Dream
     I put my ladder against a tre and climb to the top of the half a tree.  The top half is missing and is a weed and vine choked mess, the vines possibly having pulled the top of the tree off, almost a nest.  I pull myself into the nest and take a nap. I wake up in my nest as it rocks slightly.  As I wake up I notice a diamond shape moving slowly across the sky, blue and red lights, alien design.  There are clouds following the machine, and in them more moving shapes of various sizes and combinations,  A circle with a triangle on top, a flashing rhombus, this has to be the invasion the internet was warning us about.  I try to get down but my nest lists dangerously and the ladder is tight against the trunk.  I don't want to risk a fall just when the world is getting interesting again.
     I can peek into the third floor window of the building next to the tree and I am surprised to be staring into my old school classroom.  Someone's been doing some work in there.  The island in the middle has been removed, there are neatly labelled chemicals on shelves, it looks like a set from a "how to teach" television documentary.  I knock at the window.  A grinning idiot at the third floor window.  The young blonde teacher sees me and immediately brightens.  She opens the window and I hoist myself over the window frame, tuck and half somersault into the room.  We chat excitedly about the changes she has made to the room and I am happy to see that one of the scared kids I tried to navigate through the madhouse has mastered the delicate juggling act that is teaching in the inner city.
     I'm late!  I run downstairs to my room and it is a shambles, candy dinosaurs all over the floor along with other debris.  The cat was away.  I bellow at the students about the mess, how did they make such a big mess in the few minutes the school was open.  "Jonathan was in here when we got here," they say.  Jonathan.
One name.  Pure chaos.  A natural born leader, a visionary, a creator of any reality he imagines.  And he's got a great imagination and is filled with rage and confusion.  They will be naming Tsunamis after this kid.  He knows he runs the school and what he can get away with and how impossible it will be to get any second hand allegations to stick.  He is the boogeyman in this school and seems to be everywhere at once and never where he is supposed to be.  They did a reality show about super Nannies and he went through three of them before they quit production.  Even with video evidence he was able to squirm out of it and reassign blame and show probable cause.  As you expect he practically raises himself like so many of them do in this modern world of ours.  A child raised without fear, who has never lost.  A child who exploits all the weaknesses he sees in a system, who exploits the maximum amount of fun and chaos from every situation.  His parents are lawyers and he is their little angel.   They come to every parent teacher conference and defend their child to the end.
     I try to get the place cleaned up a little by bellowing to no effect.  I go to the trump card and add some profanity, waiting to see them scurry.  No real positive action comes from it and I am out of mass manipulation techniques.  The kids know that Jonathan is Bulletproof and may be learning that they can invoke his name foe behavioral Carte Blanche.  I have not signed in.  I run to the office for my roll sheet and to sign in and I realize I am dressed like a cloen.  Shiny black sweats, a grey hoodie over a florescent orange rugby tee shirt.  For some reason I am wearing one of those head gators, also orange, and I pull my hood up to hide this.  The gym teacher is also late and also wearing sweats.  Camoflage!  the gym teacher is wearing a dark green satiny sweat suit combo that has yellow letter on the back that say black crown.  The new beer from budweiser.  I may get away with my outfit.  
     The Principal and three others are sitting at the table where the sign in sheet normally is.  They say it's to late, it's been sent in.  I guess the blonde has related details of our morning and they are all smiling and laughing at me, "same old Mr. Bake"

 

      It feels good to be restless at 3 AM . Outside the still world sleeps while my mind is racing, still linked to unconscious world.  Franitcally transcribing the fading dream that made me sit up in bed.  The answer.  Another aha moment rendered into an indescipherable heiroglyphic word salad when I pick it up a few weeks or years later.

      There is a historic feel to writing at this time.  I have done some of my best work at 3am.  That's what the critics said during staff meetings at the inner city madhouse.  A madhouse clothed as a school.

"My jobs hard enough with all these forms from the new bosses," complained Romesa Smith, Bankers wife, and titular "Educational Leader of the building", " but that don't mean the School District paper work is going away.  They got me doing double work now.  And it isn't helping that there are members of this staff sending middle of the night emails to Edison talking about how I should be fired. "

tit·u·lar

ˈtiCHələr/

adjective

1. 1.

   holding or constituting a purely formal position or title without any real authority.

   "the queen is titular head of the Church of England"

   synonyms:

   nominal, in title only, in name only, ceremonial, honorary, so-called;More

2. 
   

I snorted.  I made it.  I knew when I pressed send and sent the email with Re: "Criminal Negligence?"  that I would get someone's attention.

   Was it enough?  She was not working in that school the next year so some one owes me a hero's dinner  I tried to save that school by eliminating one of the most pressing dangers facing it.  The next year I was a little less energetic.  I didn't feel I had to watch my back as much.  I lost my edge, and soon after that I lost my career, but that's not the story here.  Perspective is the story here.  This is just the part in the narrative where the writer establishes his tone.  Where I dance the foreshadow tango.

  Elegant at age 50 and impossibly graceful for a half hippo, half /Neanderthal hybrid, an impossible combination put together by geneticists at a secret under ground laboratory which I took over when I lead a menagerie of nightmares in an underground coup, but that's also not the real story, that's being optioned as a graphic novel and we can't talk about it here for legal reasons.

This is a story of another kind of all American boy, a wunderkind, really.  The kind of kid who believed the teachers when they told him he was great, even if he was only half ass-ing it and mailing it in.  They were teaching to the lowest common denominator in that suburb.  Kind of reminiscent of the one Garrison Keillor waxes Rhapsodically about.  The place where everyone's kids are above average.   I learned valuable lessons about effort and picking your spots and about the behavior of an observed cat, versus that of an un-observed one.  This cat is happy laying in the sun.  But if some scientist is watching me, or a boss, girlfriend, coworker, the general public, it's then SHOWTIME!  Cue the fertilizer delivery truck.

 I journeyed into the heart of the Education system in this country to see what the deal was.  

How could my Kindergarden thru third grade teachers have been so wrong about me?  I was a prodigy, I was sunshine.  I was Tom Freaking Sawyer and the world was mine.  At least that's what the blimp said that floated above the cast party as the production ended one steamy night in Miami where we partied long into the evening and wound up in a board game tournament for creme filled donuts in a seedy area in little Havana as the sun came up.  I was ten.  The world was my oyster.  Then I met the first Educator named "Smith" that ruined my mojo.  Changed the course of my life.  And just like in the Matrix there were a few of them along the way and they never looked like the other one until it was too late and you were suddenly dodging metaphorical bullets which were aimed to change your worldview radically.