Man...

Man, I just noticed that my last two posts were prefaced with the word man. I know that I'm prone to redundancy, but a redundancy spanning two posts is impressive to my bored mind. It reminds me of a story, probably only of interest to me, of my friend Bruno. Bruno was a very intelligent guy. He just missed the cut at Princeton and later he went to Vanderbilt for grad school. So he was super smart, but not an intellectual. Which is one of the reasons I was his friend. I've always been a fan of those who can like professional wrestling and Shakespeare (and what's the big difference anyways), and do so without a trace of irony. Anyways, when we were juniors in high school we had college prep English together. College prep was a given for him, but I had been taking lower level English since 9th grade. I blame Oakland High School for this. I had been in higher level classes all through school and then when I started high school they let me sign up for whatever I wanted. So I did what any aspiring stoner rock and roller kid would do; I signed up for the dumb classes. So by the time I transfered to Riverdale the die was set. By junior year I was determined to show that I did indeed have a brain. Bruno and I always had a good time in the class. The teacher was a strange old lady who liked to go against traditional teaching methods. This meant picnics by Stones River, an entire 6 weeks watching M.A.S.H. episodes, and classroom readings of The Crucible and The Scarlet Letter. Nobody would have taken Bruno for a rock and roll hipster. The dude used to wear a sportscoat emblazoned with buttons he got from work and he worked at Taco Bell. On the surface, he was more doofus than hipster. But he was hip, at least to a point. Part of the doofus appeal was his usage of California surfer slang, which is what got our English teacher mad. During our classroom readings he would inevitably begin to put dude on the end of whatever he was reading. So you'd get this: Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with it the utmost passion of her heart, dude!
Or this: Do what you will. But let none be your judge. There be no higher judge under Heaven than Proctor is, dude. Man, it was almost as funny as when Perez set a girl's hair on fire. Nothing like that ever happened in the lower level classes.