LiveJournal Tags: douche
I was thinking this morning of the pep-rallies I was forced to go to, or risk detention, back in high school. “Pep,” does not exist in nature, and “rallies,” are usually fascist affairs that end with someone being placed in an oven. Together, these two words describe an event of macabre fascination. Pep-rallies were usually held to bolster the confidence of people who already have too much, like the school sports team. Being popular was not enough: the required worship akin to Gods. Others were held like over-hyped prayer sermons for the Canucks. These were the worst, especially for a child like me who had no interest in hockey whatsoever. A hockey game was just something to be passed over while flipping idly through channels in search of brief glimpses of boob in the pre-internet days of the 90’s. The entire concept of a pep-rally for the Canucks eluded me. These men were paid in the hundreds of thousands -if not millions- of dollars to do their dream job and went home to their overtly attractive wives in their McMansions to eat steak. They didn’t seem in dire need of my attention, or praise, especially in a group setting. The combined excitement for “our” team was somehow supposed to be able to magically transform from orchestrated shouting into raw vigour for burly men in sweaty uniforms hundred of miles away, who had no idea what we were doing for them. This resembled the beliefs of the “wackier” religions who felt that prayer in their mass sermons somehow amplified their wants and desires to a cold and unfeeling God. Let it be said that I am not magic: I cannot make things happen by willing them to happen. It takes some form of direct physical contact for me to do something. Furthermore, my implied intent extracted through duplicitous means will not gain you your vicarious glory. Why then am I being forced to sit in a crowded gymnasium and made to watch my school’s less-than-adequate cheerleaders fumble through their tumbling performance?
Who orchestrates this madness? Why, the biggest douchebag on the faculty.
But who could that be? The principal? The vice-principal? Both are firm candidates for biggest douchebag, but no, they can’t reach the heights of douchebaggery that this man has achieved.
The biggest douchebag of course, is always the gym teacher. This closeted homosexual who carefully crafts plans that involve young boys stripping down in a locker room he can observe through a window in his office that looks directly into the shower.
My first encounter with this man basically told me everything I needed to know about him. A high school is a large place, and it’s as segregated as it can be without directly violating any major laws. Based on your Grade, there were places you were expected to avoid, unless you wanted some dirty looks, or even a fist to the gut. Thus, you might not venture to the third floor, reserved for the older students. One time I was asked by my teacher to go to the upper storage room to retrieve some books for the classroom. I went up, following her instructions, but went to the wrong door. The key I was given opened into a computer room. A man sitting at a computer desk turned to me and asked me what I was doing quite gruffly. I told him I was looking for the storage room. He asked me, “Does this look like a storage room?” as rudely as possible. This was after the major offense of poking my head through a door into a classroom in my school, a class that was not currently in session. The door I wanted was across the hall, and looked identical to the one I had just passed through in an underfunded, due to be torn down, sort of way. Didn’t I feel stupid!
This was Mr.Keane, looking for all intents and purposes like Wayne Gretsky.
As a Gym/Journalism/English/History teacher, he was unavoidable for anyone trying to pass themselves through the school.
I mentioned segregation before: let me expand upon that. Mr.Keane was a firm believer in segregation. He separated classes based on their grades. If your grades fell below an “acceptable” level, you were moved to a different classroom, much as if you had special needs. This could happen for any reason: if you missed an assignment, or didn’t meet the Bell Curve average, or if he just plain shit didn’t like you. You were to be “educated” in a different sense than book learning. You’d be taken away from your fellow classmates as if you had a disease. Now: this was a man with some pretty bullshit assignments. Plus, he convinced the PTA and school board to combine classes. Math, Science and English class overlapped for group projects, which drained huge time and resources for students. These group projects included building shit like catapults, despite being dangerously unqualified for such tasks. Why do I say that? Because someone got hit in the head with a catapult. Not the projectile: the actual catapult. What did catapults have to do with Science, Math, or English? Nothing, but you were expected to say the opposite and stretch it out for eight pages in your final assignment You had to feed their egos, after all.
I can go on endlessly about how much I hated this man, or how creepy it was trying to change into my gym short with him around, but I’ll try to keep it to a minimum. He kept me out of Journalism class because he thought I was a loser and he never bothered to look at my writing. He considered it to be embarrassment to have a Peter Parker-lookin’ motherfucker like me interview such prestigious figures as the mayor of Chilliwack (no relation to the band Chilliwack). Ah Chilliwack: the town that had the Guinness Book of World Records record for most churches per capita: now a rural haven for grow-ops and crackheads who grew weary of pot. Surely, a lowly Eighth grader like me should never brush elbows with a God-like figure as the mayor of Chilliwack. What questions could someone like me ask, aside from, “How pathetic is your life?”
With a Journalism credit, I might have been able to advance my writing beyond this bullshit blog. Oh well.
This fucker, Keane, loved pep-rallies, and he loved the Canucks.
There is nothing positive to be gained from pep-rallies. They do not bring schools closer together. There’s no such thing as school spirit. It doesn’t exist. A school is a cold and sterile place you go after waking up too early in the morning. “School spirit” is the organized hatred of the rival school. You know, the one where all the available girls who aren’t dating your friends or are super-Christian/ugly go. The one where there isn’t lead in the drinking fountain water. After a pep-rally, the assumption is you should go to the rival school armed with baseball bats and do what you may like you were in Clockwork Orange. Their mascot is to be bukkake raped, and the remains put up on a pole.
A school assembly is just another place for a kid to avoid eye-contact with his bully. No one on the school faculty seemed to understand that, or how intrinsically gay assemblies are. There was never any need to host an assembly with regards to the Canucks when every kid in school was already talking about them ad-nauseum. It was unavoidable on TV, newspapers, radio, and in the school halls. I had alienated myself from virtually everyone with the mere act of not watching the game the previous night, or any night before that. I never watched hockey. It was boring; even the fights. Pulling a shirt over someone’s head wasn’t interesting unless that someone was a large-breasted female.
I had “friends.” They had friends. That meant I had to hang out with my friends’ friends, who were even bigger douchebags than my friends. Which meant they loved the Canucks, traded hockey cards, and considered anything not hockey gay. So, I had to listen about hockey and contribute nothing in every conversation. Then, I had to file into an assembly and listen to further B.S. about a B.S. team. Hooray.
The Canucks winning or losing does not affect my life at all. It only affects the douchebags I have to deal with on a daily basis. Will they be loud and obnoxious, screaming things like, “Yeah we did it!” or will they act like prissy little girls on their period? This is my conundrum.
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