Free Writing

I wonder about "free writing." They say there's no free lunch but I've eaten many a free afternoon meal; the thing that's never free in my mind is writing. There's a price the writer pays, an amount the reader invests, and everyone hopes to get some change. I had a teacher that got mad at me once in H.S. when I said his instructions about free writing were unclear. He shouted at me, "I was damn clear babe." My friend Scott and I laughed about that for weeks.

Which reminds me of the time that Scott passed me a note in class about how a teacher's voice sounded exactly like the voice of Mel Brooks. Nothing was the same after that. Still I felt bad when a kid wrote on the board one day before this teacher entered the room, "W (not his full last name, nor his middle initial, but used here for purposes of anonymity) is a wino." The kid claimed he saw the teacher sitting in his car during recess drinking out of a brown paper bag. The same kid had another teacher enter the room one day to be greeted by a board filled with the chalk written command, "Z (the first initial of the man's last name - in each of these cases the full name was written on the board) - quit or die.

Today this kid is a rich man in his forties and says he remembers nothing from his childhood/adolescence (I guess he also doesn't remember the time he short legged the desk of a teacher so that when she sat on that corner of the desk as she always did she and all her stuff would slide to the ground - and then he proceeded to help her up and she said that was so nice of him). Maybe none of this happened, was only freely imagined. I wasn't going to blog tonight.