Chapter 246

Up at 6, taking the dog out, all that shit. I rode to work, listening to a Jocko Willink podcast, he was talking about the book Ordinary Men, documenting the batallions of Germans who’d round up the Jews in Polish and Ukrainian villages to either put them on trains or shoot them on the spot. Aside from a few who refused, a great deal of seemingly ordinary men performed the grueseome task asked of them. I was surprised to hear that most were in their late 30s or 40s, working class men in a reserve battalion (the younger, more able-bodied were in combat units on the front line) and thus they had grown up in the pre-Nazi years, before mass indoctrination took place. Also, you can’t really explain the atrocities with a sort of combat frenzy or a desire for revenge, like in other cases. So what then? Conformity? Obedience to orders? Something dark, very dark, deep inside all of us?

I had a double with the twelfth-graders and gave them time to do their homework in the second period. Then I sat in the office, which was nice and frosty, with the AC on. Students and teachers kept waltzing in and out, ignoring the giant CLOSE THE DOOR sign and I had to refrain from yelling at them. You’d have to be seriously dim to not notice the contrast in temperatures and how some people might possibly want to keep it that way.

I had another class just before lunch, with eleventh-graders. They’re new to me, so I call them using the student list stuck on the front desk. They all have some kind of English name, and not that I think I’m better’n anyone, but in this very case yeah, I’m above that and just use their real names. There’s only a handful who have obscure characters I don’t know how to pronounce and I realized that I’d been avoiding them, going for the easier ones. I’ll have to print my own student list and make annotations on it.

I rode home and ate the last of the R n’ S, topped with beef strips and fried eggs. I love R n’ S, I enjoyed every grain and how coated in flavor it was. I watched a few videos by that young conservative John Doyle, he is very entertaining and has a balanced dry humor style that never goes over the top, brings a lot of good points and sustains them with facts but I just can’t get over the fact that so many of those conservatives push for a rational approach to societal and political issues but are also religious. It sounds like such a contradiction to me.

I went back to the office and had two classes in the afternoon. They went really well. So far, in three days, none of my classes felt like a chore. I remember some other schools I taught at in the past where nearly every second of every minute of every lesson felt like getting tortured, and I’m glad things are going well these days. In between classes, I sat at my desk, listening to ultra-aggressive grindcore offerings by Shit Life, Death Toll 80K and PLF. Death Toll 80K might very well have released the greatest grindcore album of all time with their 2011 LP Harsh Realities, and only now did I listen to the long awaited follow-up, ironically titled Step Down. It is indeed not as good, and more than anything I think the vocals bring it down. I then listened to Harsh Realities for what must be the 500^th time in my life, and it absolutely slays.

In the previous years, we finished work an hour earlier on Fridays, but now this has been abolished and the whole schedule is packed from 8 to 16:50 every day. Bummer. I went home, opened an IPA and a small bag of Doritos, and kicked back. The girlfriend came soon after and cooked a huge meal of braised duck, eggplant and onion pancakes, that we ate watching The Office. I washed the dishes, had a glass of rum and watched the Hip-Hop Evolution episode about Outkast and Goodie Mob. I went to bed around 11. Good night everybody.