Re: Keeping Score [was Natasha. What's in a Name?]

From: Phil Osborn (philosborn2001@yahoo.com)
Date: Wed Sep 04 2002 - 19:38:46 MDT


>From Olga: "but it seems the law of diminishing
returns kicks in on this perceived efficiency when one
resorts to calling people trash."

And the NAZIs? Maybe there were some "good NAZIs?"
Right...

There were some good people in the Armuchee area, even
some passable teachers at Armuchee H.S., but they were
the rare exception.

At one point, I got in trouble for not being a coward.
 The PE instructor used the PE boys as training
dummies for the abysmal football team. We were
supposed to lose. I had never been seriously hurt and
had absolutely no fear. It all seemed like great fun
to me, and I went after the team's star player
(himself a real fine fellow) and kept bringing him
down or hindering him and stopping him from scoring,
which is what I was supposed to do as the opposition.

This pissed other team members off - especially since
I was only 5'8" and 140lb. (but my parents knew
something about nutrition, so I was a lot healthier
and stronger than most of those poor kids), so one of
them switched to be in front of me on the line, and,
when I lunged forward to stop him, he - at over 6' -
brought his knee up violently into my face. He then
told me to stop making trouble.

My mother bought me a fashionable pair of pants -
which annoyed the farm boys. So they cut holes in the
seat while I was in PE. I never noticed and wore them
the rest of the day, to the great amusement of the
girls. My family was not well to do, and my mother
raised the roof for the Armuchee principal. So he
held a special session in the auditoriam for all the
boys. Somehow he had gotten things confused and
thought that my pants had been urinated upon - not
cut.

So he told us this story about how when he was a ditch
digger some guy urinated on him when he was in a
trench working, and how he nearly killed the guy. End
of parrable. I'm still trying to figure out the moral
to that one.

The one guy who in retrospect undoubtably deserved the
most admiration from that place and time was the
school "queer." He made no bones about his
inclinations - any more than Abbie (the girl) did -
and I never saw any of the endemic meanness from him.

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