A man of wealth and taste

This isn’t going to be about anything much, so if you’re somebody who likes meaningful content in their blog posts, just skip this one over. Plenty more good stuff coming soon!

For those of you who have already read my shitty introduction to the blog (no, not the TV one from last week, the other shitty one), you’ll know that I have identified as a psychopath. I’m gonna say right now that I regret the way that initial conversation with Tina was conducted and especially dislike how quickly it turned disrespectful. That is not at all how I intend to interact with people on here.

So let’s start over. Hello, my name actually is James, no guessing required. I’m a twentysomething psychopath from the smallish island of Great Britain and I like all kinds of music, philosophy, travel, manipulation, excessive drinking, adrenaline sports, playing mind games, bullying the weak, scaring people in dark alleyways, pushing grannies down the stairs and long walks on the beach. At least one of those interests is a lie, can you guess which? I have a job and a life, but I’m not going to talk about those in this post, if at all.

A choice memory to share with you all: I was in year 7 or 8 of school, so about 12 or 13 years old. We had a few poor teachers, everyone does I think. There was one who was particularly bad, not at his subject I might add; he was very good at woodwork. You have to be good at a technical subject like that to get a job teaching it. No, his problem was classroom management; he was hopeless. If he told you to do something, you just wouldn’t do it. His classes were always chaotic and dangerous (we had saws and big electronic tools at our disposal). I was – am – the opposite of him: good at managing people, bad at woodwork. I was failing my project and had injured a few people in the process due to my general carelessness around the drills and soldering irons.

This hack of a teacher could see how bad I was and I knew he was going to fail me the year, but he had a weakness. Everyone does, you see, but his was a fun one. On top of this general incompetence, he had a nasty temper. When he didn’t get his way in controlling the class he would blow a fuse and have a kind of tantrum. He’d shout a lot, go very red and generally look quite ridiculous. And his body language promised the potential for violence, he just hadn’t yet been pushed enough.

To get rid of him, all I needed to do was to rile him up a bit more. Or rather get the idiots in my class to do it for me. So I told them he had confided to me how much he hated the class and the kids in it and he had plans to fail everyone that year. The genius of the lie that it was probably true (but he of course had said no such thing to me of all people) and just needed someone to point it out to get the kids worked up. I then suggested he should pay for this treachery with a particularly badly behaved class that afternoon, and that was what he got. I can’t remember exactly what happened but I know it started with us refusing to enter the classroom for the first 20 minutes of the lesson and it ended somewhat earlier than normal with the teacher throwing a box of tools at a student’s head before chucking somebody’s wood project out of the window and locking himself in the tech office. He was of course immediately suspended, I got the other kids to play the victim card for the post-breakdown inquiry, some of the girls even agreed to say he had touched them inappropriately, and I didn’t have to finish my stupid woodwork project.

That wasn’t the only time I drove a teacher from their classroom, but it was the most memorable. I don’t know, it’s probably not an entertaining a story as I find it still to be.

Anyhoo, you might be wondering quite how I found my way onto this blog, or why I continue to stick around, but frankly I’m none the wiser myself, so there are no answers forthcoming. The fact is that when I sat down to write this, I had no idea I was going to write about my school days; this was very much an improv deal. You can maybe surmise that I enjoy writing and want to transmit a few ideas with others that aren’t so easy to talk about in everyday life. If so, then I think you are probably right. Perhaps you suspect that I might be more than a little narcissistic and like the attention that comes from publishing online. That’s a safe bet too. Or maybe you just don’t care one jot. That’s okay too, it’s a free country. And it’s something I can relate to, so there’s that.