GARDEN TALK--Suddenly I'm a writer in a genocide
if that interests anyone
Rex
I awoke at 2am and started thinking about a couple of English professors who inspired me to write. If they would have never came into my life I wouldn’t be a writer in a genocide.
I have no idea how many articles I’ve published going back to the late 90’s but it’s probably in the thousands. Kind of mind blowing to think about it and now I write about people who want me dead. My only self defense weapon is a keyboard attached to a Mac computer.
In this garden walk and talk I talk about the two professors who trained me as a keyboard warrior. The session is all about me because I’m a big fucking narcissist. Would a narcissist ever admit to receiving an A minus on an English essay? Would he admit to receiving 11 in a row? Never. I do say nice things about all of you but it’s towards the end.
Interesting story about your professor and the essays. She probably focused on you and reading your essays exclusively, because she recognized talent and wanted to drive that home on you. English was also one of my best subjects, along with science. I sucked at math, but excelled at grammar. I seldom had the discipline to complete a writing assignment.
Once in junior high I worked late into the night finishing a poem for the next day's assignment. It was from the heart, and I was very proud of it. The (lesbian) teacher gave me a zero, and accused me of plagiarism. She was adamant that it could not have been my own work. I never got over that.
Once in high school I was forced to take a summer class to make up a lost credit. It was an English class. One assignment was to write several paragraphs focusing on description to paint a picture in the reader's mind. The teacher chose mine to read to the class. I got an A. ( without a minus, lol )
Great to hear you for the first time Mike. RE 'proper teaching' ...I had a friend who is a drummer. His drumming had a sort of rhymic hitch, he kept great time but a lack of squareness in it that I loved. I was always glad that he had NOT had drum lessons that would have sought to remove that hitch. So much teaching seeks to pour us into a preconceived box like so much concrete. So few teachers are skilled at making sure the individual human remains intact in the process. In my own life I am a computer drafter (!) who like you was trained to draft by hand. I liked hand drafting and was good at it when I came to Oregon from Detroit in 1992, but once I got out here, I (slowly) got myself 'up to speed' on dumb-puters (what i call computers). One of my supervisors looked at my first computer drawings and expressed sadness that I too had been 'eaten' by the machine, now my drawings looked just like everyone elses computer drawings. I am so glad it made him sad, I think he is right. It's like you can't just go back, restore the human 'hitch' into the drumming once trained out, squared up.