Evil Origins: A Horror & Dark Fantasy Collection (95 page)

Introduction

“Strike
five!”

I turned to look
at my neighbor as she clapped her hands and cheered for both the batter and the
hitter.

“Throw a good
pitch, pitcher. And you, batter, take a good swing,” she said.

My son looked at
me as we both counted on our fingers.

“Did the ump say
‘strike five,’ or am I hearing things?” I asked.

“Yes, five,” she
replied.

“This is
baseball, right?”

She gave me a
sly glance until the batter received strike six and walked back to the bench.
He did not strike out. He had exhausted his supply of six pitches.

“They don’t call
them ‘strike outs.’ You get six pitches and then you return to the bench.”

My son looked at
me again, this time with the face of someone who had just stepped in dog shit.

“Well, what’s
the score?” I asked my neighbor.

“Oh, it’s the
regular season,” she replied as if I were to know better than to ask such a
stupid fucking question.

“And?”

“They don’t keep
score during the regular season.”

My eyes darted
around the field and over the dads pulling beef jerky from their fanny packs.
If Ashton Kutcher had a
Punk’d
crew there, I could not see them.

“No, of course
they don’t,” I said.

She kept her
eyes on the infield although I could tell she knew what I was about to ask.

“They keep score
starting in the playoffs,” she said with a preemptive verbal strike. “That’s
when things count.”

“Right, the
playoffs,” I added. “Which teams make the playoffs?”

“All of them,”
she replied.

***

Sparing children
from all of life’s discomforts is akin to child abuse. It does not leave marks
or draw blood but is far more damaging. Schools and parents aim to make
children’s lives as boring as possible. It sounds crazy, but getting everything
you want and winning all the time is boring. Parents demand an immediate
audience because Johnny received a B+ on a test and it upset him in the worst
way. What kind of monster gives a kid a B+? Kids unknowingly suffer the
consequences. Children think it’s foolish to have second winners, and they
cannot understand why you would play a game without keeping score. They know
that somebody has to lose. Kids do not like to lose. Nobody does, but they
recognize it as a risk of competition.

In
addition, our terminology has gone to the absurd. Whether it’s a child or an
adult, everyone has a condition. This condition causes them to be nervous, shy,
inattentive, an asshole, whatever. The condition takes the fall for behavior
that society deems unacceptable. Big Pharma seems to have a pill for every
condition, even ones that do not exist. The lexicon reflects the use of
fabricated disorders when frustrated teachers say a student has “processing
issues” instead of calling him out on disruptive behavior. Nobody is fat.
Nobody is stupid. Nobody is a loner. The true insanity comes when educators
believe every child is a superstar—until they reach adulthood, when some become
complete assholes. Special Johnny grew up to post a YouTube clip where he
rammed a remote control up his ass because his mom cancelled his World of
Warcraft account. Special Sally grew up to take her clothes off at the local
strip club.

Imagine
what Adolf Hitler’s grades and comments would have looked like if written by
today’s teachers:

Adolf
is a determined and resourceful young man poised to make a difference in the
world. His charismatic leadership bonds our community together. Although Adolf
can engage in not-so-pleasant behavior with the Semites, he plays nicely with
the blue-eyed, blond children in our class. Adolf is adept at public speaking,
and I enjoy watching him grow into a powerful young man.

Finally,
schools and parents assassinate diversity of thought. It is crushed by conformity
peddled through school spirit, religion, and patriotism. Although many teachers
promote the individual and strive to create unique thinkers, the final solution
is a mass of dull clones. The programming is well meaning for many, and I do
not want to diminish the love educators have for their students, but in the
end, they teach and reward conformity to the least creative kids. We are
raising zombies.

***

Read this
collection of essays however you see fit. There is no significance to their
order that would prevent you from skipping around. The index card images that
appear at the top of every essay are real and come from my years as a classroom
teacher. The words of wisdom speak to the students’ experiences and my core
beliefs about learning. Except for the blurring of names, the cards are
unedited.

Like many
writers and artists, I have lived through several career changes, including
newspaper delivery boy, short-order cook, snobby record store clerk, geeky IT
guy, and classroom teacher.

The stories from
my personal and professional life are also real. Some have been enhanced or
shortened to meet your lessening attention span, but they are all true. Again,
I have changed names to protect myself from a lawsuit. The appendix is new and
something I hope to grow in subsequent editions.

Enjoy the book,
and be sure to email me kind words of encouragement and praise, even if I do
not deserve it.

*A note on formatting:

The original print edition
contained footnotes. However, ebooks no longer have fixed page numbers.
Therefore, I have adapted and used parenthesis to represent the comments I
would mumble under my breath if we were sitting together in a smoky bar.

Gay for Brett

I’m
gay for Brett Favre. I suspect a lot of straight men who watch football are,
too. After all, we watch guys in tights grabbing other men in tights as they
lie on top of each other trying to get balls.

***

The Cleveland
Plain Dealer
published an article about the controversy surrounding a tax
on soft drinks (soda to you East Coasters and pop to those of us in the Midwest).
While I wholeheartedly despise the government telling me what I can do with my
body through the use of taxation, the article addressed an alarming trend:
childhood obesity.

According to the
Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, childhood obesity has risen from 5
percent in 1980 for kids aged twelve to nineteen to 17.6 percent in 2008. These
may sound like numbers that do not make much of an impression, but consider
this: The president hopes that the recession’s hold on the country is relenting
given that unemployment is hovering around 10 percent. When it broke the double
digits, the coverage was everywhere. Currently, almost 18 percent of our
teenagers are obese. Not overweight, but fucking obese. Close to one in five.
If we saw the same increase in unemployment as we did in childhood obesity,
people would take notice.

