The Un-Usual Suspects

Johnny's stream of consciousness overflows the banks, flooding the tiny town and killing thousands, oh the humanity:

Dream I have more and more now that I'm going back to school. Every day is the same. I get to high school, though in the dream I'm in my forties, at nine, and I've already missed homeroom and my first class and I go to the office to try to get them to look up my schedule and tell me where and what my first class is, was, and they tell me, but I can't retain the information and I end up wandering through the halls, peeking through windows into rooms, and I see not high school kids but grade school kids being taught by the habit-wearing harpies of my childhood, or I find the class and it's final exam day and everybody has turned in their exams and I'm magnanimously given five minutes to make up for a year and it's hopeless. At least this time through school I don't have that parted-in-the-middle-feathered-back-on-the-sides disco homo haircut. That makes it less of a nightmare. But then I tell you this every time I email you. Don't mind me.

Another thing that surfaces in the background of my free-floating mind when I dream these moments is something that I guess I understand now as a fuck you to authority but at the time I couldn't make head nor tail of. We had a janitor, back when you could call them a janitor, named Dave. The nuns would tell us not to do it if they saw us, but when they looked away, we gave Dave the peace sign, and he gave it back to us. Very exciting. Damn, we were cool. Anyways, Sister Nebulous or some one of them came into the classroom, flustered more than we had seen her even when Jack Kennedy got shot. Dave had refused to clean up this mess and she'd had to do it herself. Someone had shit and then wiped the shit all over the walls of the boys' bathroom. She just wanted us to know how dirty it was and how shocked. It being Catholic school, she wanted the culprit to confess before God and then subsequently confess to her so she could exact her vengeance, but we never found out who the shit wiper was. During the parts of the dream when I'm suddenly back in grade school, it reappears there, in the back of my mind, wondering why someone would do a thing like that. What the point would be. I almost wish I had been enough of a rebel that young to wonder if I had repressed the memory of doing it myself, but I was always too persnickety with my hygiene to suspect myself, although because I was the only long-haired-hippie-freaky person in the school, I mean, besides my brothers, I think they probably did suspect me. Unfortunately there was no DNA testing back then. I could have been exonerated. Like OJ.

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Nothing like truth, justice and a squeaky-clean conscience.