Rejection - 1/17/2012

The prompt for this week's writing group is: "An occasion when you experienced rejection." I could have just submitted my journal but that would have been cheating. A high school memory came immediately to mind:

It is the late 1960's. The scene is a spring high school dance held at the local union hall in a small mining town in northern Idaho. I had just performed all the compulsory moves for a maladroit 16 year old boy. I had enthusiastically shaken hands with my few friends as if I hadn't seen them in years, though we were all playing baseball together just a couple of hours prior. Sometime, during the course of the evening; I would shake hands with the same guys each time we came in contact, as if one of us was a returning POW. It was all we knew to do. I think eye contact without shaking hands would have been too awkward to bear. We would sometimes attempt to talk, but the band was playing "Gloria" so loud that communication was impossible.

Those of us without dates were then required by ritual to stand in front of the stage and watch the band (composed of some of my classmates), standing as close to the speakers as possible. This activity showed any girl that may have been looking in our direction that we possessed great musical knowledge and might be called upon at any time to sit in with the band, Though I, myself, possess slightly less musical skills than the wind-up monkey with cymbals and the closest I would come to joining the band was to fetch an errant drumstick.. A casual stance and the bopping of my head, though undoubtedly totally out of sync with the beat, was the closest I could come to looking cool. And, believe me, I was the polar opposite of cool. I am not certain, but I may have invented the "air guitar".

The drunker or more confident girls would dance with each other. No teenage boy would be caught dead dancing early in the evening. Well, except one guy who was a northern Idaho LSD pioneer. He danced in the halls at school. Even guys that came with dates would hang out in front of the stage with the rest of us handshaking, speaker hugging, losers, while their dates danced.

The dance floor was huge. Though it really only needed to be the size of a jail cell. For a self-conscious teen, like myself, walking across the room to where the eligible girls were compressed against the far wall was every bit as terrifying as crossing a minefield. Everyone in the place could see you crossing the room. There may as well have been a spotlight on you.

For most of us, no floor crossing would happen until "last dance." It was important (for other than the most hopeless dork) to pair up with a girl for the last dance. It was always a slow song, such as "Something" by the Beatles. Of course, I couldn't actually dance. My idea of dancing was to put my arms around the girls waist and lurch around in no particular pattern, trying unsuccessfully not to step on her feat. Since most of the girls were several inches shorter than me, there was an uncomfortable bend necessary that increased the degree of difficulty and made me look like a staggering scoliosis victim. The sole objective of "last dance" was to find a girl that I could give a ride "home".

My lack of dancing prowess was moot if I failed to cull a consort from the bouquet of wallflowers. I had been covertly scouring the line-up all evening for a possible candidate. My strategy was to never approach "A"-listers. It was improbable that a girl who would not acknowledge my existence in the classroom would want to be seen with me, let alone experience my haphazard embrace. "A"-list girls liked good-looking, popular guys. I had the facial features of a young Gandhi. "A"-list girls liked star athletes. I played baseball. Our high school didn't even have a baseball team. Soccer hadn't been introduced yet. If it had been, my studliness factor would have been somewhere between a soccer player and the guy that played the clarinet in the pep band. "A"-list girls liked guys that drove cool cars. In the parking lot was my dad's ten year-old pick-up. The one we drove to the dump.

So I focused on the "B"-team, who were still out of my league, but it was possible that one of them may have drastically lowered her standards by that time of the night, so that an invite from me would be marginally less objectionable to slow-dancing with one of her girlfriends. There was the added barrier in that the "B"-team believed themselves to be "A"-listers due to the stampede of supplicants they could expect at "last dance". This significantly increased the probability of a rebuff.

The truth was that I would go as far down the alphabet as necessary. Bee-lining to a less desirable girl would not only increase the chances of acceptance but also the probability that I was the only guy that would be looking into her lazy eye that evening.

The band had announced that after "Satisfaction" would be the "last dance". I joined the other oddballs on the Bataan Death March to rejection.

Stupid Human Tricks - 7/2/2011

When I was in high school, my dad bought a brand new 1968 Mercury Montego MX Brougham. It was bright orange with a black vinyl top. It was very sleek and sporty, very out of character for my dad, who was a pick-up man. On rare occasions, I was allowed to drive it to school. I had a 55 Chevy, but by then, it was pretty much a rust-bucket that spewed smoke and backfired at the most inappropriate time. I ended up driving it, unsuccessfully, in the demolition derby. The Montego was way cool. With anyone else behind the wheel, it would have been a babe magnet. For me, not so much.

When I drove to school (about 3 miles), I would wait until the school bus had entered Interstate 90 and whiz by it at a high rate of speed, honking my horn like a moron (actually, exactly like a moron). This maneuver was designed to impress a girl that I had a huge crush on, but whose parents, wisely, did not allow to ride to school with a miscreant such as me. Actually, I paraphrased. I am pretty sure the word miscreant has never been uttered in Smelterville, Idaho. I should add here that this particular girl was so far out of my league that she didn’t even know my league existed. That did not stop the ever-hopeful me from the futility of trying. Her parental excuse was just to spare my feelings, she would not have ridden with me if I had duct tape and chloroform.

