than your retirement does to you: we want a point.

This technologically advanced society has taught everyone at this school, from the valedictorians to the drop outs, something your religious background never showed you: there is no point. Let me state this again for dramatic effect: there is no point. Why learn how to make something a machine can make ten times quicker? Why learn how to cook when the pizza will arrive in less than thirty minutes? Why care about your job when it’ll just disappear in a blink of monopoly? What is there to care about? Television taught us life was one big batch of bliss. We compare our world to the world on the television and are obviously disappointed. So, we react. We lash out at the consumer world that binds us. We steal things, take drugs, wield guns, battle sexual diseases and consume skin products. And why not?

Therein lies the problem. There is no reason why not. We just do. We don’t have to think or care or even acknowledge that there is anything to think or care about. Mankind can draw borders, but individual man doesn’t always respect those borders. The vending machine vandals knew the illegality of their action, but that wasn’t the point. Everything is illegal nowadays. If someone wanted to break a law just for a law’s sake they could spit on a sidewalk or throw rocks at random windows. It wasn’t that some vandals simply wanted kicks and Twix—they wanted kicks at the expense of the school, i.e., the society that tells them they are wrong for hating the world in which they live.

How many murders were there the year you graduated from high school? Compare those statistics with the murders that will occur across this country in my final year. Everyone has a gun, and why shouldn’t they? They’ve got the right to bear arms. In this consumer society, gun owners are simply consumers buying and baring their products. As a matter of fact, society encourages the right to kill and murder other people. The more rapes and murders a society has, the less its property value is worth, which is all the better for people in more affluent neighborhoods because their property value rises. Have you ever considered why alcohol can be bought for one third the price in the ghetto as it can in the suburbs? Why should poor people have cheap beer, food and houses? To keep them poor. No one can respect a government that calls them worthless, just like no one can respect a public school that calls them worthless. We build societies around our attitudes. What you consider insolence, we consider necessary. What you consider apathetic, uncaring and insensitive is quite the opposite. The vandalizing of the school’s vending machine represented the vandal’s love of themselves as individuals in a society that shuns individualism, i.e. they cared enough about their own self worth to retaliate against their oppressors. Their apathy is simply an acceptance of a technological world. They know you’ll have a new vending machine in a matter of minutes. They know you’ll beef up security as a result. They were applying an adverse sensitivity of the world around them to the very world that deems them insensitive. In short, they were representing emotional unrest through a physical medium—an art form, if you will, or even if you won’t (it makes no difference to me).

Which leads me to the wonderful world of education, where arriving on time is more important than applying yourself, where dress-codes imply appearances, where rules are made up by the minority for the alleged good of the majority and where anyone like you can have the freedom to detain anyone like me for whatever reason. Just like the products we buy and the jobs we hold, our schools are interchangeable, prefabricated versions of a greater whole. We are not taught to think freely; we are taught why thinking freely is dangerous. We are shown the proper ways to care for our property; we are shown that appearance is everything (through dress codes and tardy penalties); we are taught that the only acceptable boys and girls are the boys and girls that cannot accept any alternative lifestyle; we are taught that God is a clean lunchroom. We are not taught that if we don’t make decisions for ourselves our futures will be nothing more than an extension of this fast paced, mediated society that confronts us with lies every day. We don’t want to be part of lies—at least, not those of us who think—we want to be part of the truth, and the truth is somebody fucked up a couple of candy machines.

And the lie is that anyone really cares.

In the four years I have attended this school, I have never heard you care for anything more passionately than our crippled vending machines. For once in your life at Luther S. Dunby High, you gave a damn what we were doing. You never cared what we were doing when everything appeared fine. You only worry about us when the shit that hits the fan splatters on your tie. You don’t care what we learn or how we learn it. Only that we show up, look a certain way, buy your food products, stay in school and don’t break laws. That way you look good, we look good and the world can move on—oh yeah, either way we’re just ignorant fools in reality, but reality isn’t a test score or a retirement fund. Reality is an intangible substance that high school students confront everyday and high school educators create.

Well, your accepted reality got smashed like glass and so now, you want answers. Why are kids such little bastards nowadays? Is it society, television, education or drugs? Is it the school’s fault, the parents’ fault, or the fault of organized crime?

Nope.

The reason kids are so filled with an unbecoming wrath never before seen in America’s youth is because we’re good students. Believe it or not, we’ll need to be able to think like those vandals in order to find a place in society. If nothing got broken, then nothing would get fixed. Our world is closed off, not wide open like your world was. We need to kick in the door just to get an appointment.

You want us to care about the reality that you created, but you don’t want to help us find a place in that reality. As far as you’re concerned, it’s conformity or insolence, and never the two will meet.

So, I found insolence. I got a few friends, a few crowbars, a couple of lock cutters and in the end, I got me about thirty dollars worth of Milk Duds (my girlfriend’s favorite candy).

So go on and plead, “what’s wrong with you kids?” But be sure not to ask, “what’s this system doing to these kids?”

Because once you’ve inquired about possible error in your system then you must acknowledge your own part of the problem, which would yield guilt.

You’d rather not feel guilty.

That’s okay. You’re fine. Just remember: as long as I show up on time in the proper clothes with lunch money, combed hair and my books; as long as I never skip school or violate any of your laws (no matter how I feel about them); and as long as I look like I care, then your job is done.

What’s your job? As near as I can tell, you oversee our collective education, which means you teach us to feign interest.

Then you have the audacity to ask us why we don’t care?

Sincerely Yours,
Fuck Off.