12.11.21 | come to to wound

as a kid i was taught to cut my nails over the toilet bowl; easy clean up. but i have taken to cutting them up on the roof. today the sky is low and mustard-yellow, has been for about three weeks. i had hoped that, since i finished reading a long novel last night, the overcast might break. no such luck.

it's december, and warm. i cut my nails over the brick railing of the rooftop. like a radio station just out of range, the skyline of the city disappears and reappears behind the clouds. it takes less than a minute for me to cut every fingernail, but i spend about seven minutes walking back and forth and smoking.

i've only met three people from my building up here. i'm usually the only one, up here all the time. but others must be coming up here now and then. someone's been watering the sunflowers, at least, but with all these clouds they don't seem to be doing too well.

much later, when it's dark, i think about one of my students who always asks how to spell things. he's smart, and he hates school, but not in a way that makes him a bad student. it's worse; he's resigned to the fact of schooling, and so he does well, but because he hates school, he's on the look out, at all times, for anything about it that doesn't seem worth his time. ok, fair enough so far. but for this reason he hates history. "nobody's going to ask me about the Inca on a job interview." schools poison by being so intolerable that the student begins a mental calculus -- once begun it is difficult to derail -- weighing the tolerability, the usefulness, of entire branches of inquiry, based on whether it might serve them later, in the future, not near enough, when they can be rid of school.

i too often now wonder when i can be rid of school.