Back to School

So yesterday, it was back to the classroom, and I was (am) not ready to start another year.  How many damn years now have I been going “back to school.”  I usually buy my new jeans at some sort of “back to school” bargain sale.

So it’s back to school.  I parked in a new parking structure that I hadn’t parked in before.  It is better than the last one, but to get to my office I had to walk from there down the central path—like the main freeway—that the students are taking—it was at the noon hour—to get wherever the hell it is they might be going.

So there I am dragging my stuff behind me in my little airport roller bag, and I have to cross two bike paths, and for some reason the bikes have the right of way so you have to wait and then lurch across the path.  Which I manage to do and then I am on the main path and it is completely congested.  Eight people across, milling along.  With a large number of the current generation having never learned apparently that you are supposed to walk to the right.

And then cutting through the current are skateboarders.  I hear one of them coming up behind me and I get nervous.  I know as the skateboarders say that skateboarding is not illegal.  That’s true.  But it is damn noisy and damn irritating if they are skateboarding though a milling mass of people, and I am thinking just these thoughts, when whap!  I am hit from behind by a skateboarder who grabs me by the shoulders, to steady his self, and laughingly apologies. 

I am not injured but I am damn annoyed because I have been doing all I can to stay out of their way, and I surprise myself when I say, “You fucking idiot!”—which I genuinely and sincerely feel—and I surprise myself again when I say it loud enough for him to hear it.  And he gives me a sort of chagrined looked—as well he might be—chagrined I mean—for nearly knocking an elderly person like myself over.  And if he is thinking anything else, he doesn’t say it probably because he sees I am about ready to call him a “fucking idiot” again and take a swing at him with my rolling book bag.

So I am not even at my office yet, and I am really, really wishing I was not there at all.  I am surrounded by the youth of today, and find myself completely repelled.  First of all they are young….which is one big strike against them, and then they are all talking away on their cells, and I don’t know why but it appears de rigueur for the dudes to wear t-shirts with shorts.  I mean I wore short pants as a child and then I stopped wearing them.  These guys look permanently retarded with their t-shirts and shorts and some form of Nike on the feet and those of them that can raise a beard seem to be into the I shave every three days look.

So there I am walking along in my new back to school jeans, wearing a Henley, one of those I bought when my gut was sticking out a mile, and I look down and I already have coffee stains on it.  And I am thinking my shrink is right, I have got to do or find something or I am going to turn into one hell of a bitter, nasty old man.