i remember...

Back at South Cumberland Elementary, we used to go to the library once a week to check out a book. The following week, we had to return it when the librarian called out our name and the title of the book we had checked out.

The librarian was a total bitch. In order to embarass her, my friends and I would check out the stupidest sounding books just so she would have to announce it.

Example: "Chris Brown; Hefty's Hot Air Balloon in the Land of Pickles...Josh Burgess; Darla's Dream Come True..."

The best was the Space Cat series, including Space Cat on the Moon, Space Cat and the Kittens, and Space Cat goes to Mars. We checked these out all the time, and I actually read one once. It was awful. Space Cat and his astronaut master/friend went to a planet with bubbles and caves and plants that could take on the form of other matter. Then they came home. Space Cat apparently recieved all recognition for the discoveries and the astronaut did not.

The library was full of similar books published in the 1960's and 1970's, about children overcoming yada yada and being awesome for something typical. Some books made me hate reading, which were the prairie model of children's books. These were meant to instill a sense of respect for how hard life used to be, how thankful we should be to be alive when we are, and were a reason to be quiet while teacher had a headache.

People back in the day had to go to market a jillion miles away, and would take a week to buy shit for the farm. When you finally got back your daughter had disentary and the mule was dead. This says to me not that you're a hard workin' man with dirt on his hands, pioneerin' for a dream that's just over the horizon. It says you should have stayed in South Carolina and fished. Life on the farm was lame, and I wanted to play Mario Bros.

But I digress.

I spent most of my library time checking out "Bigfoot" and "Bigfoot Across America". I must have checked those books out, especially the first, twenty or so times. They were great, including first hand accounts of people who encountered bigfoot, or who were even abducted by them. They explain why no one can find him and his origins. They include grainy, inabsolute photography and pictures where a brown blob was frantically trying to run up a hill. In addition to this book was one about all forms of supernatural phenomena across the world such as the Loch Ness Monster and the Mothman. Mothman was so fucking scary because he would jump on your car and try to come in through your windshield, or try to break into your house through the windows. Nessie couldn't do shit.

Sexual intercourse was an unstoppable force at South while I was there. The library had a giant dictionary that was always, and I mean during my entire 9 year tenure at that school, on the page with "sex" on it. Always. When the classrooms got the internet (and were thereby dubbed "21st century classrooms" by the powers at be), they did not have any kind of protective software. This was AWESOME. My best friend and I figured out a system to look up porn that everyone else knew nothing about.

On the Macs, we would have a "safety window", through which we surfed stuff like video games, online encyclopedias, and information on our book report on dinosaurs. It didnt' really matter. What mattered was that we had a smaller window that we would use to navigate the fledgling internet porn industry. "Lara Croft nude" was my first porn search, I distinctly remember this. We would sit in the back, all alone, for half the day and everyone just thought we were quasi-dorky. Little did they know how awesome we truly were and how envious they should have been. One of our teachers was so cool that, while she knew (or strongly suspected) what we were doing, she still let us do it. How great is that.

We eventually started saving our greatest hits to a floppy disk. One day we hit the jackpot and filled up an entire disk, but my friend thought it was wrong to save it. He erased the disk while I begged out loud for him not to. The next day he was smacking himself, because he had discovered an extremely important lesson in life: be strong through times of morality. We laughted when he came up with that way to put it because it was completely true. From that day forward we made fun of as much people as we could and climbed our way to excellence.