It’s a busy day. I’ve got some meetings and then I’ve got Falcon practice because we’re playing a show with the mighty Naked Raygun at Metro next Wednesday. Bring your grandmas folks, because this amazing performance by the Falcon is sure to drench the panties bunched around even the most ancient and desiccated vaginas. That’s a moneyback guarantee folks (not valid). So come out to the Metro on the day before thanksgiving and throw your bras and dickslings, eh?

Anyway, last time I rapped at you I was talking about parent/teacher conferences and I was feeling pretty good about the whole thing. Of course, it’s short sighted to feel too good about anything that’s going on in schools when congress is declaring that pizza is a vegetable and making sure that our kids get plenty of delicious fries with every lunch. Not to mention, it seems like there’s been a real spate of child buttrapes in the news lately, which is disheartening, to put it mildly. I mean, don’t get me wrong, whenever I’m showering with a bunch of kids just going about the ins and outs of regular old naked, sudsed up horseplay, a penis can sometimes up and slip right inside someone, (who HASN’T had that awkward experience? Am I right?) but this isn’t about who raped whom or who’s pawning off horrific monstrosities as ‘towel snapping’ (though it bears mentioning that one of the big defenses for Sandusky’s actions is something along the lines of [and I’m paraphrasing his pedophile lawyer here] ‘He’s a big kid, a jock. That’s what jocks do, they take showers after practice and they roughhouse and stuff.” Okay, firstly, I was involved in various organized team sports from the time I was 4 until I was sixteen. In all that time, I NEVER once experienced a team shower. The notion seemed and still seems weird, and no one wanted [wants] to get naked around each other and well, I can’t be alone on this one. I’m pretty sure that the team shower is the stuff of movies. I remember that sophomore year we were ordered to shower after swimming class in gym but realistically only about 2 dudes did it and even then it was in their swimsuits [and they were the dweebs].

(But fine, I’ll accept that maybe it happens. I never played organized football. Maybe team showers are the holy communion of football practice. Maybe [and I’m doubting this seriously] everyone positively LIVES for the team showers afterwards. BUT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The coach is NOT EXERCISING DURING PRACTICE, and therefore DOESN’T REALISTICALLY NEED A SHOWER AT THE END OF PRACTICE [I am, for the sake of giving the benefit of the doubt {barf} ignoring the completely inappropriate nature of being a grown man and jumping into a shower with someone else’s kids]. I don’t think that there’s any way to spin that one. If you’re showering with my son, sorry. I’d like to see you in jail if you’re not my wife or someone age appropriate that he’s dating or at the very least someone he very much wants to bang [you know, once he’s old enough for that kind of thing to become a non-creepy, reasonable idea.] There’s just no reasonable excuse that places a naked old man in a shower with naked kids, right? Right? Okay. Good. Glad we had this talk).

No, my concern is with the fact that they’re beginning to phase out cursive in schools!!!!! Can you believe it! An outmoded, nigh unreadable style of writing that only serves to confound and annoy and then be suddenly forgotten is being phased out of curriculum! What the fuck? But I learned cursive! So did my mom and dad! Holy fucking SHIT!!!! NO CURSIVE? What’s next? Rape showers and force feeding our kids plastic garbage? Oh. Okay, let’s keep some things in perspective, eh?

Cursive is useless. Well, I guess it’s not ENTIRELY useless. Women continue to write in some form of bastardized cursive their entire lives. I suppose it’s technically important to have an exercise that forces children to correctly manipulate their fine motor skills in unplanned ways, but cursive is hardly necessary these days, what with all the typing that people do. I mean, I hardly write shit down at all anymore (and when I do, its not in cursive) but fine. I’ll admit that my ‘cursive is useless’ statement is kind of harsh, but you know what? There are other ways to teach fine motor development. How about a regimented art class? How about music classes with instruments? How about fucking knitting? People make LIVINGS making music and art and scarves, but there’s not a fucking person on the earth who’s paying the bills by writing cursive.

It just infuriates me. Our nation is fat and slovenly, lazy and riddled with diabetes. We construct nothing in this country. Yet we shave off art and gym and shop classes like it’s no big deal at all and then something completely outmoded and antiquated gets put on the chopping block and people lose their fucking minds. I mean, I don’t fucking understand. We had plenty of time to learn cursive along with everything else and now that there’s no gym or art or music, it seems like there’s PLENTY of time for cursive, but whatever. I don’t think it’s worth getting pissy about.

In fact, I think the whole thing is fucking stupid, but you know what? This is what we’ve sown. The last forty years has been a systematic pillaging of the social and physical infrastructure that the ‘greatest generation’ (an infuriating but shockingly apt moniker, at least in terms of what I’ve seen) by my parents’ generation. And the worst part is that they didn’t even raise us well enough to give a fuck or fix it. Look around. We’re all visionary geniuses now, myself included. Everyone’s great and no one fails and OUR kids are EVEN WORSE. We’re fucked, people. They’re dumping mercury in lake Michigan and running out of money in Detroit. Prisons are now legal slave labor camps that have created a powerful slavery lobby (in the name of the drug war) and nobody has a job and the only fuckers getting rich are the same dicks that got us into this mess in the first place.

Fucking cursive. Fuck cursive. I’m moving to Uruguay.