I Left My Heart in Frackville

When I was a boy, I used to handily and regularly eschew field trips. I tried a few of them, early on, but found them to be unnecessarily anxiety-provoking disruptions of the routine that I craved hungrily, and I could not ascertain the alleged and purported benefit of these almost exclusively lame excursions.

So, typically, I refused to go.

I would be given a permission slip in class, just like everybody else, and I would dutifully bring it home and present it to my mother. She would regard me for a moment and I, thin-lipped and gazing forlornly at the linoleum flooring, would wait for her question that would come, as a matter of course.

"Well?" she would prompt, "do you want to go to the _____________ (factory, park, public place, governmental building, prison, local air strip, etc)?"

I would invariably shake my head in the negative. Now it was her turn to regard me, thin-lipped.

"Okay," she would reply, in an almost resigned way, mechanically checking off the box next to "I Decline to Grant My Child Permission".

By fifth grade, this routine would occur in pantomime-- no words were necessary anymore. Harrisburg, The Herr's Potato Chip Museum, the Crayola Crayon Factory, French Creek State Park, The Nabisco Factory, the Philadelphia Navy Yard, and probably a bunch of other shit that I don't remember passed me by. Normally, the misfits and rejects who stayed behind during field trips were consigned to near-empty classrooms manned by a janitor or some teacher's daughter home from college break to do meaningless busy work and mimeographed ditto sheets in their own, private Valhalla.

I either stayed home or chilled with my mom at the local public library: her place of employ.

This pattern of mine continued throughout middle school and even into high school, though the number of field trips taken once you've hit puberty declines rapidly, principally (most likely) because they're afraid you're going to wander off with a peer and have sex somewhere. This was never an issue in my case, because, in those days, the only person who wanted to have sex with me was me and it wasn't like I was going to randomly start masturbating at a Philadelphia Orchestra concert, though I'm sure I went to school with at least one or two guys who would, and possibly did.

In high school, though, I did start to come out of my shell, and my rampant fear of unpredictable events and circumstances subsided somewhat, as did my near-obsessive thoughts about throwing up on the bus on I-76 or getting molested by a park ranger or having a heart attack somewhere out of the reach of prompt medical attention.

When I was a senior in high school, I took Physics for exactly two days. I rapidly came to the conclusion that I did not, and would never, grasp even the most basic concepts of this discipline after the teacher's first lecture, and I was irrevocably convinced of same after looking at the cover of the textbook and being thoroughly confused.

I dropped the class and, instead, signed up for Geology and Astronomy in its place.

Academically, this was almost the single smartest move I ever made-- second only to my decision to not take math during my senior year. Both of which were decisions that enabled me to become a high school, and, later, a college graduate. Not only were Astronomy and Geology fathoms easier than Physics, but the teacher (the same for both classes) had a delightful sense-of-humor that meshed effortlessly with my own, and three classmates and I kept him in stitches for the entire year.

And I got a full letter grade added to my final for singing "The Galaxy Song", from memory, from "Monty Python's Meaning of Life" in front of the whole class, with every astronomical measurement precisely recited.

The best part of that class, however, was a field-trip.

"You'll love it," the teacher told me, "you'll finally get to meet people with no teeth."

Hey-- did this guy know how to sell or what?

We boarded a bus to Fuckmeintheass, Pennsylvania. We toured a real, live coal-mine-- underground! We walked around Centralia, a town that has been smoldering and on fire since the 1960s. What high school guy doesn't love fire? We went on a hike and pretended to give a schist about shale.

Hanging around on the porch outside the coal mine gift-shop, there were, indeed, two men without teeth. Inside the shop, there were dozens and dozens of objects made out of coal. I picked up, of course, a four-foot-tall, highly-detailed rendering of the Crucifixion ($68.00) and brought it to my teacher, making puppy eyes.

"Are you kidding?" my teacher said, his eyes wide, "Your parents would kill me. Put that back before somebody shoots us."

So I bought a penguin made of bituminus coal, that stood proudly on a base of anthracite coal. A year later, I would give the penguin to a new friend who directed me in my first college play, "The Dumb Waiter" by Harold Pinter. My friend named the penguin "Shitballs" and, in a haze of pot-fueled idiocy, he broke it playing catch with it on the quad with a couple other morons.

During the hike, my friends and I spotted a huge rock-- a boulder, really, probably about the side of a car tire.

"Do you think this is igneous or sedimentary?" one of them asked.

"You know what I think?" my wily-haired friend, vaguely psychotic friend said, his eyes ablaze, "I think we should beat the fucking SHIT out of this thing!"

And so we took our little two-foot pickaxes, that were probably given to us for a more benign, academic reason, and that is exactly what we did. The four of us took turns hacking away mercilessly at this poor sonofabitch rock while the rest of our class, and our teacher, stood and watched us with gazes ranging from amazed to shocked to disturbed. We took out every ounce of our pent-up, suburban, adolescent rage on this object that earth and wind and rain took millions of years to produce and we screamed,

"AAAAAAAAAH!!!!!!!! I HATE MY MOTHER!"

