Tonight, we start with poetry.

Don’t worry, it’s the good kind, plus there’s plenty of pictures.

Amazing stuff. Shit like that makes me want to be a poet, almost.

I have always heard that there is no future in poetry, that you can never make a living at it, that nobody likes it except a handful of literary geeks and language nerds who love words and are willing to wade through the oceans of intolerable drek in order to find those few pearls of wisdom formed deep in the souls of the tortured and the minds of the refiners.

And talk about a subject close to my heart. I was scarped rawbone bare by bullying till every day of school was a raw and pulsating whirl of pain, terror, and ennui. I stood astride that terrible chasm with one foot in the official world of the child, the schoolroom, where my natural talents rendered the work laughably easy (and laugh I did, much to my detriment), and the other in the schoolyard, where my timid and emotional nature was no match for the aggression of the resentful and the repressed, who expressed that rage against my dual crime of excellence and vulnerability by thrusting me down the totem pole to lie down at the very bottom, below even the special education kids, who at least ad an excuse for being what and who they were.

They were merely intellectually retarded. I was socially retarded, and the punishment for that is so severe that it never ends. It just keeps going and going inside, killing you a little more every day.

Don’t misunderstand, I understand why the schoolyard bullies targeted me. As my shadows, my opposites, they saw in me a way they could exact justice for a world that had decreed they be poor and stupid and never be anywhere near the middle class life that I took for granted like a fish in water.

They had a lot of reasons to be angry with the world, and there I was, isolated, friendless, a social pariah with no friends to defend him and the absolute gall to treat the same school work that was the brutal bane of their existence, the questions and challenges that seemed downright designed to leave them humiliated and helpless and confused, bruised beyond all endurance by a system that seemed to constantly demand the impossible of them and then punish them for noncompliance.

And then there were people like me, who did the work with ease and then looked bore, and all because I happened to be born with something the system rewarded. I had won the jackpot with my high IQ and comfortable middle class life where we never, ever has spaghetti five nights in a row because Dad was not getting enough hours, where everybody got presents every Christmas and the teachers treated you like you were one of them and not the wrong kind of person just because you didn’t talk like they did.

You talked like your family did, and so the teachers not only did not approve of you. They didn’t approve of your family, either, or honestly, anything about you and your life.

And there is me, a fat target, someone your excellent social skills intuitively inform you that nobody likes anyhow because my unconsciously nonconformist ways cause stress and uncertainty in the social fabric of the classroom.

Not even the other smart kids liked me, because I was not like them, either. They consciously and deliberately strove for academic approval, and so in their minds, earned it.

I just got it naturally, and hard work always resents talent. How can it not? Talent is not fair.

So when everyone hates you and wishes you were not around because your weirdness and your wimpiness cause so much social distortion, the bullies pick up on this, and take it upon themselves to be the instruments of that anger, the fist of the punishment, and the teachers just let it happen, because you know what?

They don’t like you either. The other smart kids are keen to please the teachers, and hence are extremely well behaved and conforming. They are, in fact, model students, the kind that teachers like and wish all their students could emulate.

You, on the other hand, are independent, at times outright defiant, and your high intellect only creates more work for the teachers and is a constant challenge to their intellectual authority.

And that would be bad enough. No teacher wants a student in their class that might well make them look foolish at any moment with a question they can’t answer or even worse, a correction.

But if you had been a conscious and deliberate rebel, they could at least have respected you as an adversary and perhaps even admired you for your stance.

But no. You had to go and be intellectually independent via raw intelligence, and thus be even more unpredictable. It might even seem, sometimes, like you might actually be smarter than your teacher, and that simply cannot be tolerated.

And to compound their loathing, the vast gulf between you and your classmates makes you incredibly emotionally dependent on your teachers, who, disapproval or no, were the only people you could relate to in a school full of hostility.

So you were all kinds of problem, and your teachers found you hopeless, pathetic, and wished, like the students, that you would just go away.

And that got written into the fabric of your soul as well.

And the bullies, they knew the teachers didn’t like you either, and would not interfere with what everyone agreed, openly or tacitly, was just what you deserved.

But that poem quite rightfully points out the only effective battle cry for people like us :

THEY WERE WRONG. Say it loud and proud until you truly believe it. You deserved better and they were wrong to hurt you and to deny you what you needed to survive and thrive.

They were wrong.

And it;s time to get right.