this is a post kids

it's funny, i'm a little bit dazed today and i've had to catch myself from saying 'you're welcome' when people don't actually say 'thank you'. it's just so natural to end conversations here with 'all right, you're welcome'.

here's one for my friends from old school. elementary, in fact. shawn and steve, namely. there's a maniac, the more i think about it, that used to be our elementary school gym teacher. did anyone else ever have to do this kind of stuff for gym class when you were 9 or 10? we had this giant apparatus that must've been donated to us from the marine core that had ropes, verticle ladders and horizontal ladders that probably topped out at 20 or more feet high. at say, fifteen feet, there was placed the horizontal ladder, which gave my wide eyed heart its first taste of terror. it was expected of us to climb up to it and then walk or run along the top of these monkey bars. if you were too much of an 8 year old pussy to walk on the bars, you could, for half of the presidential credit, edge along the inch-wide wooden beam with a hand or two stretching out for the wall a few feet away (that's a few meters away, for my metric readers). it was a long, humiliating walk for those of us who slide-stepped the entire way, ass in the air from leaning both hands against the wall. yeah, there was a high-jump-kind-of-mat below, waiting to cushion you after you cracked open your head falling and twisting your way down through the bars.
the other gym class threat that was a part of that menacing apparatus was the high ladder. stretching maybe 20 feet above our heads, the young child was expected to ascend it's thick wooden bars to the top and then proceed to shimmy his way over the highest rung and climb back down. (i'm remembering how fun it was to jump to the mat from dangerously higher bars.)
so now that i write about it, i realize that that was an amazing thing that we all did, when we were too young to let our fears overcome our fear of standing up to authority. or was it the embarrassment of quiting in front of all our peers.
anway, we also had to run a mile and practice to run a mile, and stretch beyond our limits with the teacher pressing wrecklessly* into our backs, and get in lines and take turns trying to do handsprings and front-flips (which, when before i knew whether i could do one or not, i went charging forward, expecting to do one, before just doing a bellysmack face-first onto the mat). also we had to do what was called six inches, where we'd all lie down on our backs and lift our feet six inches from the floor and hold them there until he felt our crys and moans of effort were enough to satisfy his torture bug. it was the best fucking gym class in the world, though. probably because i was forced to conquer fear and trepidation.

haha, compare to our middle school days where the gym teacher would read the paper far and high away from us while some asshole in the class would play dodgeball with some skinny nerdy glasses kid but with a hard, real, football, and in between plays.

*doesn't it seem like the word should be wreckfully instead of wrecklessly? have i said or heard that question before?