While it’s difficult to pin down a specific
cause for obesity, there are many contributing factors. Genetics play a role,
but behavioral factors have a much greater impact. Genes have not changed much
over thousands of years, but the rates of obesity have skyrocketed over the
last three decades. The CDC identifies energy intake, physical activity, and
sedentary behavior as key elements in creating childhood obesity, which quite
often leads to adult obesity. Around 80 percent of obese children become obese
adults, according to the CDC website.

Evidence is limited on specific foods or dietary patterns that
contribute to excessive energy intake in children and teens. However, large
portion sizes for food and beverages, eating meals away from home, frequent
snacking on energy-dense foods and consuming beverages with added sugar are
often hypothesized as contributing to excess energy intake of children and
teens. In the area of consuming sugar-sweetened drinks, evidence is growing to
suggest an association with weight gain in children and adolescents.

Consuming sugar-sweetened drinks may be
associated with obesity because these drinks are high in calories. Children may
not compensate at meals for the calories they have consumed in sugar-sweetened
drinks, although this may vary by age. Also, liquid forms of energy may be less
satiating than solid forms and lead to higher caloric intake.

As they say, it ain’t rocket science. Kids are eating more, doing
less, and getting fat. Surprisingly, the CDC does not cite being a Trekkie or
fourth-level Dungeon Master as factors for obesity, but they do consider those
primary indicators of virginity.

Obese children and teens have been found to have risk factors for
cardiovascular disease (CVD), including high cholesterol levels, high blood
pressure, and abnormal glucose tolerance. In a population-based
sample of 5- to 17-year-olds, 70% of obese children had at least one CVD risk
factor while 39% of obese children had two or more CVD risk factors.

-Asthma is a disease of
the lungs in which the airways become blocked or narrowed causing breathing
difficulty. Studies have identified an association between childhood obesity
and asthma.

-Hepatic steatosis is
the fatty degeneration of the liver caused by a high concentration of liver
enzymes. Weight reduction causes liver enzymes to normalize.

-Sleep apnea is a less
common complication of obesity for children and adolescents. Sleep apnea is a
sleep-associated breathing disorder defined as the cessation of breathing
during sleep that lasts for at least 10 seconds. Sleep apnea is characterized
by loud snoring and labored breathing. During sleep apnea, oxygen levels in the
blood can fall dramatically. One study estimated that sleep apnea occurs in
about 7% of obese children.

-Type 2 diabetes is
increasingly being reported among children and adolescents who are obese. While
diabetes and glucose intolerance, a precursor of diabetes, are common health
effects of adult obesity, only in recent years has Type 2 diabetes begun to
emerge as a health-related problem among children and adolescents. Onset
of diabetes in children and adolescents can result in advanced complications
such as CVD and kidney failure.

This
is not theoretical guesswork or a matter of perspective, like whether or not
you favor David Lee Roth or Sammy Hagar. These are the scientific facts. (Roth,
of course. Don’t even mention Cherone. Eddie didn’t let him stick around long
enough to become part of the Van Halen debate.)

***

Brett Favre will
go down in football lore as the greatest quarterback of all time. Yes, Marino
put up incredible numbers, but he never won the Super Bowl. Montana did win a
ring, but he did not have the ability to single-handedly win the game unless he
tossed the ball to Rice, who was a master at gaining yards after the catch. The
jury is still out on Peyton.

As
Wikipedia states (Remember
Encarta
? Me neither. How long will it be
before Microsoft or Google swallows Wikipedia?):

Favre is widely considered to be one of the greatest quarterbacks of all time. He is the only player to win the AP Most Valuable Player three consecutive times (1995–97). He led the Packers to seven division championships (1995, 1996, 1997, 2002, 2003, 2004, and 2007), four NFC Championship Games (1995, 1996, 1997 and 2007), winning two (1996 and 1997), and two Super Bowl appearances, winning one (Super Bowl XXXI).

He holds many NFL records including: most career touchdown passes, most career passing yards, most career pass completions, most career pass attempts, most career interceptions thrown, most consecutive starts, and most career victories as a starting quarterback.

And don’t forget the immortal cameo in
There’s Something About
Mary
. Given the list of records this man holds and the mystique that
surrounds him, it’s no surprise that the media, especially the NFL network, has
turned its attention to Kiln, Mississippi, every spring for the past few years.
Will he retire, or will he come back for another shot at a championship? As sad
as it may seem, this is no longer a mystery as Favre has retired for the final
time.

I must apologize to my good friend, Adam, who is now screaming at
me while spitting his Dunkin’ Donuts (Endorsement? Free java? C’mon, Dunkin’,
hook a brother up) coffee all over the wall. I know you feel betrayed by the
legend given that he ditched your beloved Packers. But it’s almost impossible
to deny the manlove so many have for Number Four.

With all of Brett’s records, his Super Bowl rings, and loads of
money, why did he continue to pursue the title at the age of forty?

***

Skip
Downing runs an organization called On Course. On the home page, he states, “As
a college educator myself for more than forty years and a designer/facilitator
of professional development workshops for more than twenty, I’ve created this
web site as a one-stop resource for educators across the curriculum
. . . especially those who want to empower their students to become
active, responsible, and successful learners.”