The mental health of students is going to be a life and death challenge next school year. Listen up. Improve your skills now.

I am serious, or go home.

If you think your skills are Just Fine, Thank You. The same old same old. Will Just. Not. Do. Listen up.

I am here to tell you that you are in THE FUCKING WAY. Move your fat ass out of education, baby, if you can’t stand the heat. It’s about to get a lot more hot.

I Do Know.

You wanted to educate. You kinda liked kids. But it was education that drove you.

I know how badly you wanted to render reality today a blip on the radar screen. I hear you. But Listen Up. The old days are not going to be valid and a few teaching tricks will not work. What is attention. What is focus. What is survival. What is death. What is grief. What is suicide. What are the options. What do I do next. I have no more friends. Why am I depressed. What if you, the kid, were at some point, infected, too. And now, it can be a struggle to breathe. Long Term Covid is real and it’s about to land in a classroom near you. I would never, ever, ever suggest to a kid that suicide was the answer to anything. But these past few years, I have seen too much pain. Yes. But. We. Were Tough, tough, tough.

And.

So.

Now what.

Now What comes sneaking after you like a copperhead.

If you do not like children (they drive me Miss Sugar Nut), go home.

If you cannot deal with an adolescent meltdown, go home. The numbers do crunch. They’re real. Lots more kids next year will have diabetes. Kids will arrive deeply addicted to Dr. F, while the DEA eats our lunch. We don’t have any idea whatsoever how much money these guys spend on toys for the boys. Guys, go home. Teachers, Butch Up. It’s a whole different ballgame, now. I have over 3,000 friends on Facebook (I hate Facebook), and 3,000 of them are all from South America. The Church has been out to get me for those books, and that has created an underground especially for teenagers who are overly-focused on dystopia anyway. Sure. Right. American publishing would seriously cut my legs off at the knee, but they were going to do that anyway so what exactly is it I have to loose.

I will fight to the moment I drop dead. That is why I am here. Why are you here.

Legalize drugs. Get it over with.

All your gymnasiums will become war zones. But you didn’t sign up for a war zone. No one did. We never told you this would be babysitting. This is the struggle to survive. Or go home.

If you cannot deal with the fact that, yes, they’re dealing drugs in class, isn’t there a better intervention than detention in a jail where he will now be with a confined, imprisoned, population. What kind of sentence is this. Is this what you want. I’m supposed to be the one who wants to see the system burned to the ground. Not you.

If you cannot deal with the fact that all hell in a hand-basket can go off, and will go off, especially after kids who have had to shoulder actual responsibility and at the same time play witness to the dissolutions of marriages that could not stand the strain. To survive. That kid. Your kid. My kid. Our kids.

Abled. Or disabled. I had no help. Not one day or one hour of help. There was no help. I was not fucking god. It’s hard to admit. 

You will not like hearing this. It goes against everything you know. Gibran taught it. Your children are not your children. They belong to themselves.

If you cannot deal with parents yelling at you and so you damn well did slam the door in their face and good for you. You are a human being, too. Don’t take shit from anyone. Ever. But what about some of you, you know who you are, are in awe of kids. I am. I am in awe of kids. And no. I will not start my school up again. Leave me alone. That part of my life is over. You do it. It’s not brain surgery, and let’s face it, Southern States have very few requirements if any. Because all of these schools were Christian Racist Schools. But not me. I missed out on that one. I had a very big social service agency shut the fuck down. I took a story to the media. What I had seen. From the inside. It sent shockwaves through the government at that time. Very hush shut the fuck up. They all so wanted to kill this story. And they did, too. Most of the media gays said this story was very dangerous. Lots of families involved.

This bullshit went on for hours. Didn’t these guys have companies to run.

Oh, my. They were probably all complicit. I needed drugs. I moved back to Key West and lived on the beach in a cabanabanana. Just away from any institution. Please. People tell me I am too suspicious of Authority. This. Is. Just. Me. But I blame publishing because it is the Iconic Culture of We Will Keep You Out which is the game they play with who gets what, and they know it, too. Let. Me. In.

The crows fly off on that one.

What did Authority exactly do with one kid who had been raped, and the kid who had done this. I think it all kinda just all blew up. I was in the Bahamas by then. On a Windjammer. Cultures and their problems were not my fucking focus. To tell the truth, I don’t give a flying fuck about any of this because I did not know that any of this would be taken seriously, especially by publishing.

Do. Not. Hire. Me. I seriously did not give a flying fuck about any of it if one kid is being hurt. Family or no family. Fuck family. It has no validity to me. Escape it if you can. If the kid is being hurt, I’m with the kid, and I want you to know BigShot that I have photographs of your fellow cops trotting off with papers and throwing them into trunks and taking off. That work is in a vault, and make no mistake, it’s art, that is being documented, art, that is a documentation that cannot be ignored or made to rock and roll. It will not go away. And as art, it’s protected speech.

Protected speech, get it.

I was summoned to the downtown offices of ABC who thought they were the king of the hill back then. Every platform sent a trooper. I’m thinking, and these are the guys I going to try and work with. No.

It wasn’t going to work. I am such a virgin at this. Sylvia Chase’s (is she still alive) name kept creeping into it, and I got the real impression they were putting together a team to lure her in. Whoever these suits were I don’t know. I don’t understand a word suits say. Don’t speak to me. Don’t look in my eyes, and I need a drink, what, you drag us down here, they thought she would bring in big advertisers because of her credibility. It was Barbara Walters goes underground. It just didn’t work. It was a bad idea. I think Sylvia went back to New York, but I never met any of of these delightful people in my life and they are not nice people just arrest them.

Barbara, we know who you are.

They told me flat out. I was too gay. I would be great at the job but I was too gay. I wanna tell you though, they said it. To my face. No one blinked an eye. WHAT WAS I DOING THERE WHAT THE FUCK.

All fucking hell let loose. It was us versus us.

This stuff leaves kids breathless. Their whole universe is shit.

I’m sorry. But it’s not about education as we have always known it. It’s about keeping kids alive. For that day. They were alive. It means something. I’m sorry. But it’s not about you. You are the teacher, and it might seem to be a bit socratic right now, but what I am really impressed with is the obvious. We are still alive. I am still numb. I make mistakes. I am still alive. It is an Alive Wave, so what is Armageddon. The not quite so obvious kid is the kid dancing out there in shadows only he can see. I am autistic. I know what the fuck I am talking about, and every fucking one of us is different, and don’t talk to me about stereotypes like you can play shrink and the kid will never be on to you.

Did I just write that. The kid who knows how to slip the mask on and this is the mask of death. Look at his History. It’s Still about the kid. That focus did not go away.

The data does not lie. You can’t stand the heat and you know it. It’s what scares you. You also know this: the predators can smell your sweat a mile away. I do not mean wild animal predators. I mean kids who want to draw blood — kids who want to kill other kids — kids who have just seen their parents become each other’s sworn enemy because they are angry, disturbed, hungry, insomniac, climbing the walls, melting down, cutting, suicidal ideation on a good day. I am a communist. I try.