Cafeteria

The Buckman Elementary School cafeteria is still to this day the grandest room I've ever seen in any public school building. The brick archways around the three main entrances and above the stage, the authentic century old velvet curtains hung across the stage, the geometric tiled floors. All those features and more of the room combine to form a certain elegant sturdiness. Most often, students enter the hall through the lunch line. The way the kitchen is arranged is such that the children line up on the other side of the entrance to get their food. The hungry kids proceed to slowly make their way across a 30 or so foot section of buffet until they reach the register and pay for their surprisingly high quality food.

The salad bar lies outside of the buffet area and students are required always by a watchful parent volunteer to collect a suitable amount of fruit and vegetables before moving on to a table of their choice. Once the students are done with their lunch they must wait to be excused from the table by another parent volunteer who checks to see that they have eaten enough nutritious food. Upon being excused the kids are free to walk down the long hallway through the gymnasium and out onto the blacktop playground.

It was at one of these long-hall like bench-tables that The climax of the story takes place. One of the many kids who bullied me went so far as to spit in my food. I just had had enough. I only ever wanted to be friends with these people and I simply couldn't understand how they could be so consistently vitriolic to me. And so, having been involved in judo and kickboxing since the beginning of the last summer I proceeded to utilize the skills taught to me by senseis Servignat and Frager had taught me and beat up the bully with a flurry of kicks and a choke that had to be pried apart by the frantic parents who of course hadn't witnessed the instigating bullying and spitting.

Stealing

Stealing is one of the most universal and heinous crimes that exists. When one lies, he steal an individuals right to the truth. When one kills, he steals a family's son, daughter, father, or mother -not to mention the murdered individual's right to life. When someone commits rape, they steal the victim's right to their own body and sexuality. When one takes property that does not belong to them they steal the victim's time, energy, and very possibly his lively-hood. By the thief doing so, it's easy to extrapolate the situation to a theoretical small business owner's scantily orderved table. By taking the products that he's paid money for in order to resale them to you, thieves literally steal the food off of his table. By plagiarizing the work of another without their permission the cheater is stealing the essence of someone who worked hard to produce a unique intellectual product- which is quite possibly the most valuable commodity on the planet.

I'm proud to say that I haven't had a serious physical theft experience with someone. However I am a consummate liar. And it took practice to become this way. I first began to practice the unsavory skill of telling falsehoods when I was in middle or maybe even elementary school. It really started with the age old question of:
"Did you do your homework?", to which my reply was always along the lines of:
"Yes".
I lied. And I got better at it. And I lied more and more about more and more things until by the middle of high school my whole life was literally built upon a shaky maze-like tower of untruths. Lying was a compulsion now. Ever question in a casual conversation has a million possible answers. It's not that it didn't matter to me if the question only had one or even a few true answers. What mattered was rolling the dice, and adding another layer to my labyrinthine hyper-ruminated upon tower of lies. I literally was past the point of having to do conscious mental exercises in order to remember all the ins and outs of my various deceits.

Until the webbing that held together my tower began to fray. And nearly my whole life came crashing down around me in a matter of weeks. I learned lies didn't just hurt the people I told them At the end of the  day I was not living an authentic life. Not only had I stolen the right to truth from every single important person in my life a multitude of times. I had robbed myself of the experience of not feeling like my life was a constant anxiety-riddled balancing act. I had to rebuild every relationship that I broke. Starting with those involving my family. I had completely lost the trust of my father by not telling him that "No, I haven't done my homework". Because what that one little lie turned into was a leviathan of deception.

I came to recognize that in the beginning it was inaction and fear that lead me to lie. The procrastination and inaction that resulted in me failing classes or not completing other responsibilities naturally lead me to fear being discovered. Especially as a two sport athlete who overcompensated with the failings and imbalances in his life with a fanatic devotion to all things running. I went through a period of telling truth. A lot of truth. And catching myself when I lied compulsively and telling the person I was speaking with that- no that didn't actually happen that way. The compulsions to tell random useless little lies are dead these days. I'm just not willing to cause others or myself the pain of interacting with, or being- and inauthentic person.

 I still tell lies. But they develop in my head only with conscious thought. And mostly they're very small white lies that will save me a lot of trouble at the cost of what I observe to in all practicality be nothing. Or, more often, the lies I tell are to protect the people I care about. The truth cuts deep, and is just as dangerous as the darkest lie. Is this moral? No. Every untruth ever told had robbed the victim of their inalienable right to the truth, and that isn't fair. But who's to decide whether someone deserves a stinging truth or a comforting lie.

My First Trip To The Emergency Room

'Fiddling' was one of my favorite hobbies when I was in elementary school. I would take sticks from all different trees around the neighborhood and carve designs into the bark, or strip it off completely. Of course now I understand that this is called whittling not fiddling, but as a young boy I refused to be troubled by such conventions as the words I used in everyday conversation actually existing. My friends and I would design complex games of war and then beat each other with those sticks, using them as swords, until someone started crying or all of the weapons broke. Since I was too young for my mother to grant me the permanent responsibility of owning my own pocket knife I would surreptitiously steal kitchen knives, and use those to carve most of my swords.

One day, during a typical muggy, post-rain Portland Spring afternoon I was using a serrated steak knife to carve whorls into one of the best sticks ever. a long, slender, and yet dense Oak branch that I had torn off of some unsuspecting neighbor's tree. I distinctly remember coming across a difficult and ugly little knot in the otherwise beautiful, soon to be sword. So, I of course began to hack and saw at the evil little knot with all of my ten year old self's strength and ferocity.

Suddenly, the knot popped right off of the branch without an ounce of resistance and the sap-stained stainless steel serrated edge of one of my mother's more expensive steak knives sliced deep into my left index finger. I let go of the knife with my right hand and watched the handle slowly rotate downward like a Victorian monarch's thumb declaring execution. Once the handle reached the apex of its rotation the blade slid out of my finger and fell to the increasingly bloody ground next to my red-stained bare feet. Then the pain came. And came. And continued to explode across my consciousness despite my screaming.

My family rushed to my aid. My mother fainted right away, I learned later that she thought that I had cut off my whole hand. My father took his shirt off and wrapped my hand in it as he picked me up and began to move towards the car. The ride to the hospital was only a blur of white hot pain and road rage at the mundane idleness with which the rest of traffic was driving.

Upon reaching the hospital I was forced to wait no less than thirty, or perhaps even forty minutes until finally thank god a nurse ushered us into a curtained off "room" and sowed my bisected finger back together. After the nine stitches sealed my wound closed I passed out. I slept for quite awhile. I later discovered that with me asleep, and already being downtown my dad took about an hour or so to run some errands before coming home to my mother who was, understandably in my opinion, angry at his dalliance. In all, I learned from then on to stick with paring knives rather than their serrated cousins when doing my fiddling work.


The story is as much about me cutting my hand as it is about how little control a child has over their own care. I was an object in the story that an action was happening to throughout most of the blog. Is there an overarching moral? Perhaps not, but the vivid red of my blood pouring out of my hand that day is still fresh in my memory, hopefully after reading this you'll be able to recall it too.