Why people suck - repost of last short story

Heathcote high 2010 and the horror of the public school system  - a single recount of past trauma

Imagine having been laughed at by effectively everyone you knew in high school, in your senior year, for writing an essay - poorly and under the influence of motor coordination-inhibiting drugs. The extension 1 and 2 English students made fun of you. They were meant to be somebody, some day, right? Well they aren’t. It’s 2020 now. Orwell and Kafka wrote their first novels at age 30.

That’s not all. You tried your best. The essay you wrote was about Frankenstein and Blade Runner. In your heart you knew those prescribed texts and then some. You’d even read Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep - the book Blade stunner was based on! Your head was spinning as was your sense of reality.

Your essay, regarded by the teachers (the local authorities) tacitly and in smug exchanges, was copied and distributed to students very much against your will. You weren’t even asked. Not a single copy of your own text made its way to you, only malevolent and sidelong glances, snide sniffles and choking chortles on its behalf, reminding you that, like your essay, you were a joke. Unlike them. They were smart.

The rest of it was a blur to you. Frankly you just enjoyed having necked the bottle of Robitussin and having people pay attention to you for once. 

Those fuck heads? The smart men... One is a doctor now I think. Probably not a very good one given his former character. Police officers, office drones, cogs in the machines, watchers of game shows, self-proclaimed artists and insignificant internet bloggers. 

Me? I’m honest. A man is the badges he sticks to his coat. I pity those I mentioned and no longer feel spite, as I held for years over the trivial matter I just mentioned. I in earnest forgive them. I’d go so far as to call them pathetic, using pathetic as a word which means literally “inspiring pity”. Surely they forgot. Why would you remember? A quiet kid getting what’s coming to him... commonplace and of no consequence. 

Memory is a treacherous thing. Besides, nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so. In my solemn opinion this very text was good to write, albeit bad. If you understand this last sentence, you know what I mean. 

Atone or live a life of misery, that which you deserve, for suffering is conducive to change for the better, and may God guide your soul. ;)

Oliver Vieri-Pignatelli 
6:30AM, Tuesday 29/12/2020,