Monthly Archives: October 2021

Education

Life of a sub: First Man on the moon.

(Editor’s note: The following, like all of my accounts as a substitute teacher, is best qualified as creative non-fiction. Though the account is true, the site, school, grade, or subject may have been modified. More importantly, the  names of the students have all been changed.)
 
I was standing outside, leaning against the open door made of metal and painted a rusty-red.
 
One by one, they walked in.
 
Each with a world ahead of them.
 
Turner: Yo Mr. Flores!!!
 
Hand in a fist headed for my face, in very slow motion.
 
Me: (FIST BUMP) Yo Turner. Are you going to be good today?
 
T: (A smile with curly blonde hair) What do you mean?
 
The day before he asked to go to the bathroom, then disappeared for 30 minutes. I had security looking for him.
 
Me: (LOL) Yeah. nice. You know they put people in jail for less.
 
T: (suddenly serious) They do?
 
Me: No. I just like to see you with fear in your eyes. Look no trouble and I promise I’ll let you be the “teacher’s pet”.
 
T: DONE!
 
Me: Yeah, freakboy, get inside.
 
Turner passes me by and I can hear him and his favorite friend greet each other. Suddenly,
 
Turner: YO MR. F? CAN ME AND …
 
Me: No!
 
T and Friend: Ahhhhh!
 
I chuckled
…and then I saw her.
 
She was maybe a sophomore or younger. She had dyed her hair a dirty platinum. Her eyes were red and it was clear she was struggling.
 
Me: (I smiled at her) Hi, hold on a minute. ( I whispered to her).
 
She stopped and looked up at me.
 
She had freckles and blue eyes full of tears.
 
(It’s times like this I have to remember I’m a teacher, not a father.)
 
Me: (I nodded) Can you talk?
She tried and it ended in more tears.
Me: Okay. It’s going to be okay. You are safe here. You understand? You are safe.
D: (nods).
Me: Ok, how bout you sit right there on the bench in the garden and take a breather? I’ll be right back.
 
I promise, I’ll be right back.
 
She nodded and started walking.
 
Now, I’ve been formally trained how to help students that are experiencing crisis, even those with severe trauma. It’s rare though that you have to use every bit of learning and talent for one person.
 
Eventually, we sent her home.
 
Turns out there wasn’t any particular ‘thing’ that’d happened.
 
The poor thing was unhappy…and tired.
Articles, Non-Fiction

BOOM Salad calls out the so-called “revolutionary org” known as “Anonymous” for its complete failure as an engine of change, as a revolutionary counterpoint to what Althusser referred to as the “Ideological State Apparatuses”

ddjpb

At its inception, the hacker co-operation known as Anonymous portrayed itself as a post-modern antithesis to modernity’s’ indiscretions. They were, we believed, the TECHNOLOGICAL antigen to the poisonous ideological formations of mainstream tech. And as such, we believed, they would save us from being overrun by techno-fascism. A decade later and one has to wonder if the Anonymous experiment was ever more than another media tool, a compromised pseudo-angst comedy of wasted and ineffectual technological brilliance.

They had the keys, so they said, and they understood the controversies and stood firmly on the side of mankind, so they argued…and yet, what has been their legacy? A series of ill-effective media friendly outbursts that only served to solidify the institutionality they claimed to oppose.

Chicken little

The Wolf of the three little pigs

Compromised, mediated, undermined, and now, insignificant.

That is the historical trajectory of the most powerful techno-community ever devised.

BOOM Salad calls you cowardly for not rising to and fulfilling your so-called mission statement, your vision statement…the purpose by which you even exist.

Grade: F-

(Come get me. I am wide open and everyone knows me. I have nothing to hide. Not like you. Only cowards have need for shelter from the violence of the oppressor.)

Poetry

Silicon valley to nowhere

No one knows this valley

We pretend

Its just like any other

Its got its streams

Its hills

And its simple communities

Born and bred on the

Westside

Then one day

They drove them orchards down

And paved a road

With silicon…

Some said it was shiny

But most just wondered

“what the hell is silicon?”

Next thing I knew I was chasing things

Like math and science

And the arts

Humanity had no value with the

New

Only silicon

Suddenly everyone spoke a different language

The language of silicon

And we just kept on runnin

Some of us were swimming

Deep

In a blue pool of silicon

To nowhere.

Non-Fiction

A Theory Regarding the Madness of Children.

(Editor’s note: the following is an excerpt from a larger work that will soon be posted on the BOOM, enjoy).
 
Upon emergence from the womb, these formative notions are reinforced as a stark contrast to the sensory-motor traumas the newborn child immediately confronts as part of its introduction to its new, extrauterine reality. The experience of the extreme differences between its pre and post-natal existence mark a watershed moment in the child’s cognitive development and become conflated to form the earliest primary metaphoric concept, LIFE INSIDE THE WOMB IS NOT LIFE OUTSIDE THE WOMB. Because it is the result of complex, neural mapping mechanisms of the sensory-motor systems, the resulting metaphor, “remain(s) in place indefinitely within the conceptual system and [is] independent of language.”
 
As the child develops, it remains aware of the existential dichotomy represented by its memory of life within the womb and its present awareness of life outside the womb. Only when it is physically and intellectually able to embody space independently, does it begin to recognize within the spatial patterns that surround it, similarities to the environment it recalls from its experiences of life within the womb. These patterns form the prototypical designs that will eventually emerge formally as child caves, little houses, and special places. It is at that moment, when the child’s memory of life within the womb becomes conflated with the fully realized spatial reconstruction of that environment, that a new primary metaphoric concept is created: THE CHILD CAVE IS A WOMB.
 
While many who read this essay will argue that its hypothesis regarding a prenatal origin to the child cave is ‘purely speculative’ and, perhaps, ‘impossible to prove’, the fact is that it is not the first time such a link has been proposed. As Roger Hart noted in his work, Children’s Experience of Place, “Freudian psychologists have ‘explained’ these so-called ‘cozy places’ as a desire on the child’s part to return to the womb.” By this, he refers to Freud’s theories regarding, “regression.”