The High School Military Tribunal

People say “Don’t lose hope!”, but I disagree. Lose hope. Despair is cleansing. Give up. Walk away.  Hope is a trap. It keeps you in the dark place, where the slimy things multiply and the solid things rot. I learned that in gym class when I was seventeen years old. It was the classic ordeal for the classic high school weakling: the rope climb. Not much of a trick, all you have to do it grab that slick trunk of hemp and climb. You tangle your feet in the cord to brace yourself while you pull yourself up with your arms. Breathe and repeat, while everyone watches. Our gym classes were co-ed. So, no mercy. I tried to make myself small while Mr. Burdick, the bald barrel-chested bully boy gym teacher strolled among the kids sitting cross-legged on the floor, deliberating over his next recruit. I was going to say victim, but most of the others did fine. They had some strength in their upper arms. I didn’t. They were coordinated. I wasn’t. So I sta...

I met Jim “Sippy” Bascomb on the first day of school, when it still seemed that life might change for the better. The beginning of the fall semester always felt that way to me. Everything seemed new in the clean September air – new teachers, new classmates, and this case a whole new school in a whole new place. I was anonymous on Nantucket, I could rebuild myself from the foundation up.  My   mistake. They say the Devil you know is better than the one you don’t.  The same goes for Hell. Anyway, I was eating alone in the dining hall when the incident happened. The girl from the boat swept into the big room in a crowd of other girls, eight of them altogether, somehow prettier in a group than any of them would have been separately -- that mysterious bubble of arrogance and estrogen. I was smart enough to keep my distance. My half-brother Lonnie had offered me at seat at the loser’s table – him and a fatso – Sippy, it turned out – along with a weird looking ...

The first time I saw her I was throwing up in the women’s bathroom on the slow boat from Hyannis.   I was sea-sick and I couldn’t make it to the men’s room. I couldn’t even make it to the toilet. The seas were so rough the boat almost turned back. But I guess they were half way across by then, so what difference did it make. Some people never get seasick. My mom never gets sea sick. Supposedly my dad never gets seasick. But I get the sea sick gene of course.   Some people are lucky. I’m not. If I fill in the boxes on a multiple choice test at random, I’ll get every answer wrong. Seriously. I left my book bag on the school bus, no one found it, no one turned it in. Those books were gone forever. And I knew it would happen. I wasn’t even surprised. I finally talked my mom into getting a dog, and it was some crazy mutt from the Bide-a-Wee home that growled unless you threw kibble at it. The next one ran away. The last one died from some weird kidney condit...

Thanks for stopping by. I've been away for a long time and I'm new to the internet, but scrolling through dozens of websites, I've come to understand how the system works. I know the rules.  I've learned the lingo The best clickbait is a listicle. So I have two. I'll get to them soon  But  first I want to explain my blog’s title. The Nuremburg trials were officially referred to as an international military tribunal. They gathered evidence of Nazi war crimes and put the criminals to justice. But their essential function was to gather evidence for a comprehensive historical record of the atrocities committed during the Third Reich. The cruelties of a middle class American adolescence, inflicted during the four-year ordeal of high school, are much more common, far less terrible and hold no historical significance. These ordinary tortures and debasements pass unnoticed and unpunished in every town and city in America, every day and every year. But s...