"DAMN YOU, SOCIETY!!!!!!!"

"IF I EAT ANOTHER BOWL OF CEREAL I'LL GO CRAZY!"

And, after our energy was sapped, there was a huge, coffee-can-sized hole, dead through the center of this now much smaller rock. And we posed for a picture of it with our arms around each other, grinning like the fucking crazy schmucks that we were.

It was our "Stand By Me" moment.

It was the best field trip ever, man.

Nuke the Moon

Well, NASA's finally cracked up.

Tomorrow morning, at 7:30am EST, they're going to fire a rocket straight at the fucking moon.

Ah, boys and their insatiable need for destruction.

They are going to blow up a portion of the moon in search of water. They are hopeful that there will be water there, ostensibly to sustain longer manned missions on the moon-- but I think they want us to live there after we've turned Earth into the solar system's largest septic tank.

I've long lived in thin-lipped, school-marmish disapproval of NASA and their risky, poorly-executed endeavors that have cost the lives of some of this country's greatest folks. I probably rail against NASA in part because I don't understand the larger point behind some of their missions, something I freely admit, and yet, when they build space crafts with faulty heat shields and capsules that disintegrate and burn up in the atmosphere, well, you've kind of got to wonder-- are they cramming a bunch of bold-minded geniuses into the equivalent of a 1990s Kia and blasting that motherfucker up there while the folks at mission control sit with assholes puckered and jaws clenched, crossing all their fingers and toes and elbows?

Probably.

But now, instead of risking the lives of real humans on a spaceship that might crash, they're using remote-controlled rockets that will definitely crash, because that's what rockets do. The rocket will be followed by a satellite that will communicate images and data back to Earth before it too crashes into the crater created by the rocket.

Can't you just hear the comb-overed geeks at Cape Canaveral?

"Fuckin' awesome, man!"

Yeah. You need to get laid.

When I heard this morning that scientists were going to slam a rocket into the moon, I couldn't help thinking about 12th grade Astronomy, and my old schoolmate, Ted. Ted and I both took Astronomy because we were too severely retarded to handle high school Physics, even at the non-honors level. Turns out, it was the best decision I made in high school, besides opting out of 12th grade math and parting my hair. Ted and I raised such hell in Astronomy that we essentially had ownership over the class, and the teacher, who was so amused by our off-color and off-the-wall antics, never seemed to mind. When the teacher came in with delivery room photographs of his new daughter, I inquired if any of them were "R-rated." Ted took a keen interest in the baby's nutrition and asked if our teacher was breastfeeding. Our poor, harrassed teacher's face turned red and, through his smile he said, "Boys, can we have a little couth, please?"

That was his favorite, rhetorical request for us. "Boys, can we have a little couth, please?"

Regrettably, there was no couth to be had. We openly sexually harrassed the only attractive female student in the class, Kathryn.

"Can I sit next to Kathryn during the exam, please?" I asked while tests were being handed out.

"Why?" our teacher asked, "So you can cheat?"

"Who said anything about cheating. I just like the way she smells."

The only reason I passed the course was because I scored 60 extra credit points on the final by standing up in front of the class and singing , from memory, the entire "Galaxy Song" from Monty Python's 1983 film, "The Meaning of Life," which contains lyrics like,

"Just remember that you're standing,
On a plant that's evolving,
Revolving at 900 miles an hour.
It's orbiting at 19 miles a second, so it's reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power."

It was a dare, by the teacher.

Ted, however, provided most of the amusement in the class, and he emboldened me to go further and further with my own antics. He bicycled to school, routinely showing up in the dead of winter wearing cargo shorts, Timberlands, and an EMS fleece vest with no shirt on underneath. He drank 20 ounces of coffee in the morning and did drugs through the afternoon. His bizarre black hair stood one-and-a-half feet tall. He laughed like a wild animal having sex in fast-forward, and I knew that classroom was the only possible location in the universe that he and I could be a team.

I'll never forget one day the teacher stood at the front of the room and he asked what we thought would the most worthwile scientific endeavor relating to the study of astronomy. Ted's hand shot up straight as a yardstick. Because it was fun, the teacher called on him. Ted shouted lustily,

"NUKE THE MOON!"

That became his rallying cry. Sometimes he would shout it out in the middle of tests, or in the hallway in between classes. He probably yelled "Nuke the moon!" at his wedding, if there has been such an event. I don't know where Ted is today, I suppose I could stalk him on Facebook, but, when I heard on the news this morning that NASA was going to send a rocket crashing into the lunar surface, I had this funny feeling that somehow my old classmate Ted was working for the government.

And that they finally heard him.