My youth was filled to the brim with
debauchery. Being the young rebel that I was, I spent quite a lot of
time in detention. In fact, I spent more affternoons in that dulled
out classroom, with that zombie-like teacher, than I can rightfully
remember. Was it awful? Surprisingly, no. Perhaps that perception is
what kept me there, day after day.
I quite liked my time spent in
detention; he let me listen to my head phones and I would listen to
podcasts and new music, with my head down and my mind clear. It was
sort of meditative, if you will. When others were in also in
detention (about half the time), we would brainstorm new rambuctious
ideas together. How can we prank the whole school? How can we prank
that gnarly math teacher? What is our next move? Should be super glue
people's binders to the floor? How about quarters? The following day,
we would act upon our new ideas; putting us again, in detention.
It was like a rebels club, in a way; a blender of wonder We
never got sick of being there, because each moment we spent together
in detention acted as sort of an icubator to our alliance. We would
have deep conversations of civilizations and where humans went wrong.
One way to realized humans went wrong was this: being an adult meant
to kill one's inner child. We realized that so much of what was wrong
with the world was that people stopped having fun and behaving like
children. To have the passion for life and the curiousity of a child
is to live life to the fullest.
From this, we created a sort of
cocophany society. We became a group of best friends, destined to
bring about weirdness and child play. Eventually, our alliance grew
to about 35 people; we would have meetings in the court yard where we
would all wear our pajamas, hold hands, Disney songs and plan
mischevious acts. One instance, we once had what we called a “Salmon
Run,” where everyone would dress as Salmon and we would bombared
track races by running the opposite way down the race track. It
became quite the hit! Pretty soon, the Meridian Cocophany society
became too big for us all to know what to do; which was fantastic
news! The rebellion, weirdness, and childplay was spreading!
Detention couldn't have been a better
place to put me as a young gremlin.