I usually had a couple of fellow miscreants riding with me, even though my parents had strictly forbidden me from “running up and down the road” wasting nineteen cent per gallon gas. I was supposed to drive straight to and from school. In retrospect, I am sure that my dad realized that was never going to happen. On those days when I had the Montego, lunchtime was miscreant cruise time, sans girls. It was not like the lousy schools now with their closed campuses, metal detectors, and armed security. About the only controls put on us were that the teachers took roll sometimes.

One cold Idaho winter morning I set off chasing the school bus. Just as I accelerated past it I hit a patch of black ice. Many southern readers (as if I have many readers from any region)probably have no idea what the heck that is. Let me just say that once you have experienced it, you will never forget. A few hundred yards in front of the bus, I went into a flat spin. I did several 360s and miraculously stayed on the Interstate without hitting anything or rolling over. It was totally luck, as at 16, I had zero driving skills under normal conditions, let alone careening down the highway at 80 MPH, with two caterwauling passengers. Luckily there was no traffic other than the school bus.

When I had spun to a complete stop, so did the school bus. It had to stop relatively short in order to avoid t-boning me, as I was sideways in the road. There were 55 faces staring straight at me. I don’t think the girl was impressed, nor was the bus driver, who happened to be someone that knew both me and my parents well. Needless to say, I rode the bus every day for the rest of the school year.

The race-car driver of the day was a guy named Parnelli Jones, who had just won the Indianapolis 500. This was back when the Indy 500 was a big deal and everyone knew who won it (and could pronounce their names). I know it is hard for young people to believe, but once upon a time the Indy 500 was bigger than NASCAR. Now I am not even sure if it is televised. My reason for this diversion is that calling a driver Parnelli was like calling a total moron, Einstein. It was not a compliment. That was my moniker until the event was forgotten and I earned more permanent and vile nicknames, based on other stupid things I did later in my high school career.

Mensa - Doorway to Nothing - 4/11/2011

It is not uncommon for an exchange with my friend, Bill Woolum, to inspire a blog. Bill is one of the handful of my Facebook contacts that is also a friend in real life. Last night our Facebook conversation began with a discussion of the Yankee/Red Sox game and ended with speculation as to which of our classmates, circa 1970, are Mensans. That may seem like a strange segue, but actually since both of us have severe attention deficit disorder, as well as other issues, it is a totally logical progression. Our exchanges often deteriorate into much more base topics (usually my doing).

I often wish that Bill and I lived closer so that we could have these conversations over beer, breakfast, or blancmange, but alas, we both love our particular coasts.
The Mensa dialog is what inspired this post. I am a member of Mensa and I expect Bill is a closet member. Speculating as to whom in my graduating class of Kellogg High School, Idaho, 1970, were possible Mensans proved to be an interesting activity.

Let me state at this time that I don’t believe my qualification for Mensa is any sort of accomplishment other than I am a really good test taker.

Mensans that I have come in contact with are generally weird and uninteresting, insufferable bores. (Except for Dave Powers and me) You will note that I have let my membership lapse. I have absolutely nothing in common with members of the organization. Contributors to their publications expend an inordinate amount of effort to try to impress each other with their knowledge. I write to publicly display my lack of enlightenment.

I believe that being smart is like being gay, it is not a choice. It is thrust on you and it is up to the individual what he does with it. My innate ability to process information has actually worked against me in my life. School was very easy and as a result I got bored and stopped paying attention in about grade six. Also, in the 1960s, in Kellogg, Idaho, tall, skinny, awkward, kids with big ears/noses that wore glasses and knew all the answers in class were not cool. I tried, unsuccessfully to be cool. I learned pretty much by osmosis, through no effort of my own. I can honestly say that I never read a textbook, other than an occasional chapter that interested me. As a result, I was, and continue to be a world class underachiever.

I graduated right in the middle of my 192 high school graduating class. That may not sound too bad unless you consider that the majority of those that finished below me would be considered special needs students in today’s society.

But, as is my modus operandi, I smoked the ACT/SATs, and went on to college, where I discovered lots of new distractions as barriers to success. I learned that class attendance was necessary to successful course completion. After one year, I was not invited back.

Getting back to the Mensa discussion, statistics would indicate that since Mensa membership is comprised of the top 2% of standardized test takers, my class should have included 3-4. I have no reason to believe that Kellogg High School produced genius above the national average. After all, we were all subjected to 18 years of heavy metal poisoning. I am thinking that would work against us.

Bill and I enjoyed speculating as to who the remaining 2 or 3 qualifiers were. It was an enjoyable exchange. I guessed the other Mensans from my class were Jim Etherton, Mike Jasberg, and Jeff Kenyon. Sorry Christy Blick, you can’t have beauty and brains. It wouldn't be fair. Bill did not disagree with any of those and added Brian Shiplett.

After our conversation ended, I thought that it is very possible that, like me, the other gifted students were also camouflaged, cloaked in mediocrity, and the high achievers from my class succeeded by sheer effort and ambition.